Beach vacation

Pompano

We spent last week on Flagler Beach – I mean literally on the beach. We rented a place right on the ocean with the back door probably 200′ from the surf. It so much reminded me of my teenage life on Patrick where, except for school, I think I spent the rest of my time on the beach – fishing, swimming and doing all those beach things.

The place is located about 5 miles north of SR100 on A1A. It’s a 2 bedroom, 1 bath place with a nice kitchen and living room. It was totally complete with everything needed,even satellite TV in the living room and main bedroom. We actually brought more than we needed and next time will scale back. Turns out there’s nice Publix about 5 miles down the road and enough restaurants to eat every meal out and not repeat. We never turned on the stove or the microwave and the only thing we ate in was cereal a couple mornings and some fruit on the beach purchased from a local farmer’s market.

I fished every day and had some “interesting” catches. Over the week I caught all the expected stuff – whiting, bluefish, and pompano – so if we had wanted to eat our catch we could have had the fresh stuff every day. On the “interesting” side – on the first day I hooked into something that nearly stripped all the line off my reel. My surf fishing tackle is major equipment with a big league reel loaded with 300 yds of 30 pound test line. In the past year of surf fishing a couple days a week, I think maybe I’ve had fish that pulled out as much as 10 yds off the reel. So you can imagine my surprise when I set the hook and see the line just peeling off the reel. I have 200 yds of one color line and the last 100 yds another so I can tell that the first 200 yds was gone in maybe a minute and I’m working on the backing. I tighten the drag down to the point where I’m being pulled off the beach into the surf myself and can see the end of my spool coming up when he finally turned. Luckily he started swimming parallel to the beach instead of straight out to sea. I ran along to catch up on my line and retrieved about half of it. It was kind of a standoff because he was just steadily pulling me down the beach and I couldn’t gain line but could move along fast enough to keep him from taking more. After 20 minutes of this tug of war, I’m maybe 300 yards down the beach from where I started and he got off. I never saw what it was so it might have been a submarine. My best guess is a large shark but it seemed too fast for that so perhaps a very large Jack or Permit. In the ocean, you can never tell what’s going to bite.

The next day I had a near repeat but this time I saw the fish. I have witnesses to this one – Joey, Mark, Nancy and the next door neighbor. I hooked a giant manta ray. This guy had a wing span of maybe 6′ and probably weighed over 100 pounds. Rays jump. and jump and jump so you have no doubts whatsoever as to what it is. The neighbor hooked one that cost him about 300 yards of line and I just figured this was going to be the same with mine. But luckily he got off – as it turns out he straightened out a stainless steel hook. About a half hour later we’re sitting on the beach chatting when an Osprey dives on bait right in the surf about 20′ in front of us. Now that’s unusual. Even more unusual is that when he flew away, he flew right into my line and about jerked my rod out of the sandspike. He crashed into the surf entangled in my line, maybe 50′ out. He was in big trouble but not caught with the hook so there was some hope. On his own he managed to swim to the beach but was clearly stressed. Joey managed to get behind him and cut the line while I distracted. Ospreys are really fierce birds and you sure couldn’t get too close without risk of serious damage. He regained his composure in a few minutes and flew off. So within a very short period we had a manta ray and an osprey experience. “Interesting”.

The next day Nancy and I were fishing and I hooked another manta ray, about as big as the day before. He was on the rod that had snagged the osprey so it was already short some line and he managed to get away with another 50 yds of my line.

The rest of the week was nominally normal fishing but I can tell you on a couple occasions I pulled in my line when I spotted either a big shark, another ray, and one time a manatee. This week was a huge tackle test and I found myself coming out short in several cases. I need some serious upgrades – or to go back fishing in my old haunts. Guess which I am planning!

For me it was all about the fishing; for Nancy it was working on quilts on the beach, watching satellite TV, and eating seafood. One night she had a lobster stuffed with crab meat; another night she had a “boil”at TJ’s Fish Shack, That’s a large platter of crab, shrimp, shellfish, corn on the cob, whole potatos, and sausage all boiled together. The funniest one was on the way home from St. Augustine. We had planned to eat at a really unique place called Saltwater Cowboy’s. Turns out it’s not open for lunch but without a doubt we’ll hit that one. It had us written all over it. But when we left we headed south on A1A and spotted a dive called The c
Crabshack and Bakery. It must have just turned over ownership and the staff was fairly inexperienced. I ordered the gumbo which turned out to be the best I’ve ever had. Nancy ordered the low country “boil”. I think not too many people had ordered the boil before. It took a long time coming but when it came it was unbelievable. It had the regular snow crab legs, shrimp, and corn on the cob. But in addition it had crawfish and 3 blue crabs. A monster platter that the cook brought it out himself. He said he wasn’t sure what all went in the boil so he just loaded it up. Nancy feasted on that bad boy for about an hour. We had breakfast most mornings at a beach side place called the Java Hut and a monster 3/4 pound burger at the Turtle Cafe. I’d say we hit maybe half the spots on this trip but sighted quite a few for the future.

