Wednesday, October 6, 2021
12342 miles start. Left home around 9:40am. Fueled up at Swinomish Chevron. 11.126 gal @$3.669/gal 10:17am. 14mpg since last fill up. Lunch at Chiang’s @11:45. Dining in allowed. We were the only ones seated initially. Another couple came in as we were finishing.
Front parking sensors are too sensitive-sounding false alarms on open road or approaching driveways. Sensors need to be pointed upwards away from roadway and shoulders some. This proved to be annoying. After prying the bottoms of the sensors out of the drilled holes to aim them more upwards, the problem was alleviated, but not completely eliminated. Will need to install power switch so that the sensors can be activated only when needed.
Arrived at Twin Harbors State Park with some confusion because the park is split into two camp areas and a beach access area, all separated by major roads. The West side camp area is adjacent to the beach with access trails over the dunes, but no utilities except to several Yurts and tiny cabins that are available for rent. The full utility sites are clustered in a small area with small sites, but fortunately, there were only about 12 sites occupied out of the 49 utility sites. We picked site 28 which was at the end of a row so there would be no neighbor to our right if the campground filled up, but it didn’t. The camp volunteer had been there only a week, and usually worked at Cape Disappointment State Park. Lynn said Cape Disappointment’s campground is fully booked this time of year, but there are a few first come first served sites in one low lying part of the campground that frequently floods. Twin Harbors is all first come first serve this time of year (shoulder/off peak) and occupancy has been surprisingly low considering razor clamming is open. We road our bikes through the campgrounds and also to the beach access to scope it out. There is a nice parking lot with bathroom/showers at the beach access, and several hundred yard walk to the beach over the dunes. There is no drive-on access to the beach at this site.
After setting up our “Site Occupied” signs and cable locking our bikes to the table for good measure, we took the RV into Westport and stopped at the Westport Lighthouse State Park. The light house is the tallest on the West Coast, but is situated a surprising distance from the surf- probably at least a quarter to half mile back. There is a nice parking lot with picnic and toilet facilities as well as a trailhead to the Westport Lighthouse Trail system, which has a nicely paved walk/bike path that runs parallel to the coast for about 2 miles to Westhaven State Park, which is located at the Jetty protecting Westport’s harbor. We walked a mile down and back on the trail system. We then drove through Westport. Most of the restaurants and shops were closed. We drove around the fishermen’s memorial, checking out the view across to Damon Point.
We then briefly checked out Westhaven State Park where at high tide, it looked like half moon bay might be similar to the beach’s at Damon Point. We determined to check it out during tomorrow’s AM low tide.
We returned to the campsite and had Marie Calendar chicken pot pies with Costco Artisan rolls/Boursin cheese for dinner around 7pm. We didn’t realize until too late that the low tide was at 7:20pm, so we made it to the beach access after the bottom of the low tide, as the last rays of dusk were fading. There were fewer than a dozen people on the beach looking for razor clams. Some were blindly digging up a large area of the beach without much yield. One man did manage to find 5 razor clams- he had a clam gun and sack and knew the technique. We never saw one convincing “Show” in the sand, and came up empty handed. It was very difficult to spot shows due to a combination of extremely limited search vision reliant on headlamp beam only, and a probable overharvested portion of the beach. We could see vehicles entering onto and driving on the beach to the south. We quit after an hour of futile search, but there was little wind, and it was not cold- probably in the upper 50’s. It was very hard to find our way back to the beach access in the pitch blackness of night. Fortunately we managed to hit it by heading straight up the beach towards the dunes.
We returned to the campsite, backed in and leveled with the assist of lithium powered hand held work lamps to illuminate the site. We watched the pilot episode of Gilligan’s Island after configuring the Apple TV and iPad to both log into a Netgear mobile router so that the iPad could use Airplay to mirror it’s display onto the AppleTV. Airplay wouldn’t work with both devices logged into Janet’s iPhone Xr hotspot. Ben and a quick shower and we retired to bed at 10pm.
Thursday, October 7, 2021
Ben got up at 5:30am and got the RV ready for departure by loading up the bikes, disconnecting the power and pulling forwards off the leveling blocks. At 6am we retracted the slide and drove to Westport’s Westhaven state park to walk the beaches and look for agates. This got us to the beach about an hour earlier than necessary since sunrise wasn’t until 7:20am.. Ben made Oatmeal for breakfast with diced fresh apples and milk. Lot’s of surfers began showing up as daybreak approached. We walked the 0.66 mile length of the Halfmoon bay beach area with Janet finding just one agate.
