We've been onboard for 8 years. I can hardly remember a time when we lived on land. We've had our ups and downs, but I'll always remember a conversation I had when I was interviewing with LTX in Boston. The manager told me that 2009 was a really rough year. I had to tell him that 2009 was the best year of my life! It was our 3rd year on board and the first year without work since I was 18 years old. Getting out of debt and living super cheap is way better than living high on the hog and praying to God every day that you don't have a pink slip waiting for you at work.
I took a walk on the beach...
...and found a bunch of cool treasures.
Sunset over Sauvie Island.
Eagles soaring over the marina.
The beach on Caterpillar Island looking south towards Portland.
I crewed on a job taking a boathouse from Caterpillar Island to Crims Island, about 45 miles downstream.
Off we go at daybreak, we have 45 miles of water ahead of us.
A shot taken from inside the boathouse while underway.
We made it past Bachelor Island and are approaching Warrior Rock near St. Helens.
The city of Saint Helens.
Pixie Park and Caples House at Columbia City.
Loading a gravel barge on the Columbia north of Columbia City.
A mooring buoy near some houses on the shoreline.
An old dredge.
Longview Washington (on the right) and Rainier Oregon (on the left).
The bridge between Longview Washington and Rainier Oregon.
The river near Lord Island (on the left).
Across the river from Fisher Island.
Approaching Crims Island.
A fish shed on the river near Crims Island.
Cape Horn
We made it after 15 hours. A very long day.
With all our work done we are off to Vancouver Lake. Here is April at the helm. It's such a rough life!
We made the turn up Lake River and now you can see Warrior Rock behind us.
The bridge to the Ridgefield Wildlife Refuge.
We made it to Vancouver Lake in only 3.75 hours despite the fact that the tide was running against us coming up Lake River. I credit it to the new third pontoon, which is behaving exactly as I had predicted.
A Bald Eagle in his favorite perch tree directly behind our house.
Here he is on a different perch off our starboard side.
The island in Vancouver Lake. We have named it Bird Island, it's not really named anywhere I can find.
A bit of rain started falling at sunset and made this pretty picture.
The rowers are out. They gave us some funny looks, like "where did you guys come from?"
Our eagle wading in the lake getting his breakfast.
A rather grainy picture of the city lights of Portland.
I'm heading off to do my shift at the library. Anchors are holding, so it's safe to go for a few hours.
Coming back from town, and Great Ambition is still here!
A mansion on the hill above Vancouver Lake.
The lake is glass this morning.
The rowers have lanes laid out so they can race. So pretty with the beam of sunshine blasting the shoreline.
The Clark County Sheriff patrolling the lake on Memorial Day. It's a long cruise for them, but I'm sure they don't mind.
Another shot of our eagle.
A great shot of our Bald Eagle hanging out behind us.
I took a trip in the dinghy over to the island and got this long shot of Great Ambition.
A foggy morning.
My watermaker, explained. All valves are electric, no fooling around with flipping valves manually
Drinking water on the left, "house water" on the right. After adding chlorine you could drink the house water, but why?
The moon in deep blue sky.
With the wind coming from behind us we get a nice wind-shadow in front of us.
Sunrise
Our Bald Eagle perched just off our stern.
I took a trip in the dinghy towards the flushing channel. First shot upon leaving was one of the Yf working on her newest book.
And a shot from quite a ways off.
A juvenile Bald Eagle.
And his mom.
She's getting tired of me taking photos off her. If she had fingers she might flip me "the bird".
Mom and Junior together.
Dusk over the lake.
Sunrise.
Bullock's Oriole looking in the front door.
Our last evening on the lake. We did get some thunderstorms overnight as forecast, but they didn't impact us on the lake.
On our way home down Lake River. Such a pretty body of water.
We went to Home Depot and picked up a 20X30 foot blue tarp for our pool. Now we fill it with river water after passing it through a 20 micron filter.
Six hours into the filling process, it's coming along nicely.
