June 8: High Tide!

I spent most of the day inside, hiding from the cold wind (low 40s, says the thermometer), working on Seattle projects and fighting for Internet access. I went outside a couple of time to take the antenna off the side of the cabin and, mustering the full power of my technical skill, shake it, hoping that that would make it start working. It didn't. But I didn't break it either, so except that it was darned cold, no harm done.

I also tried turning it all off and giving it a chance to think about what it had done, while I went around to the various cabins looking for replacement cables for the gas and shifter on the Ambi. When I began to work on getting it ready yesterday, glancing at where those cables enter the outboard side of the equation reminded me that changing those out should be considered a matter of maintenance. I'll remember to get a picture tomorrow when I go try to actually do that.

It turns out that the thing that gets the Internet to work again for a little while is to push the end of the straightened paper clip into the reset hole on the router and hold it there for 10 seconds while unplugging the router and then for another 10 after plugging it back in. I think I'll have to be sure to use my lucky socks too.

Because of being cabin bound all day, I hadn't noticed how high the tide came last night. Yikes!! It's been a few years since the tide has made it to the bottom of the cliff. Last night, it probably came 8' up the cliff. That's a high tide. Marc Watson from Peninsula Automotive called today to let me know that the Ranger (our tracked vehicle) is ready for service. I thought about bringing it down and parking it up on a high spot that I thought would be safe from the tide. Imagine my surprise when I went to look over the cliff before heading off to bed... and found the high spot gone - washed away. The first photo of the cliff shows that. The yellow circle is where I had envisioned parking the ranger... glad it wasn't ready yesterday. We'd have an upside-down, swamped ranger today. The green circle was where we parked everything last year - that's pretty wet, too. And the pink line is about as high as the tide has been in the past several years - anyway, since Eddie moved the cabins back in 2006, I think.

I don't know if you can see the contrast between the cliff behind the stairs here and the second day when I pulled them down... a lot of that cliff is missing. The stairs were pretty snug up against the cliff on the second day. It looks like the bottom of the stairs is a good 10' away from the cliff now. The wavy yellow line is how high I think the tide may have come last night. The tide book says 26.7'. It was about 10' higher than last year's 26.7' tides. Tomorrow morning's is expected to be 26.4'. It will be worth getting my camera out there by high water at 8 AM just to see what it's doing. (I think I'll sleep in long underwear - it was stinging cold this morning.)

Both of the stair photos were taken at about 11:30 PM without a flash. This moonshot was from 6/6 at 2:30 AM. It does get dark this time of year, but it takes a while. Anyone know what caused the reflection of the moon at the bottom of the photo?