We then walked over the jetty to the Pacific surf side, where all the surfers were. There was gravel adjacent to the jetty which did contain agates that looked very much like those we have found at Damon Point, which is across the Aberdeen Hoquiam inlet from Westport. There was fog which hampered lighting for ideal agate finding, but we ended up with a small handful, as well as a pile of intact sand dollars which Janet collected. Janet had tea and a nap. We had Ramen and leftover Chiang’s for lunch. Ben adjusted the parking sensors by pulling each out of it’s hole and reinserting it clipping only the top clip in the hole, leaving the bottom 3 clips out to direct the sensors slightly upward.
We unloaded and rode the bike down the trail system to Westport Lighthouse State Park and back. Then we drove to the drive on Beach Access on W Bonge road, which turns out to be part of Twin Harbors State Park. The road is sand and compacted gravel, but the beach was too soft to ride Janet’s bike on, so the RV would most likely have gotten stuck. The parking sensors did not provide any false alerts driving from Westhaven State Park to the W Bonge road beach access. Janet had walked to the beach while Ben rode her bike to test the sand. Her bike promptly got bogged down in the sand as soon as it left the compacted gravel road and entered onto the actual beach. We rolled out the slide and took naps, then made Spaghetti with meat balls and green beans, Artisan rolls and Boursin’s cheese for dinner. Used LP cooktop, microwave and toaster, but the inverter alarmed with both the microwave and toaster going. Ran the generator for a while. Stopped with 15.1 hrs on the hour meter.
Low tide was forecast for -0.9’ @20:12. We left the RV parked at the W. Bonge Road beach access at 6 PM and walked down to the water with clam guns, shovels, buckets, headlamps, gloves and work lights. There was a steady stream of vehicles onto the beach, and we could see people digging clams almost as far as the eye could see up and down the beach. We went to an open spot a couple hundred yards south of the beach access road. The sun was well above the horizon at 6:15PM providing good illumination, so we had no need for the headlamps or work lights. With the natural light, it was relatively easy to spot razor clam “shows”, which took the form of tiny volcanos if there was a tiny bit of water over them, or subtle depressions if the sand was drier. In this stretch of the beach, the shows were scattered 10-15’ apart, although sometimes two would turn up within a foot or two of each other.
We were able to get two limits of 20 clams each in less than an hour. We found that we had to take a break and rest after using the clam guns to drill down and lift out 2 or 3 clams. Most of the clams were at least 16” down so if you didn’t get the clam gun completely buried on the first attempt, you had to reinsert it into the hold and shove it the rest of the way down to get the clam. Janet had a tendency to break the shells and cut a few clams with the gun until she got the hang of angling the tube just slightly back from the water (5-10˚). By the time we had managed to get our 20 clams each, we were ready to be done, exertion wise. Ben took the buckets closer to the surf where puddles were a few inches deep to rinse most of the sand of the clams and to put enough salt water in the buckets for the clams to be able to purge themselves of some of the internal sand. We carried the buckets back to the RV and arrived at 7pm, still an hour before the bottom of the -0.9’ tide. The level of the beach where we found the shows and clams was about a hundred feet back from the surf, where the sand was just slightly dry to covered by less than a half inche of water. It was very instructive to discover it was possible to find the clams well before the bottom of the tide while there was still daylight.
We drove the RV back to the campground, leveled it and then hooked up all the utilities and dropped the rear leveling jacks. Janet took a shower while Ben started working on cleaning the clams. The induction cooktop was used to shell the clams by parboiling them, which worked well. Once they were all shelled, Ben started cleaning them while Janet did some clean up. While she was wiping the induction cooktop she wanted to know if it was on because the power light was on and there was an “H” on the display. I told her that meant that it was off, but still hot. However, when I went to show her how it should look like when it is turned on, it would go to Temp/Heat selection mode, but when you pressed either, it beeped and wouldn’t turn on any more. This will need to be investigated. There may be a blown thermal fuse or circuit breaker preventing it from working. We’re hoping that after shore power is unplugged and the inverter is off, that it may reset itself. It took until 11pm to clean and put up all the razor clams into a gallon ziplock bag. We had chilled them down in the freezer after blanching them to get the shells off. We didn’t have a scale, but it felt like we had a couple pounds of cleaned clam meat, as well as 1-1/2 cups of clam “guts” which may be used as shrimp or crab bait. We will freeze that in a quart ziplock bag.
Ben took his shower and was in bed by midnight. We may do some agate hunting in the morning after we pack out of the campground, but there is a 30+% chance of rain in the forecast at 10am. We might consider extending another day if the weather proves nice.