Still filling the pool. Once it's full I'll change over to a 5 micron filter to clean up the water.
I got up early to feed the geese and get a shot of the moon in the daybreaking sky.
First dip in the pool. Cold, but refreshing!
A couple of shots from opposite sides of the pool.
A nice shot of the pool. Notice how the sides curve down smoothly to form a nicely shaped 6.5 foot deep pool.
River or pool. Which would you rather swim in?
It's really hot and here a deer is hiding from the heat by browsing near the river in the shade.
We left the dock and headed for Southend! Here we catch the same deer crossing the channel to leave the island and head for the mainland.
Our first morning at Southend. So pretty!
Our deer crossing the channel again. Music is Iris by Gandalf.
Our geese have found us. They feel comfortable enough around us to nap together nearby.
A nice shot of us on anchor.
An Osprey with a fish.
And here she is crossing again!
With our Fortress FX-23 anchors in "mud mode", that is, a fluke angle of 45° rather than the normal angle of 33° the shank of the anchor tends to dig itself into the sand. They hold pretty well in sand in mud mode too, so why change?
A juvenile Bald Eagle soars overhead.
An interesting little ship going out, Argosy. For some reason I like that name, I wonder why?
A morning shot of us on anchor.
A pair of dead Lampreys. Ugly little guys!
A US Navy landing craft is getting towed/pushed up the river, probably to Swan Island for some repair or refit work.
A convocation of Bald Eagles fight over a dead fish on the shore near us.
Our empty slip. It looks so big!
Sunrise.
A large group of Canadian Geese. There are lots of new goslings here but they are almost all grown up.
This guy has done this to us two years now. He needs a place to park his boat because he doesn't have an Anchor Buddy so he drives over our anchor lines to get to the shore. Each of our anchor lines costs $200, not including having them shipped to Seattle for termination on thimbles and loops. If we lose the anchor and chain too that's over $700 worth of gear. So rude to drive over someone's anchors like this. Don't do this or you might cause someone a lot of grief.
A Bald Eagle flying around us.
This is pretty funny. A couple of Mexicans came by on Jet Skis and their jets sucked up a bunch of Milfoil, an aquatic plant. They seem totally oblivious to the obvious cause, rev'ing their engines to no effect and somehow expecting the problem to solve itself.
Sunrise.
The Bald Eagles found another fish to fight over.
We returned to the slip after a week on anchor and noticed that one of the dead trees across the slough from us had fallen while we were away. We hiked in the woods to find it and here it is. It had lost its top some 8 years earlier, and now that it's down it should give us a good load of Hericium ramosum (coral fungus) this fall.
Nearby a nice beefy bracket fungus.
We refilled the feeder and now the Hummingbirds are feeding like crazy!
The cotton from the Cottonwood trees is really flying!
Back at the slip the pool is coming along nicely. Even though we left it alone for a week, it is amazingly clear, so clear you can see a quarter on the bottom 7 feet down.
I walked the beach and found a message in a bottle. Fan-mail from some Flounder as Bullwinkle used to say.
I thought, what might happen if I put my 3HP Tomatsu/Merc outboard on my grandkid's raft? It hustles pretty good!
The cotton from the Cottonwood trees is amazing! It blankets everything including the river.
A doe and her two fawns.
Low tide can be hard on sailboats with large keels.
A Mallard mom and her ducklings.
Good morning!
If there is any doubt that the island has been eroding away here is the evidence. A tree we named Dancing Man has come a full 4 feet out of the sand since 2001. Either he's been wriggling free of the beach, or the sand has been going away at a pretty good clip, about 3.5 inches per year.
My pool is pretty clean, despite the fact that every drop of water came from the river. The pool water is on the left, the glass on the right is full of tap water from the well. The pool has a TDS of 100ppm, the tap water is about 300PPM. I wouldn't drink the pool water, we've been soaking out bodies in the pool for days, but still, it's pretty darn clean!
We took a walk on the beach all the way up to Northend. This of course is the shipwreck at the North end of the island. April is standing right near the rudder post.