And the future is the last week of April.

Disasters?

Did you hear or read the latest scare story from the scientists? This week a prestigious group from England came out with a report that says the oceans will be fished out within 50 years and there will be no fish left – totally destroying the oceans. Last week another prestigious group from England came out with a report describing the costs of global warming which basically said we will be totally broke by 2100, living on a dry planet.

At my advanced age I have two advantages over you younger folk. First and most obvious is that I won’t be around to experience all these disasters. Second, and maybe more reassuring to you, I’ve heard it all before. I was in college when I was exposed to my first “world ending” prediction from groups of prestigious scientists – the earth was entering a period of global cooling and we were at the front end of another ice age. There were many articles with maps showing how the glaciers would come down from Canada all the way into the plains. The northern part of the country would be under hundreds of feet of ice. Much of the water in the ocean would be caught up in icebergs so that the water level would dramatically drop. In Florida the coast line would move 100 miles out from where it was and it would snow every winter. That really bothered me because at the time we lived right on the beach and I just couldn’t imagine that instead I’d be 100 miles from the beach and it would be too cold to swim in anyway. I just bet that if any of them are alive, those same prestigious scientists are on the global warming side. I like global warming way better than ice ages.

The next disaster predicted by a group of prestigious scientists was that the population of the earth was growing so fast that within 50 years – so that would be now – there woudl be worldwide famine. It was technically impossible to grow enough food to feed the masses – there simply wasn’t enough land. India and China would suffer first but eventually we would all simply run out of resources. The big movement was called ZPG for Zero Population Growth. I can remember my cousin Joan coming to my dorm to warn me to take it seriously. She was a med student so she knew much more about it than I did and she was concerned that I just wasn’t worried enough. I guess we know now that she took it very seriously since neither she nor anyone in that family had any kids. How interesting to find that not only is there no worldwide famine – but India and China are both now exporting food and one of the large worldwide economic issues of the day is the protection of farmers from cheaper imports. All over the world land is being taken out of agriculture because there’s too much food available.

Later in the 60’s we worried about “nuclear winter”. This group of prestigious scientists said we were certain to have a nuclear accident or event that would trigger chain reactions and massive explosions. So big, in fact, that a cloud of dirt and dust would completely cover the earth and block out the sun. The temperatures would drop and we would all be dead in short order – either from a lack of sun or radioactive fallout. I was never sure which would happen first.

At some point in the 70’s we (earthlings) were being barraged by ion blasts or something from explosions on the sun. It seems that the sun is just a continous series of hydrogen bomb kind of explosions which generated something called solar flares that reach out jillions of miles from the surface of the sun. These ions would totally wipe out the electrical systems around the world so there would be no power, no radio, no TV. I think it was also predicted to reverse the magnetic field of the earth so I guess compasses would all work backwards. And that was about the time we learned that there are huge asteroids drifting around out in space that would some day crash into earth, totally destroying it.

And didn’t we have Avian Flu last year. Remember this was to be a globe cleaning pandemic that would kill jillions of people. There wasn’t enough antibiotic on earth to stop it. Every newscast had reports of dead ducks in Taiwan or a dead goose turning up in Holland. Plenty of maps showing the migratory patterns of birds and how the flu would travel around the world. First we’d lose all the birds in the world and then the virus would learn to transfer from birds to people. What I wonder is how this could go from something that was going to impact the globe and basically deplete the population of the earth to a non event and there be no follow up news about what a bunch of crap it was. I wonder where these jillions of doses of antibiotic are??

