I think we had THREE freighters go by today. Two big oooglies and a salty but not the Happy River, which is YELLOW and I hope I’m here when it goes by some day. But THREE is NOT ENOUGH.

I was looking at Marine Traffic (iPhone app) and I saw three little turquoise icons that usually indicate tugboats and things but sometimes big tug-barge style freighters like the Presque Isle, which went up yesterday and I almost missed it because it shows up as a tug.

Anyway, the three little turquoise icons turned out to be two tugboats and two dredges. At least I THINK they were dredges. Not really sure. Only one of the dredgies had its own little turquoise icon. I watched this little parade C-R-A-W-L up the Upper St. Marys past Round Island and over by the back bay. Okay. “Hey, do you wanna take a little drive over to the Back Bay and check out the tugboats and dredges?” YES! Said the GG. He had no clue about these botes. His morning mini-adventure involved a walk down the back road to the Doelle end of the beach where a border patrol person was SOUND ASLEEP in his gubmint vee-hickle. Hey, what self-respecting Canuckian would want to emigrate to the United Snakes with our out of control virus and we won’t even talk about the Orange Baboon today.

So we drove out onto Bay Mills Point from where we were able to see the tugboats and dredgies but not well enough to take a pic. And no, it doesn’t take much!

From loosely remembered family lore, my grandma Margaret lived with her fam on Bay Mills Point for a while when she was a teenager. Family lore also says that she walked across the back bay to high school in Brimley on a long gone railroad trestle and had to move off the tracks whenever a train came. I wish I had a more complete story about that. My pea-brain imagines Grandma climbing DOWN over the side of the trestle to wait for the train to pass but that’s probably not the actual scenario. Also, I’m guessing the trains were not moving very fast at that point given the geography, which I won’t begin to try to describe.

Anyway, we came back to the moomincabin and I went down to the beach to read and almost immediately had to decamp because BIG BLACK CLOUDS and THUNDER! That was kind of unexpected today but it turned out that little “popcorn” storms hit us off and on all afternoon. I would think the coast was clear and head down to the beach and “bom bom bom” (as a young beach urchin once called thunder) and I would have to decamp to the moomindeck. I did that probably five times this afternoon and by the looks of the sky, we are not done yet. Yup, there is more and bigger thunder. It’s okay. We need rain.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2020 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.