A family of River Otters out hunting for breakfast.
A female Raccoon and 5 kids roaming the beach looking for food.
A Beaver cruising the slough after a hard night foraging.
Google Maps caught us at Southend again! This time it was on our trip in April (16th-21st). Google Maps has NEVER caught us in the slip, EVER.The only time they have ever seen us at the slip was with the Google Street View cam, and of course that was good, because they can't see us anywhere but in the slip with that thing!
I think this shot was taken on the 16th of April because if you look at this shot you can see a ship anchored straight out from the Southend Channel...
...and I took this shot the morning we arrived, on the 16th of April. Notice the fishing boats on the river, but the Google Maps pic was taken around Noon (as you can see by the shadows) after pretty much all the fishermen went home.
By contrast here is the latest Bing Maps image that shows us in the slip, nose in, way back 2011.
And here a compilation of shots Google and Bing got of us.
The pool is so nice, and today it's going to be in the low 90s!
The pool filter. I had to turn it off to get a nice shot, otherwise it makes so much turbulence that it distorts the shot.
We had some guests over to beat the heat. Here Barry is showing off his ability to sink.
Speaking of visitors, we have some unwelcome visitors with questionable intentions.
A deer on the shore of the channel.
A rabbit on the shore.
A Raccoon and her cub pass by a Wood Duck mother and her two chicks. No violence ensued.
We are starting a big project. Over the years, the roof deck has gotten spongy and we have gotten drips out of the ceiling. There were no leaks in the roof. The problem is that the ceiling panels allowed moisture from the house into the roof structure and it rotted out the plywood. Time for a roof job.
First, the RADAR arch has to come down. That included removing the Radome and GPS receiver.
Next, the rails.
With the rails down I cut open slots in the roof to begin the drying out process.
I guess I am committed now, or should be.
It was a full moon on my birthday. I've had enough excitement for one day.
Now to really open up the roof. It's tricky up here, the rafters are also a bit soft which makes walking up here treacherous.
Here is part of the pile of debris. You can see the fungus growing on the underside of the plywood. This has been going on since we started living aboard.
So here it is August, and we never get rain in August, and yet, we have a forecast for potential thunderstorms! With the roof open this could be a disaster. But I planned for this. Our friends Tom and Jerry take their yacht to the coast every summer, so we subleased their slip and slid in. It's very, very tight, but we fit well enough that we can relax and bit when we hear rain falling, and I don't have do all this work in the brutally hot sunshine.
We are just a bit long for the slip, but most of our house is covered by the roof.
To make sure we added a tarp across the stern that guarantees we won't get any water on our still drying roof structure. Just a few minutes after we got this tarp up we got rain. Good thing we didn't dawdle!
We are very, VERY tight. I had measured and tried to make sure we would fit, but I had no idea it would be this tight!
The roof is completely stripped off. Now it's time to assess the rest of the damage, repair it, and rebuild it. Notice how much nicer it is being able to work under a roof than to be stuck out in the blazing sunshine all day. Rain or shine, it's always nicer to do work like this "indoors."
Here is just one of the reasons I had to rip the roof off my 8 year old houseboat. The plastic ceiling panels have cuts, drilled holes and other gaps that allow humid air from the living space into the roof. In cold weather this moisture condenses on the back of the plywood roof sheets and softens them. Then the fungus takes over and completes the process. The first place we saw this was around the speakers in the living room. The moist air from cooking, breathing, showers, washing dishes, etc snuck right up past the speakers and caused drips from the ceiling. This should have never happened. The crew at Catamaran Cruisers apparently doesn't understand Moisture Control in home construction.
I added a speakers in the kitchen and the back computer/guest room.
Now with the roof off you can see the sunlight lighting up one of the speakers and streaming through the crack I showed you above. This is in the kitchen, where a lot of moisture from cooking and washing wafts right up into the roof. This is really unacceptable, this is a disaster that could have been avoided if the factory had sealed up all ceiling penetrations as well as they sealed up the roof on top.
