Superlative Day: Gone Fishing
I’ve had some great and memorable days in my life, and this is one of them. My good friend said “Hey, you want to go fishing Friday?” and I said “Yes!” I had to go get a one-day fishing license, and I could add crab for a mere 50 cents, so I did.
We met up at 6:30 a.m. and were on the water by 7 a.m. on one of the hottest day’s in Seattle’s summer. As we left the marina, we passed an Eagle. (We thought of you, AdventureMan!)
AdventureMan must have heard us talking about him, because as the sun rises, he calls from Kuwait, eating Felafel sandwiches and ice cream as we watch the sun rise:
And set the crab traps – this is what an empty crab trap looks like. We put turkey legs and old fish heads in the bait box to attract the crabs:
It is a gorgeous morning. As my friends dig out the fishing polls, I admire the mountains and the sparkles on the waters of Puget Sound:
My friend has baited my hook and hands the rod to me. I lower the weight to the bottom, pull it up just a little and – an immediate nibble:
He’s a good size and he’s a keeper. My friend grabs my camera to take my photo with my first fish of the day, I hold the fish up – and just as she is snapping the shot, the fish does a little flip right off the hook and back into the water!
It doesn’t matter – the fish are biting and we are hauling them in. Some are too small; we take them off the hooks and throw them back, telling them to have a good life, grow big and we will see them again, we hope!
After about an hour of superlative fishing, we go back to check the crab pots. They are HEAVY with crab!
You can’t keep any female crab, or any male under a certain size, so any crab you think you might want to keep, you have to measure. You get a HUGE fine if you are caught with undersize crab. As we bring in the crab and the fish, my friend notes them down on our licence records, which have to be sent in to the state at the end of the season, listing fish we have caught, crab we have caught, and how many we threw back.
We catch a couple rock crab – those you don’t have to measure, and you can keep. Most of what we catch is the sweet and delectable Dungeness Crab – my very favorite after Alaska King Crab.
We had just decided to quit for the day – it was getting really, really HOT for Seattle, like 90°F/33°C (and there is an advisory for hot weather, and air stagnation) and we have nearly our limit for crab, and a respectable amount of fish, and we are happy, happy fisherpeople! Just as I am about to raise my line, I get a big bite, and catch the last fish!
Here is our bucket, full of fish. The cooler is full of crab. What a great day to be alive.
Seasonal Change Sunrise
More clouds! Beautiful Tiepolo clouds! A Turner sunrise! And look, you can see almost all the way to the horizon. That nasty yellow-black band of (whatever it is) that hangs over the horizon on some days is gone!
It is 91°F / 33°C at 0530 in the morning – and it was still 98°F at 0300 this morning – imagine! No wonder most of the flights take off at night!
Qaatteri Cat’s Sunrise
The Qatteri Cat had the cat crazies as the sun came up this morning. Racing around the house, coming to our bed and saying “day has started! You don’t want to miss this!” and by the time I am up, I have to laugh, every carpet in the house is rumpled up from his scampering and racing about.
He was right. The humidity has disappeared, even if temporarily, my windows are clear (too clear, as you will see!) and it is a gorgeous sunrise.
Isn’t that GORGEOUS! No, not the photograph, the sunrise! Blue sky! Clouds! A hint, in the middle of summer, that winter is coming!
But this photo is the do-over. I took a previous photo. When I uploaded, I laughed out loud, and immediately took another – you can see why:
It is 97°F/36°C at 0700.
Steamy Sunrise
Last night, I was working on a project, and was wondering why sweat was just streaming off me – I wasn’t working THAT hard. And then I noticed the windows – it was as if we were in the middle of a rainstorm, only it wasn’t raining.
Ahhhh. . . . the humid days are setting in. Good for settling dust. Bad for getting anything done. Generating tons more laundry . . . two minutes outside, and you are soaked, from the inside out. Your sunglasses fog, cameras fog . . . not my favorite time of year.
This morning, WOW. It’s as if it were Seattle fog rolling over the water, except it is Kuwait steam – this is what sunrise really looked like – it’s hard to photograph steam when your lens keeps clouding. What looks like waves – you can’t even see the Gulf this morning, that is steam/fog, rising off the waters. The whole area is covered with rolls and wisps of steamy fog.
Early Dawn + Cold Spell
I happened to be up this morning pre-dawn:
So calm, so serene, and I just love that someone is out there fishing on the glassy waters. But it was WAAAYYY early, I went back to bed. . . no sunrise for me this morning.
WeatherUnderground shows a cold spell today:
But as you can see, it will head right back up there as the week progresses.
I am packing for another trip – one where we will be on a beach, but instructions on Virtual Traveller say “even the hottest summer day has cool nights, so bring a light jacket, long pants and shoes and socks.” I can’t wait!
How Hot is It?
Here is a photo of what it looks like this morning, not quite 7 in the ay-em:
It’s hot. It is so hot that I will need to run to the grocery store any minute now, before it gets too hot. It is so hot, I don’t even sweat, the sweat evaporates right off my body. It is so hot that a crayon left lying on the ground will spontaneously dissolve:
At 0730, it is 97°F / 36°C.
Hot as . . .
Night before last, for the first time, I saw my husband’s temperature gizmo in the car register 50°C – and that was at 8 PM.
In Kuwait, if the temperature registers 50°C, work is supposed to cease. The official temperature gauges on buildings downtown never go above 49°C. But if the temperature outside is still 50°C at 8 at night, wouldn’t you think it would be higher during mid-day?
