February in Hood Canal

Who says blogs have to be sequential?

Last month I escaped for a weekend to Hood Canal. Despite having grown up on an island in the Pacific Northwest, somehow I'd never been there. Come to think of it, I've never been to Tofino, Oroville or Ritzville but we'll have to leave those deficiencies for another time.


Oysters lying around on the beach. Like rocks, kind of, but they're not.

So, now I've spent some time in the fabled Oyster Heaven Hood Canal. And, yes, it was oyster heaven. In fact, it took you about 3 minutes to get all the oyster's you needed for a meal. No searching required, they were just lying around on the beach. I'd like to take this moment to mention that while I have absolutely no qualms about gathering, say, berries that are growing wild, or even apples lying around under an apple tree, there is something definitely weird about just picking up a rock-like object, steaming it open and eating the gooey stuff inside. It's just weird, that's all.

It is good though, if you don't think about it too much.

This is my friend and I gathering our oyster meal. That bucket was full fast (in 3 minutes -as I said before). The tide is out and those little oysters had nowhere to go (they're not known for their speedy evasiveness).

We did not eat this. There is some kind of clear delineation between what one finds and eats and what one finds and says is "cute" and puts back down. This is an example of the latter. Note its claw. He wasn't afraid to use it either. I, like a true scientist, let him have a go at me to "see if it would hurt". This technique is not advisable for all scientific inquiries. In this case, the answer was no, it doesn't hurt.

One of the great things about the area is that it is on the Olympic Peninsula which has some pretty fine mountains (thus the picture). It also has this incredibly long canal (named Hood) that connects all the way out to the Puget Sound and then to the Pacific. You get all the sea life in what looks like a lake or a river. It's kind of interesting. The tides come in and out, since it's connected to the ocean but it doesn't really feel like you're on the ocean. It's kind of hard to explain. It even felt different from being on one of the islands in the sound.

This place wasn't far at all from Seattle, just a ferry ride across the sound, a drive across Bainbridge and then a bridge to the peninsula. We got to see things that are relatively difficult to spot in the city, like seals, eagles, deer, funky jelly fish and of course, the oyster.

My last comment about the weekend was that it was sunny. This is remarkable since we're talking about the winter in the Northwest. It was splendiferous.