The stern section is completely stripped. I was saving this area as a work platform, but despite the fact that the moisture damage isn't very bad here, it all needs to get aired out as much as possible so I had to strip it all. You can see how the blue poly tarp protects us from roof runoff and rain.
The rafters are made of two types: two by sixes and box beams made with a wood skeleton and sheathed in plywood. The plywood on these box beams is pretty weak, so I decided to "sister" up these beams with real Douglas Fir 2 by 6s by gluing and bolting them together.
Here is one of the box beams that was so bad I removed all the rotted plywood.
I then glued and stapled new plywood on to the skeleton.
Here are the first 4 rafters that I fixed.
Instead of buying 16 foot long 2 by 6s and then cutting and notching them to deal with the wiring bundle, I used 2 by 4s to extend the last foot and a half which allowed the wiring bundle to pass beneath the beam. I glued and screwed the boards in place, and remember, the mostly intact box beam is still there too, so this arrangement is plenty strong.
One of the problems with the houseboat from the factory is that it didn't have a bathroom fan to exhaust moisture and odors from the bathroom. I added one to the window, but since I have the roof open it's best to build it into the roof and have it exhaust into a roof vent. This configuration allows me to change out the fan simply by removing the vent cover. Muffin fans are very reliable, and they run on 12 volts, but they can't last forever, so it makes sense to make servicing a priority.
And here is how I put it together on the inside. Note the timer, that can save a lot of power, and given the fact that it uses a clock spring mechanism and not 120V, I can use it with the 12 volt muffin fan.
By a strange coincidence, the dock near us is having some major work done. They have to block it off and have people walk right past our houseboat to get to the slips south of here.
I decided to take advantage of the situation and charge a toll from passers by.
I have started putting the foam back in the now dried out and repaired roof. I have to start by cutting 60 or so of these 10 inch by 5.5 inch blocks of foam. Instead of measuring each one and then cutting by hand, I built a jig to make it fairly painless.
I have now replaced over half of the styrofoam blocks into the gaps between the rafters...
But instead of just flopping the foam blocks into the space and letting the lay there the way Catamaran Cruisers did, I used Great Stuff spray foam to seal them in place top and bottom. That is, I sealed up e-v-e-r-y single joint, gap, and hole in the plastic ceiling panels to keep the moisture from migrating from the living space up to the roof sheathing. That is what killed my first roof in just a couple of years. We've been suffering with this mess for 8 years, but now that is over. Using Great Stuff to cement the foam blocks in place not only blocks moisture and air infiltration, it also adds some additional rigidity to the overall structure.
I came up with a way to keep the heat in the house when the bathroom fan is not running. I made a pair of foam doors that open and close automatically when the fan runs and shuts off. I've been testing this over the last several days and I think this will do the trick. A standard house roof vent will go over this structure to keep the rain and snow out, and if the doors or the fan fail, I can remove a few screws and repair it without having to tear the roof open again.
We are keeping the pool up because it's so refreshing to end a hard day of work on the roof with a dip in the pool. Or we can take Lil' Ambition out in the river for a dip. Either way, it's still a great place to live.
And here we go, out into the river to have dip in 50 feet of clean cool Columbia River water. As we pass, you can see how much space I have to work in. Having this slip to work in has been a blessing for sure.
Making good progress on the roof. I am still gluing styrofoam pieces in place between the rafters.
I was going to move the DirecTV dish to give me more room to fiberglass the roof on, but Rogers Marine glued it down to the roof really well, so it won't come up without breaking it. It's a pretty cool mechanism!
Now that all the gaps between the rafters are sealed up, I'm adding cellulose insulation on top and then sealing it all up with 1/2 inch styrofoam panels. The "blown-in" insulation will act as a desiccant to absorb any moisture that might get in (but none will) and will give us a quieter and warmer roof.
Making more progress. Here you can see the cable for the radar that will pop up through the roof and eventually be connected to the radome on a newly fabricated mount.