He had visitors in town the other day, visitors who were so fascinated with the heat that they took photos of his dashboard temperature gauge.
It is unbelievably hot.
Chongwe River Camp, Zambezi, Zambia
I used to be such an organized person. I had a responsible job where I juggled many important things. I had meetings and messages, and events and proposal deadlines, and somehow, I did it all, and I did it well.
Now that I have somewhat less to handle, I don’t handle it as well. I am too relaxed. I don’t obsess about details, I don’t wake up in the middle of the night gasping about something I may have forgotten, I don’t even keep a notepad by the side of my bed to write things down that wake me in the night.
When I was making arrangements for this trip, AdventureMan said to add on a few days at the Chongwe River Lodge, so I told the travel guy at Robin Pope Safaris to book us at the Chongwe River Lodge. Then, I just paid what the invoice said and never thought about it again. If you go to the RPS page, it will show you Chongwe River HOUSE, and that is where we thought we were staying. When we arrived, we were a little disconcerted to discover we were at the Chongwe River Camp, not the house, but our tent/cabin faced a pod of hippos, and we were immediately enchanted, and sometimes things happen for a reason, you know? We knew we were there for a reason, and just relaxed and enjoyed what the camp had to offer.
And oh, WOW, what the camp had to offer. First, every tent is situated to have a fabulous view, and the front of the tent is all clear net, you CAN close it if you want to, but you don’t have to, you have absolute privacy with on one looking in. They have a wide range of activities, lots of water sports, fishing, kayaking, hiking, fly camping . . . so much to do! Or . . . you can do nothing at all, too.
Our view overlooked a pod of hippos. All day and all night long, we could hear hippos. In the middle of the night, a hippo mom and a baby hippo were grazing two feet from the entrance to our tent – when I got up to watch, they quickly slipped back into the water.
That might disturb some people, but it totally enchants me! I was told some people get grumpy because they can’t sleep, that they request earplugs . . . I cannot imagine. I love the sounds, and somehow, it makes me feel safer inside knowing wild things are roaming around at night. I’ve always felt human beings were the far more dangerous threat than the animals.
So I will bore you with a bunch of photos, and you will see the things I love – details of the tents and lounge and dining areas, and photos that I wish had sound attached so you could be lulled to sleep by the laughter of the hippos.
This is the Chongwe River airport:
This is the airstrip we flew into – you can see elephant dung all over the strip, but there were no elephants on the strip when we flew in:
Zambia was experiencing a huge airplane fuel crisis while we were there, so flights were being consolidated. One night, there was NO fuel at any of the major airfields. Here us the fuel storage at Chongwe:
This is my idea of camping – king size bed, good sheets, a great bathroom and a great view of hippos:
The bathroom! Can you see why I enjoy camping so much? The shower has a European style flash heater – so practical, and you get hot water in a heartbeat without burning a lot of trees.
Storage/clothing shelves in the bedroom. Rooms come with flashlights, insect repellant sprays, and a whistle in case you feel in danger:
Dining in the bush – and the food was great. Because it is the middle of winter in Zambia, nights can be chilly, and we had charcoal braziers between diners at night to keep us from shivering. It was toasty warm! When we would get back to our tents, there would be hot water bottles warming our beds, so we could just jump in.
The coffee/tea/hot chocolate bar, with French press Zambian coffee, yummmmm:
This is how the camp would look at night when we would come back from a game drive or a boating trip – purely magic, with all the twinkling candles. The camp offers fishing, hiking, game drives, kayaking, all kinds of activities, or . . . just chilling:
This is the lounge area and library in the daytime:
These are “my” hippos – oh, this just made my time at Chongwe River Camp, hearing their laughter, hearing their arguements. Just up the river all the animals would come down to drink at dusk. I could sit and take photos and never intrude on them – warthogs, impala, elephant, waterbuck, geese, heron, egret, ibis . . . and lots of baboon.
We saw everything on our game drives, but I will start with the great Kudu, because finding a male kudu not shyly running away is a great treat:
I think this lion finds tourists boring – he and his wives endured our presence for about 45 minutes before ambling off to another shady glen:
This was a great thrill for me – an elephant swimming to one of the Zambezi islands. Don’t worry, I was using my great telephoto, I was not that close. We did not bother the elephant, we kept our distance.
Here is the big guy safely on his island:
And just look at this guy! He was a big as a HUMMER! Our guide said he had seen even bigger on the Zambezi. (gulp!)
Sunrise June 11, 2008
You can see the June sun is a big throbbing ball in the sky, and the visibility at 0600 is almost to the horizon. Less than an hour later, visibility is rapidly decreasing.
Actually, I love being out in the dust; I love seeing all the men with the gutras wrapped around their faces, it looks very exotic. Before all the designer gutras, you can imagine these cloths were a necessity to protect faces and lungs from the biting sand and gritty dust.
The medical face-masks are probably better at screening out the dust, but don’t have the same romance to them. 😉
Temperature 93°F / 34°C at 0800; and the dust may keep the temperatures down a little today, below the projected high of 109°F / 43°C.
Out There Somewhere
The sun is up, but there is no sunrise to be found. I know you think I am kidding, but this is what the day looks like at 0600, 90°F/ 32°C (feels comfortable, but not fresh.) Anyone know how long this dust storm is expected to last? The whole summer?
I’m done jet lagging, thanks be to God, and back to sleeping normally once again. 🙂
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