I guess the thing that never ceases to amaze me is how all these dire predictions just sort of drift off into oblivion and the prestigious scientists just keep coming up with more dire, world ending predictions. Now they have large supercomputers to support their nonsense and wall to wall media to spread it. The scariest thing to me is the possibility that Nancy Pelosi could become Speaker of the House – that’s third in line for the presidency. Now that’s scary.

fish story

For the last couple of days I’ve been fishing with baby bream off the dock. Very relaxing. It takes about 5 seconds to catch the bait and another 5 to hook it up to my bass rig. I take down the newspapers, a book, maybe a puzzle book, and the phone. So I’m set for a couple of hours. That’s what I was doing this morning and had the Daytona News Journal and two Wall Street Journals. I went down about 9:30 and it was totally relaxing up until about 11:30. I had even completed a level 4 Sudoku puzzle with little problem. So I’m living large. At that point a large gust of wind came up out of nowhere and blew all my papers but the one I was holding into the lake. I’m scrambling trying to catch the last of them when I look over at my float and notice it’s heading out into the lake at a good clip. It had been just floating there about 20′ off the end of the dock for maybe 45 minutes. I give up on the papers – they were all in the water by now anyway- and jumped for the rod. I always leave the reel on free spool just in case something grabs it. That lets the line off the reel and won’t allow anything to jerk it off the dock. It was probably about 75′ off the dock and heading for the deep when I popped it. Sure enough, major fish. It did all the big bass things – pulled out the drag, ran into the weeds, and tried to get under the dock. But I prevailed and landed about an 8 pounder. No picture so you’re have to trust my judgement on the size. It’s the third bass in the last two days but the first one of any size. The others were in the 2-3 pound range. Fun to catch but ………..

And still on the subject – I started by saying how easy it is to catch small, baitsize bream. That’s new for the lake. As you recall, it was always easy to catch bream/bluegill off the dock but they were all large, plate size fish. It was hard to catch anything bait size. The exact opposite situation exists today. I can go down with a piece of bread and within a few seconds of baiting the cane pole, I have a small, maybe 3-4” bluegill. No big ones, just the bait size. I noticed the other day when putting out handfuls of fish food, that all the fish feeding were small. So maybe it is that we’ve come full cycle and there was a really successful bedding season last spring.. And perhaps for a few years prior to that, the crop was much smaller and most of the babies were all eaten up by the larger fish. Without a doubt, it’s different this year. The other difference is that for the first few years, we would catch as many shiners as bluegill. I can’t remember the last time I caught a shiner. It’s also possible that the large number of small fish comes as a result of having such high water levels all last year. that probably allowed th eggs to be laid way back in protected areas and they have had a much better survival rate than past years where the water level was lower. We’ll be able to test that theory next year since the level now is really low and not likely to rise for the next 6-9 months. If the hypothesis is right, then next fall we’ll have lots of big bream/bluegill and not many bait size.

bait again

About 6-8 months ago I quit feeding the fish off the end of the dock. There was a combination of reasons but mostly, it was hard keeping the raccoons out of the feed. I put the food inside metal trash cans but they could easily remove the lid. So I put a concrete block on the lid and they figured out that they could tip over the whole thing. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when they removed the lid and must have pitched it in the water. Anyway, it was nowhere to be found so I guessed they dunked it. The other things were that we seemed to be attracting too many turtles. I wasn’t too concerned when it was just the vege type turtles but occasionally one of those nasty, long neck soft shell guys would show. They’re meat eaters and I wasn’t too keen on having them in the vicinity. They kept stealing my bait when I was fishing for bass and we actually hooked one – what a mess. So I quit feeding the fish and popped a couple turtles with my pellet gun. That solved the problem. It made for better swimming all summer long.

But the downside is that you can no longer catch huge bream easily off the dock. And you can no longer catch even bait size bream or shiners. This is the time of year when it’s really comfortable sitting on the dock with a big ole shiner under a float, searching out bass while I read a new mystery novel and watch the wildlife. So when Nancy went to Utah last week I bought a bag of feed. I figured I would try putting them inside a cabinet on the dock and then put a box in front of the door to slow down the critters.

As I always did, I threw out a couple of handfuls of food off the dock. Nothing. Not a splash, not a swirl; no sign of a fish. Ditto the next 4 days. I’m guessing the fish had just gone off to greener pastures. On the fifth day, a splash and a swirl. Not much but a promising sign. I stayed with the handful or two every day and within the next five days it looked like piranha feeding – exactly how it was before I stopped. So I don’t know whether the food brought them back or if they were there all the time and it just took a few days for them to get used to surface food again. It also brought back the turtles. So far only the vege type. What I noticed about that is how well turtles can hear. I always figured they didn’t have much in the way of ears but as soon as the bream start splashing after the food, I spot turtles heading over from all the way across the lake. Within a very few minutes they’re come all that way and are in there gobbling and competing.