Making good progress. This is not hard work, but it is tricky. It would be super easy to accidentally punch a hole in the freshly installed panels.
The multiple fires in Eastern Oregon and Eastern Washington have sent their smoke our way thanks the a weak east wind. It turned the sky brown and the sun and moon red. Very cool!
Finally, I'm all done insulating the roof. Next up, plywood!
Now the plywood is going up.
The slough is so peaceful today!
Conveniently the owner decided to rebuild our portion of the dock while we are away in the covered slip hiding from the rain. It really needed some work!
The roof is coming along nicely.
Finishing up the last sheets of plywood on the roof.
Things went bad quickly when I was up on the roof during a rainstorm and had a ladder slip out from under me causing me to fall 10 feed to the dock. I figured out a solution but a little late. There is no way this ladder can slide out from under me now!
Summer is over, here is the first fog of the fall.
And since summer is over, it's time to empty the pool.
Roof ready for fiberglass.
We found a guy on Craigslist to use a chopper gun to apply the fiberglass to our roof. It looks nice, but it turns out he did a terrible job on the edges and left us to deal with curled up glass mat. He charged me $4000 for this job and later I realized what a mistake hiring him was.
I noticed something underwater near our slip. I pulled it up with a grappling hook and found it was a marine head.
The slough is so pretty!
We aren't putting the rails back up on the roof. A roof is a roof, not a deck and we just got tired up going up and down the ladder to use the deck. The rails have to go.
The dock repairs are done! We can go back home anytime.
I cut up one of the Radar arch pieces and got a neighbor to weld up my new Radar mount.
It took a couple of days but I pulled up a barrel from our temporary neighbor's slip.
I took a trip over to Multnomah Channel and got this shot of this cool looking floating home.
Finally the roof is done and we are back home in our slip.
I took a well deserved walk on the island at low tide. Boy, there isn't much water here in the Southend channel!
A nice view of the river looking North.
And looking South.
Finally our first crop of H. ramosum. We'll have to make a pizza with mushrooms or something.
A couple of shots of the eclipse.
The new roof as seen from the road. Notice that I was able to keep the guardrail for the staircase just in case I have to climb up to shovel off snow or something. The Radar mount worked great, it's rock solid and shoots over the DirecTV dish, yet shouldn't block the DirecTV dish in most cases. On the Port side you can see the vent for the bathroom fan, and on the Starboard side I preserved the vent for the fridge. I think it came out pretty well!
A deer on the bank.
Now a pair of them, mother and fawn.
It's October and here is the fog to prove it.
But fog in the morning may be beautiful clouds to garnish the sunset in evening.
Another nice sunset shot.
A beautiful male Pheasant on the shoreline. The hunters are looking for you pal, get back over to the wildlife refuge so they can find you!
A pretty sunset, but I think I missed the best part of it.
We are heading down the Sunset Trail to catch another sunset.
Almost there!
We made it in time!
Looking south.
Looking west again. Someone came by and mucked up the beautiful flat water. Oh well, with a river this big, it's rare that the water is as flat as I often show it.
Looking east. Boy, those clouds are pretty!
Here is another boat heading home before it gets dark.
A wedge of Canadian Geese heading off for the sunset.
A beautiful sunset.
A Buck crossing Southend Channel as I approach in the dinghy.
More Hericium ramosum. I took this as a long shot through the brush to give it some depth.
A Bald Eagle perched on the tree across the slough from us.
More deer, this time on a foggy morning.
The fog makes everything so pretty.
A pair of Bald Eagles in the tree across from us.
A shot from the island beach looking south. The clouds give the sky a rather dramatic look.
The same pair in the tree again.
The slough in morning light. The fall colors are really lighting up!
The car carrier Viking Emerald crashed into the shoreline near Woodland Washington, just downstream of us. I was able to use MarineTraffic.com's AIS tracking feature to make a movie of the crash. They spent 3 and half hours on shore before getting pulled off by a fleet of tugs and, contrary to news reports, made its own way to Portland to offload its cargo of new Asian cars.
