Skip to main content

The Flora and Fauna of the Boatyard and Marina

You might think with a title like that, I'm going to show you a bunch of fish and some seaweed, but not so!

We have come across a number of various critters and plants here - let me show you some:

This is a baby snapping turtle we found beneath the boat. He was very cold and still. We brought him in and warmed him up, gave him a bowl of water, and soon, there he (or she - who knows?!?!) was climbing out of the bowl and moving faster than I thought he could across the table. I just barely caught him before he fell off! So that's when we knew it was ok to take him back outside. While I was carrying him down the ladder, he was pushing and kicking surprisingly hard and I nearly lost hold of him. Then I took him over to the side of the little creek and set him down. He immediately scurried into the creek and swam right in, managing to startle two different little frogs who quickly scurried out of his way. Go safe little turtle dude!

Thursday evening as I was relaxing for a bit after sorting through and moving a whole bunch of boat stuff, I saw these deer down at the little creek getting some water. It was fascinating watching them go right down on their bellies to crawl under the fence to get to and from the water and back into the woods. This group was the first. About five minutes later a much larger group came down. At one point I think there were about eight of them climbing under the fence.

Here's a fuzzy little caterpillar I found crawling around under the boat. I have no idea what it is or if it predicts anything about winter, I just took it over to the trees and put it in them.

Here's a blue heron hanging around in the shallows. We see a lot of these, along with ducks, always hanging around the marina. We see even more of their 'leavings' all along the docks - LOL!

Speaking about leavings, we found these leavings on our freshly painted (first coat of anti-foul paint) dagger boards the other morning. They are faint but if you look close, you'll see what we think are raccoon tracks.

These beautiful birds aren't the same eagles we have here, those are HARD to get a good picture of! These two are a couple we saw in Alaska several years ago. But there are several here who nest in the trees above us and we can hear them calling out asw they soar overhead. I saw a couple soaring around the other day and then one suddenly swooped down towards the dock. It was an absolutely beautiful picture that I wasn't fast enough to capture!

I've never seen fireflies until we came out to the east coast, and then for a few magical weeks, they make the evenings sparkle. We see them all over in the bushes and trees, along the side of the road, twinkling on and off like little stars in the night. We tried and tried to video them, but don't have the equipment or know-how to capture their bright but fleeting little lights. One night, John found one under the boat and managed to snap this photo. Who knew that they looked so much like a cockroach - LOL!

In the same vein of icky insects, John found this creepy crawler on his leg one evening. UGH!! Luckily, no bite!

Moving on to plant life. There are lots and lots of trees, bushes and grasses we don't have in arid Utah. This one, however really caught my eye the other night as we walked by it. I've never seen any berry growing in huge clumps like this on the branches of the plant. Does anyone know what it is?



I'll leave you with this beautiful sunset from the other night.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Windows, and Sun Shades, and Ladders - Oh My!

Greetings all - We've gotten some things done this week and some not.  But that's life sometimes, right? I leave to go home tomorrow, so I figure now is a good time to get a post up.  Sometimes it seems that time just flies so quickly. In looking through all that needed to be done to paint the motor compartments, we decided that we needed to first reinstall the swim ladders on the transom of each hull.  That's because the mounting for the ladders comes through into the motor compartments and we didn't want to do that work first and then drill back through it and mess it back up again.  Silly us, we thought that would be a pretty quick job.  LOL Last year at this time, on Mother's Day in fact, John woke up sick and it turned out that he had a pretty bad cellulitis infection in his left leg.  Two round of antibiotics cleared it up.  Guess what happened this year - yep, a cellulitis infection in his right leg.  It didn't make him as sick, but with all the cramped m
Post a Comment
Read more

Learning Electrical Lessons - Sometimes the Hard Way - and WHY AREN'T YOU DONE?

 So many ask us where we are at and when we will be 'done'.  More and more we laugh when that questions gets asked because we are unsure sometimes of exactly what done will look like - LOL!! What we can tell you now is what we're working on and why.  Can you guess? Yep, it's all about the electricity.   As we've been working through (and by we, I mean John), getting the wiring for the electric motors, controllers, batteries, inverters, charging, measuring, . . . figured out and installed to meet the manufacturer's specs, we have found some - or many - issues with the existing wiring on the boat.  Plus, as far as we can tell, we are the first system to have dual motors, dual helms, and dual controls at each helm, so there isn't any pre-developed drawings or anything about how all the parts go together.  Plus, we've found a few weirdness things in the specs where they call out one thing, but what they sent won't fit that spec.  No worries though, we
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bittersweetness of Mother's Day

 Most women I know have many feelings about Mother's Day, some sweet, some sad, some happy, some bitter, the whole gamut of feelings I think.  Lot's of reasons for that I'm sure, not the least of which is the 'traditional' view of what makes a mother. In my book, while conceiving, gestating, and giving birth certainly creates many mothers, it isn't the defining factor in being a mother.  It's hard to say what I feel clearly and simply, but I think it's mostly about how you take care of and care for others that truly makes a mother who makes a difference.  That makes many women who haven't given birth mothers and I've been blessed to have many of them in my life. First and foremost, of course, is my own dear Momma.  Odetta Garder West. For me and my two brothers and two sisters, she was an amazing mom.  She gave us magical experiences and a very rich up-bringing.  She was ALWAYS there for us - attending every single event, performance, game, and s
Post a Comment
Read more