Friday, October 8, 2021
We got up with daylight at 8am and had bagels and peanut butter for breakfast. We dumped the tanks, topped off the freshwater and broke camp. We drove to Westport and looked at the beach at the fishermen’s memorial, but there was no access, and very little if any beach below. We drove to Westhaven State Park and used the one oversized vehicle parking space they have. We walked the beach with the tide around 2.0ft. We found a handful of agates similar to yesterday’s collection, and had walked 2 miles up and down the beach. We then had our leftover spaghetti for lunch with apple slices, and then took naps. We then unloaded the bikes and road the Westport trail system’s last leg from Westhaven State Park to the Observation tower in town. At 4:30pm, we then drove the RV to the W. Bonge Ave beach access. We walked down to the beach and looked in vain for any razor clam shows as the sun sank lower and lower in the sky, and into heavy cloud banks. As the tide retreated, as it reached about 2 ft at 7pm, right as the sun was setting, clam shows began to appear in the sand that was glistening with water, but not really submerged. This is probably the ocean water table level. Then began the frantic activity of spotting a show, plunging the clam gun over it, and pulling up the clams in a mad race agains the falling light. We were just able to get our limit of 20 clams each as the last beams of dusk faded into twilight. We did need our headlamps to walk back up the beach to the RV.
We drove to the West campground area of Twin Harbors State Park and found plenty of unoccupied non-utility sites. The bathroom serving these camp sites is just like the very nice bathrooms at Westhaven state park with individual private heated rooms with toilet, sink and electric hand dryers. We backed into site 242, but didn’t notice there was a tree branch that scraped along the awning cover. We’ll have to assess the damage in daylight. The utilities site #28 that we were in on the other side of the highway was $40/night. It was small and many of the sites were a bit soggy. Site 242 was quite spacious with two picnic tables and a fire ring, and room for a tent. It was also just $25/night.
Ben figured out the issue with the induction cooktop was that it must have a induction compatible cooking vessel on the surface before it will activate the induction coils. That is why it wouldn’t turn on to heat or temp mode when Ben was trying to demonstrate what the cooktop should look like when it is on last night.
Because we didn’t have shore power, we used the LP burner to heat up some Birdseye Garlic Chicken pasta for dinner with Ritz crackers. We then turned our attention to our 40 razor clams. We set up an assembly line and worked together to blanch them to remove the shells, separate the siphon from the foot/stomach, clean the siphon portions, remove the stomachs from the feet and then clean the inside of the feet. This yielded another gallon ziplock bag of razor clam meat and a 16oz cup of clam guts/crab-shrimp bait for the freezer. We finished up at 10:30pm. We took showers and hit the sack at 11:15pm.
Saturday, October 9, 2021
We got up with the daylight and broke camp, which didn’t take very long since we didn’t hook up any utilities or bother to level or stabilize the RV. It didn’t’ look like the tree branch did any damage to the awning cover- good thing it has a cover though.
We drove around the Aberdeen inlet to Damon Point to look for agates with the morning low tide. The Quinalt RV Park had a lot of RV’s in it. The tide wasn’t low enough to expose many gravel beds towards the end of the point, and there were several people combing the beach for agates well ahead of us so we only found a couple of small agates. But we got in a nice 5 mile walk for the day.
We had lunch in the RV- Ham and Cheese hoagie sandwiches. We discovered a bag of Kirkland tortilla chips had gone stale- too bad.
We headed home, stopping for diesel at the Hoquiam Safeway about 2pm with the odometer reading 12,675 miles. The driver information display showed we were on reserve fuel with a range of less than 60 miles, so we put $20.02, 5.471 gallons in @$3.659/gal. That gave us plenty of range to get to the Lacey Costco. It had begun to sprinkle and rain lightly. We arrived at the Lacey Costco at 3:30pm with 12,732miles on the odometer and filled the tank with 18.552 gallons @$3.499/gal. Fuel economy was 15.7mpg since the last fill up. We did some shopping at the Costco. It was a little strange that masks were required, but there were food samples, so you had to take off your mask to stuff in the samples and put the mask back on.
The rains hit hard and heavy as we hit Tacoma. We met Ciara at Chiang’s Gourmet in Seattle for dinner, and were able to have them cook up some of our razor clams with hand pulled noodles and black bean with garlic sauce. It was very tasty, but they left the clams whole. This created a nice presentation, but did require more biting to get the clams to more chewable sized pieces. They were very happy we brought in a pound bag for them to have for their staff, so they comped our clam dish.
It continued to rain pretty hard, making for a difficult drive home, but we made it safely around 9pm. We stopped by the Oak Harbor Marina where we topped off the fresh water holding tank and added 2 gallons of water with 4oz of holding tank treatment to the black tank.
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