A Red Tailed Hawk screeches.
The leaves are really turning now.
A Blue Heron fishing for breakfast. Taken through the window to avoid startling him.
Sunset.
Fog drenched spider webs in the covered moorage.
I made the mistake of tossing some raccoons some treats. Here they are, back for more.
This looks like a composite image, but it's not. It's a picture of a sunken dinghy next to the mother ship that is reflected in the water. It sure is a spooky looking shot!
A cold foggy morning.
A Blue Heron warms himself in the morning sun.
A sunken boat found its way to the wingdam on Caterpillar Island.
A Kestrel, a kind of Falcon on top of a piling with a rat he caught.
The temps got down around 24F, still nice and warm inside the houseboat thanks to the new roof and insulation, but cold enough outside to damage my watermaker. A couple of years ago I added an incandescent light I salvaged from an old boat and wired it to an electronic temperature switch, so that if the temps in the watermaker compartment gets below 40F, the light comes up on and warms up the important components of the watermaker. It seems to work splendidly!
What is it? It's a very closeup view of the spore producing pores on the underside of a bracket fungus that washed up on the island.
Here is the top side.
Speaking of fungus!
It got cold enough to freeze my Venusian life experiment. This is a bottle of carbonated water that I seeded with plain old moss and sealed up. Most plants can't handle a 100% CO2 environment, but moss does just fine! What you are seeing is the fact that the sunlight, although dimmed by winter clouds, was bright enough to cause the moss to convert the CO2 into energy for the moss to live and Oxygen. The oxygen bubbles got trapped in the ice as they rose. This bottle also spent the summer in the sun getting roasted to very high heat levels and still, it didn't kill the moss. This proves that no matter how much Carbon Dioxide ends up in the atmosphere, and no matter what the weather does, life will persist on the Earth.
A pair of Bald Eagles in the morning light.
The boat that has been next to us since we got here was sold and taken away. For the first time you can see a picture of our Port side in our slip without a boat blocking the view.
A Bald Eagle perched near our house.
The boat that spent 8 years next to us is now hanging on the piling near the south end of the island.
My little garage for my dinghy. I couldn't do this until we added the third pontoon, there wasn't enough vertical clearance. The little blue tarp is required because just a bit of the dinghy has to stick out since the motor won't fit under the front deck.
A big windstorm is forecast, so I tied us up in a way that wasn't possible when our metal neighbor boat was in the slip.
A pair of Bald Eagles.
I took a cruise out to the island to take a stroll on the beach. There isn't much beach anymore, the water is very high!
Pier One looking north.
Pier One looking south.
Tuffy out for a cruise around the island looking for driftwood.
That metal boat is still on the piling.
A plastic barrel captured on the upstream side of this barge. Plastic barrels are very useful for floatation so I'm going to tow it back to the marina.
I opened it up and emptied the water and now it's ready to use.
Uh oh! The roadside behind us collapsed from all the rain. This could be really bad! Of course, for us, it's not that big a deal. If the road totally goes we just park at the upstream marina and commute by dinghy.
View from the road.
A neighbor's rubber boat has been collecting rain water.
Flipping the dingy over might solve this problem.
The float of one of the burned out homes. It's a good place to keep things that we don't have room for anymore.
A shot from the beach looking south.
I reported the landslide and finally the road crew showed up to take a look.
Huge windstorm today. The wind is coming from the southwest, and so the waves are coming straight into the Southend channel.
A Greater Scaup.
The road crew is finally here to do something about the slide. Not much, but at least it could prevent the whole road from collapsing.
Flipping the neighbor's dinghy upside down didn't work too well. You can see that the floor of the dinghy was caved it by the weight of the rainwater. So I'm going to try this. I think it will work.
Christmas Day, so we took Lil' Ambition out to watch the sunset.
Range markers lit by the sunset.
We three ships on Christmas Day.
Caterpillar Island on Christmas Day. I used to wonder what winter on the island was like. Now I know.
A Christmas Seal relaxing after a long day of feasting.