My plan is to keep feeding them daily to create my own little bait pool and an occasional fried bream (bluegill) sandwich,

Home alone

When Nancy left for Utah this week I had certain expectations about what would happen here. And for the most part, all of my predictions are proving true. For example, it’s very quiet. No vacume cleaners, no leaf blowers, and no sewing machines. There’s also very little discussion about what goes on the TV or even when it goes on. No daytime TV to break the peace and serenity of the woods – tough luck Dr. Phil. And also as expected, I’ve not screwed up even once. I usually screw up many times during each day but so far, I’m absolutely clean. No screw ups or at least none that I recognize. No surprises on the food front. I had been hoarding left-overs for a couple of weeks – sorry about that Joey – and have enough backlog to carry me through Sunday. I’m caught up on all my WSJ’s, Business Weeks, the Volusia paper, the Deland Beacon, and the Sanford Mullet wrapper.

But there have been some surprises. The tangerines are turning orange. They were bright green when Nancy left, and started turning orange the next day. Ditto the grapefruit – they started switching from green to yellow. How did they know??? Ever the scientist, I hot footed it over to May’s tangerine tree to see if maybe this was just a normal seasonal transition. Nope, her’s are as green as Granny Smith apples. And last year at one of the Cocoa Village craft shows we bought a couple of orchids. They have done nothing and look exactly like they did a year ago. On Tuesday I checked and there was a large stalk with blossems forming. There was no sign of anything going on last week and oila!, a bloom as soon as she leaves. I should mention the red bromiliad down on the path that appeared dormant forever and has suddenly sent out a dramatic showing this week. Not any one of these horticultural events would have startled me but to have it all happen at once and a few days after Nancy leaves? That can’t be a coincidence. I’m going to be really curious to see how they react when they see she’s back next week.

I’d like to say that the fish all of a sudden turned on, but so far nothing on that front.

Fall Break

Had a great Fall Break. Simon came up Monday morning and we spent all week hanging out. Last time he was here for a week we had focused hard on fishing the lake. This time we decided to expand our horizon and do mostly salt water fishing. The surf was too rough to do the beach so instead we loaded the kayaks on the truck and hit different inland salt water places each day.

Tuesday we did the north end of Mosquito Lagoon. We were prepared to kayak and wade as the occasion required. We put in about 9AM at the south end of the Canaveral National Seashore Park. The lagoon is very shallow and just full of fish – schools of mullet everywhere. We fished for a few hours and I managed a few strikes but no fish. It was quite windy and there were serious looking storm clouds very close so we stayed nominally close to our put in spot. Even with no fish we had a great experience. Kayaked right next to a school of manatee; right next to a school of porpoises that were tearing into the mullet. We scouted out a few other places in the general vicinity that would be good prospects for future trips. Also found a good bagel deli for future beach trips right across the street from Boston’s on New Symrna Beach. Si did a salami sandwich that had to be 3” thick; My ham wrap was equally as generous. Great sounding breakfast sandwich bagels on the menu.

Wednesday we hit Tomoka State Park and did the small canals we had fished a couple of years ago in the canoe. I hooked two nice snook and lost them both. Saw manatee there too. We had packed our lunch and found a nice shaded picnic area above the Tomoka River and just enjoyed life.

Thursday we hit Strickland Creek which is a feeder into the Tomoka. What a great creek – exactly like fishing the Sebastian River – overhanging trees, brush, and lots of activity. Once again I nailed a very large snook – same as the day before, on a large top water bait. Somehow he got off but an awesome experience. Oh yeah, another manatee sighting. For an endangered species, we sure saw them everywhere. I just really don’t see how they can continue to call these guys endangered with a straight face. We had paddled about 20 minutes from the Park where we put in and then the wind and tide carried us back. At the park there’s a wooden walk that juts out from the bank and parallels it for a few hundred feet. I noticed signs that people had crabbed from the walk and we decided to give that a try. All we needed was a scoop net, some chicken wings or necks to bait a line, and crab boil seasoning to cook the catch. An hour later we had all that plus some ready made sandwiches from Publix. We baited 5 lines and then sat back to wait for action. It came in spurts where we’d have a couple of crabs on lines at the same time; then long dry periods. It took us a few misses before we got the timing right between us for pulling in the lines and scooping them. If you pull too fast, they drop off and if you wait too long to scoop they also let go. So you have to do it just right. We found the right combo on 7 keepers. Brought those bad boys to the house. Within an hour, Nancy and Simon were doing blue crab appetizers while I grilled some nice pork ribs for barbecue.

