Sunday, January 26, 2025 Cape Disappointment North Head and Razor Clamming

Sunday, January 26, 2025 Cape Disappointment North Head and Razor Clamming

We did an energy austerity exercise last night to maximize our chances of not having to go through jump starting the house batteries.  We ran the generator until we were done with dinner, had the portable jump starter fully recharged, and the house batteries up to at least 75% charged.  Then it was lights out at 8pm.  We usually keep our iOS devices plugged in charging overnight, but we took the additional precaution of not charging anything off the house battery overnight.  Ben has an app that monitors the battery status and with the everything off, it was reading zero amps.

When the furnace was running, it reported about 54W of energy discharge.  The refrigerator also runs on the house battery, but runs intermittently so we can’t force it to run to test the power draw.  We set the thermostat at 59 degrees, and did manage to make it to the morning with the batteries still online.  

The solar panel charging display came on at 8am and wasn’t blinking the no battery error like it had yesterday.  The battery monitor app showed the batteries at 52 and 61%.  All this suggests the batteries are OK, and that we probably have some solar panel diagnostics to do.  These solar panels supposedly don’t have that long of a lifespan despite having no moving parts because they are exposed to a lot of vibrations and thermal stress.  These are now 3-4 years old so we may be looking at replacing them before attempting any really long RV trips, say to Alaska or the Canadian Maritimes.

  

Another oddity we have noticed is when we start up the generator, the GFCI in the bathroom trips.  This cuts off power to the outlet over the kitchen counter (coffee maker etc), so that has to be reset by pushing the button on the GFCI.  This is most likely just the GFCI showing its age as well.  We started up the generator at 8:45am. The campground rules say we can run generators from 8am to 9pm, but we waited until plenty of people were milling about the campground and the sun was fully out.  

After brewing coffee, we headed out in the Bronco to explore the trails of this part of the state park while the generator recharged the house batteries.  McKenzie Head trail is just a quarter mile long but it is to the top of McKenzie Head where there is an old gun battery, and where Lewis and Clark surveyed the mouth of the Columbia from it’s elevated view point.  

It is also a designated tsunami evacuation site for the campground.  While much of the vegetation is similar to Whidbey Island’s, the huge Sitka Spruce are a more unique characteristic of Cape Disappointment.  

There is a small cover near the park entrance named Waikiki Beach, and while it is beautiful, it bears no resemblance to its Hawaiian namesake.  We also drove along the north jetty and found people fishing with sturdy fishing poles for Dungeness crab using small bait cages with heavy monofilament snares. 

We returned to the RV and shut down the generator before heading out of the park to the North Head Lighthouse.  There is a very nicely kept light keeper’s and assistant light keeper’s houses that the State Parks use as rental properties.  The light house is now automated but is one of the best maintained light houses along the west coast. The two light houses at North Head and Cape Disappointment are the only two lighthouses on the West Coast within 2 miles of each other.  There is a short spur trail to Bell’s View just north of the North Head Lighthouse which also gives a grand view of the coastline.  

There is an 8 mile long “Discovery Trail” that runs between Ilwaco, Cape Disappointment State Park and Beard’s Hollow on the Long Beach Peninsula.  We walked a short distance along this but it ends up pretty much running along side the roadway.  

We returned to the Corral in Long Beach to return the food pager and ended up ordering bacon burgers, tater tots and milk shakes, this time taking advantage of their Senior discount of 10%.  These were nice burgers, much like a Whopper, and the serving of tater tots was generous.  The milk shakes are made with vanilla soft serve doused with flavor shots- nothing extraordinary, but who can complain about milk shakes?  

We returned to the Long Beach beach access arch to replicate the photo that Ben’s family took back in the 1970’s, and then ate our lunches on the beach watching kites, surf fishermen and dog walkers.  

We were able to take advantage of the cellular service in Long Beach to do our daily DuoLingo language lessons before heading back to the campground to get ready for razor clam digging.  The RV’s batteries had recharged to about 60% in the morning, so we ran the generator again to try to get the batteries up to 75%.  Using the heat pump running on the generator also heats up the RV quicker than the LP furnace does.  

The low tide was at 5pm at 0.0’, but we headed out to the beach at 3pm since the weather was so nice.  It was only in the 40’s but it was sunny and calm.  We walked out toward where we found the clam shows yesterday, but Janet had found half her clams enroute by walking down to the waterline and then cutting across, while Ben did a beeline on the diagonal.  It didn’t take too long to get our 15 clams each.  There were classic clam shows above the wash zone, and the lack of wind seemed to help eliminate pesky sneaker waves that would normally chase you up the beach.  We were all done by 3:30 and were back in the RV before 4pm.  

We ran the generator while we cleaned the clams and had dinner, which was spaghetti with canned Hunts spaghetti sauce and Costco meat balls.  And we like the toasted Costco Ciabatta rolls on the side.

While the campground bathroom has free showers, and Ben had used it on the first night, Janet discovered the women’s side did not have any hot water.  We both took nice hot but brief showers in the RV, in part to drain out the freshwater holding tank since we are leaving tomorrow.  We shut down the generator at 6:30pm.  The battery monitor showed them to be at 71.7% and 80.4%.  We’ll hope for no battery drama overnight.  Ben will be doing some homework studying on how to troubleshoot RV solar panels and charging systems in the near future.