A nice shot of the shoreline over by Fazio's Sand and Gravel.
Birds of a feather? Three Cormorants and a Seagull.
We came back to the slip before the sunset, but caught it from the front deck. However, you might notice something funny about this picture. It's taken in the water, and then I flipped it over. You can tell because you can see little ripples on the left side.
A new duck! This is a Goldeneye male.
A Goldeneye female is nearby.
Another Goldeneye male. Such a pretty bird!
A nice shot of the sun blasting the river. Don't forget, we are on our way to summer finally!
Another sunny day on New Year's Eve. So pretty!
A Flicker on the covered moorage.
We have a new neighbor, Amagansette. When he pulled into the slip I asked him where he came from. He replied, "Bend." Bend? Yep, he trailered it from Bend and the snow stayed on the boat all the way down to Vancouver, a 160 mile trip. Yes, it's cold outside!
I got a Harbor Freight machete for Christmas since I broke my Gerber machete several months ago. It works great, the saw on the back is far more capable than the one on the Gerber and it was only $6!
A female Goldeneye in the snow.
And the male.
The Moon and Venus.
A fishing shack on the island.
A mating pair of Bald Eagles.
I used my knowledge of electronics to solve a problem I had with my watermaker. The pump cycles on and off quite frequently and this causes the pressure switch to fail after just 18 months. I found a place to buy the switches (Digikey) but figured out a way to prevent the destruction of the switch with a MOSFET. The switch only has to handle about 0.01 Amps in this configuration, while the MOSFET, which can handle hundreds of Amps does the actual switching. It will NEVER fail and the switch will last at least as long as the pump. It cost me about $7 to implement this solution.
Our Bald Eagles are just hanging out around us all the time!
A nice closeup of just one of them.
The February shoreline. The Dogwoods go red over winter, then green in the spring and summer.
A pair of Snow Geese flying overhead.
How many photos of Nancy Ann have I put on this blog? Twelve so far, but this one is different. Notice the difference?
The travel-trailer on the stern is gone. Here is a shot from January 2014. That travel-trailer was her trademark for years, and now they decided to remove it and clean her up. Kind of too bad, but I will never forget.
The Yf noticed the sunrise was looking good, so I dashed up to the road and got a shot of the sun rising in the east. Notice that Mount Hood is casting a shadow on the clouds lit up by the bright red sky from Eastern Oregon/Washington. Amazingly. The same thing happened a week before this, but I missed it somehow.
A little bit less spectacular sunset. But not too bad!
A short video showing how we feed the geese.
A turtle takes a ride down the channel then swims back upstream past us.
A really nice sunrise.
The State road crew is getting ready to fix the road behind us.
Here is a male Wood Duck in a tree. That’s why they call them Wood Ducks!
The road is fixed!
Fishermen coming home at sunset
The sunset that day.
A gravel barge taking gravel to Portland.
Our first Osprey of the year.
This is kind of funny. We never wanted to live inside Vancouver but a few years ago the city moved us inside the city limits. However, in order to do the road repair they had to take the signs down, and then put them back up. However, they reversed them! That moved us back out of the city again!
The moon.
The next day they came back and fixed the signs. Crap, stuck in Vancouver again. Sounds like a song.
Going out for a cruise around the island.
A deadhead out in the river. This could be nasty if you hit it at high speed.
Sunset.
A pair of Wood Ducks.
Three Osprey in the tree across from our house.
Southend Channel.
Sunset.
Another sunset. Just can’t get enough of these!
A male Merganzer on a log.
Now a pair of Mallards are taking a break on the very same log across from our house.
A male Wood Duck.
The good old reliable 5PM FedEx plane coming into PDX.
The UPS plane coming into PDX.
A male Wood Duck walking around the dock. He’s looking for corn that we put out for the geese.
An Osprey with a fish.
The moon
Mount Saint Helens as seen from the Shillapoo Wildlife Refuge.
Trimaran Transporter houseboat we named Great Ambition.
