When summer finally gets here, it sure goes by quickly doesn’t it?
The 4th of July came and went in a quick flourish of a midweek holiday that began the longest stretch of good weather we have had in 10 months. We actually had seven days in a row without rain!
Watching the evening news these days, though, makes me glad I live in the Pacific Northwest. Extreme heat, raging fires and tornados are not my cup of tea.
Crabbing season opened July 1 with dozens of our friends and neighbors harvesting the tasty creatures in record numbers and sizes. It is great to hear of folks throwing back good legal-sized crabs in favor of keeping a few “monster 7- plus-inchers.” Putting back the moderate-sized ones will just keep the populations growing for future seasons.
Someone told me once that a female Dungeness crab will have several hundred thousand babies each year. Of course, only a small percentage of the little ones survive as they are about the size of a pin head when born and become a quick snack for many bottom fish. Remember to return all females caught in your trap to the water as quickly as you can. She’s got a lot of kids to look after.
Our guest docks down at the port have been fully occupied nearly every weekend since Memorial Day and the trend should continue into September. It is always interesting to walk down the dock on a Friday or Saturday and see who is in town. Many yacht clubs show up in groups of five to 25 boats and bring lots of people to visit our town. I encourage you to head down to the dock once in a while to see who has shown up. A couple of years ago I was visiting with a couple from Bellevue and found out a young mom I was talking to actually grew up in the ’70s in the same house that I did in the ’50s and ’60s.
The migration of sand and silt from the inner bay continues to fill in parts of the marina near docks A through C. One of the liveaboard tenants on E dock has reported that the water under his boat is more than a foot shallower than it has been for years. On July 26, we had a meeting with all of the official governmental entities involved and will be developing a plan to deal with the issue. Of course, the remedy is a dredging operation and normally it takes several years to obtain all of the permits to do that. We will be approaching this project as an emergency and I would hope that we would be working on the solution before next summer. I will keep you posted.
Nautical term (almost)
For years, we have used letters and numbers to designate how good or marginal things in life are. Lloyds of London, probably the most famous insurance agency on the planet, has also done so for quite a while.
The Lloyd’s Register of British and Foreign Shipping, which deals with the design and construction of ships, was first published in the mid-1700s. The state of a ship’s hull was designated by letters and that of its equipment (anchor, cables, etc.) by numbers. This meant, for example, that a ship classified A-1 was first-rate. If classified A-2, the hull was considered first-rate, but its equipment second-rate. That is not necessarily a nautical term, but I found it to be interesting and wanted to share it with you. I think that if Lloyds was evaluating the Kingston Community News, it would be rated A-1+.
As the months roll from July to August, I will be up in the northern islands of the state and the Canadian Gulf Islands. I will see you all at a concert on the cove early in August.
As always, thanks for taking a few minutes to read this stuff. I hope you found something interesting or entertaining.
— Pete DeBoer is a Kingston port commissioner. Contact him at pete@petedeboer.com.