Friday we decided to stick close to home and do the lake. That was fun for a change since I hadn’t been fishing since all that hospital crap over a month ago. I nabbed first and most; Simon cleaned me on the biggest. I think his big one was bigger than both mine combined but ………………………

On Gator Pond

You remember how we always marveled that there were no gators in the lake – marvel no more. About a week ago I was nominally certain that I spotted one about a hundred feet from the dock. It was a one minute sighting at most and there was a nag in my mind that maybe it was a couple of turtles swimming close enough together to have the appearance of a small gator. I estimated it to be quite small – maybe 2′ long based on the distance between the eyes and the tip of the nose. A couple of days later Rick, George’s brother, told me that he too had seen a small gator in roughly the same area. Since then I’ve spent hours down on the dock reading, doing puzzles, casting and just looking for another glimpse but have come up empty.

Rewind back a month or so. I was kayaking and noticed that there was a grassy area on the shoreline across from us packed down tight. In the past whenever I had seen that pattern, it was a gator bed – a place where a gator crawled out onto shore and sunned. Since I had never seen any sign of a gator before, I put it off to be something else – maybe a deer or hog had lain there. A few days later I heard some shooting late in the afternoon – not anything unusual around here. I was out on the dock and the guy in the pontoon boat came over to tell me that a gator had been seen and shot. He said he had gone around the lake a few evenings with a spot light looking for gators and seen nothing. He was concerned for his Labs which spend a fair amount of time swimming off his dock and was satisfied that the beast was history.

With this new sighting, I decided to alert the ski crowd since they are the ones with the heavy artillery necessary to deal with these critters. My pellet gun is totally outclassed for anything other than cats at 30′ plus I doubt seriously that my marksmanship would let me even pop an eyeball. I stopped them Saturday and we chatted about the situation for a bit. They were nominally aware that there was one about 5-6′ long and guessed that based on my report, there were actually two in the lake. The guy, Brian Guyer, said that over the past 20 years there have been a couple of occasions where gators came over from an adjoining lake, lake Cain, and that it had happened when the water got low – just the situation we’ve had this year. He said that usually the gators that come in, leave fairly soon – in his words, “they don’t seem to like this lake”. He went on to say that they don’t like gators in this lake either and he had a couple of buddies who would take care of the situation if he called. I took it he meant convert them into shoes or belts and maybe a plate of gator bits. Since that’s not legal, I could tell he was feeling me out to see if I had any hangups with making them disappear. I made it quite clear that if I had the means, they’d be history in a heartbeat. The Guyer’s do lots of swimming off their dock, have little kids and small dogs and all the right reasons to take action. The kids told a few funny stories about skiing right next to one a few years ago. They have signals between the skier and boat driver, one being to pat the top of the head signalling a need to return home. The girl, maybe 12 now, said she was patting her head as hard as she could but her dad thought she wanted him to stop the boat – which he did, setting her down way, way too close to the gator. As soon as she told them why she had signalled, they pulled her up and all laughed about it. Nobody is really afraid of them but they, like me, just feel better if they are gone.

So, I’m waiting now to hear some target practice at night!!!

Clark’s fish camp

We’d heard about a restaurant on the St. Johns in Jacdsonville a while back and had been wanting to try it ever since. Today seemed like a great day so we drove up to Nancy’s favorite Quilt Shop and then to lunch at Clark’s Fish Camp.

What a great place. It’s quite large with lots of indoor and outdoor dining. The place is decorated with all kinds of stuffed animals – not little stuff, but things like lions and tigers and bears and gators. In addition it was all decked out for Halloween which meant lots of life size animated ghouls and goblins. Intermixed with the stuffed animals, the overall affect was really good.

We sat outside right along the river. Numerous boats pulled up and unloaded for lunch the whole time we were there. The menu was quite large and extensive, maybe 90% seafood oriented with lots of specialty items. We had a calamari appetizer, onion rings and soft shelled crab sandwiches. Spectacular. As we were eating, I noticed a guy at the table next to ours working on what looked like a prime rib roast. I had never seen such a large hunk of meat outside the grocery store. As we were leaving, I asked our waiter what it was. He identified it as the Joan’s cut which is slightly smaller than Jack’s cut. He said it was 2 1/2 pounds. I checked the menu and it was $22.95; Jack’s was $24.95.

When we finished up, Nancy pitched a piece of her roll over the side. It looked like a school of piranha attacked it – some monstrous size bream.

It’s too far to go on a regular basis but anytime you’re near Jax, put it on your “must do” list. It’s maybe 5 miles west of 95 on the south side of Jax so maybe next time we head up to SC, that would be a good destination eating spot.

http://www.clarksfishcamp.com/

Sudoku

Last January we visited the Burmeisters in California. I noticed that Fred was fully engaged working puzzles in the newspaper and wondered what that was all about. So I tried one of the Sudoku puzzles and was instantly hooked. Unlike crossword puzzles, it required nearly zero knowledge, just the abiliity to think logically. On the surface, the puzzle concept is simple and like any other puzzle, some are easy and some are hard so as you gain experience you drift up in complexity. And that’s been my experience so when we buy puzzle books, I move right to the ones labeled tough or demanding or challenging, or tricky, or diabolical – any of the adjectives that indicate a tough puzzle. I leave the easy and moderates to Nancy who is not nearly as engaged in solving these puzzles as I am.

But here’s where I have some difficulty. I also do the ones in the newspaper every day. These are graded one to four with one being the easiest. So throughout the week I do a few ones, a few two’s etc. What I find is that sometimes I breeze through a “four” and other times I get stuck on a “one”. It makes me wonder how they rate the complexity.

The most obvious thought would be that a simple puzzle has more filled in starting numbers and a more complex puzzle would have fewer. But I don’t think that has anything to do with it. Some of those rated most difficult have 20-22 blocks filled in (out of 81 possible); some of those labeled simple have 22 – 24. But if you think about it, if it were true that the more numbers you have filled in the easier the puzzle, then with each number you add the puzzle would get easier. For example if you started with 20 given locations and added another 10, why is that any different that starting out with one that has 30 numbers filled in and even the ones labeled super easy have fewer than 30 filled in to start with. So it stands to reason that once you had 30 filled in, the rest should be child’s play. Wrong!

Another something I noticed is that after getting totally stuck on a puzzle, if I erase it and start over using a different starting point, the puzzle sometimes melts away with ease. For example I usually attack the square in the upper left corner and then move left to right, top to bottom, exactly as if reading a book. After going through all 9 blocks that way, I systematically attack it on a column by column basis, again left to right; then on a row by row basis, top to bottom. I will deviate from this circular approach to pick up gimme’s but nominally I continue the rotation until it comes up blank. I have another technique that I use beyond that but I won’t get into that detail. But when I start say from the lower right hand corner block and work backwards, then do rows before columns etc – I don’t hit a stop at the same point. I may get way further one way and even solve one that had me tearing out my hair. Meaning that the sequence with which I attacked the puzzle rendered it either difficult or easy. That just defies logic – or at least my logic – but I’ve tried that on several puzzles and it seems to bear out. It doesn’t mean that I solve one that had me stumped but it does often enough to assure me that there’s something to the sequencing. And even when I don’t solve it the second time, my total count when I hit a stop point is different than it was originally. Telling me that sequencing surely has something to do with it.

So how do the creators of these puzzles decide which ones are easy and which are not quite so easy and which are brutal? Inquiring minds want to know.

For the birds

I was fishing off the dock this morning when a bizzare event occurred. I was casting a white 4” senko worm and had retrieved it back to within about 20′ from me. The lure is very visible so you can watch it clearly even when it’s 2′ below the surface. Out of nowhere a kingfisher bird dove on it. It came from maybe 10′ altitude and was moving fast so it was over in a millisecond, or so it seemed. Somehow my reflexes were good enough or he had misjudged the depth, but I was able to jerk the bait away from him. It really would have been a mess had he managed to pick up the worm and hook himself.

That’s the third unusual bird experience this week. Earlier in the week I was sitting on the dock, under the roof, reading. An Anhinga, a water bird similar to a cormorant, flew toward the dock intent on landing on an outside piling. He slowed down as you’d expect just as his feet hit the top of the piling but I could see he was way too low and crashed gently into the piling instead of landing on it. He came up swimming and stretching his neck in a distressful fashion. It seemed to me that maybe he had a fish or something caught in his throat and was having a hard time swallowing it. He swam a bit and then tried to fly but couldn’t get airborne. He kept repeating this swim then flight trial until eventually he reached shore over by Grover’s. I lost him in the bushes so don’t know if he ever recovered or what.

The next morning I was sitting at the computer when some kind of grayish, songbird crashed into the window about 2′ from my head. Scared the hell out of me. It hit as if it had been shot out of a gun – really hard. I got up and went outside to see what had happened and he was laying there, dead as a doornail.

Have I done something to piss off the bird God????