20250328 Friday, March 28, 2025 Cape Disappointment Day 2

20250328 Friday, March 28, 2025

The weather remained stormy through the night with heavy rains and winds, but the winds were remarkably attenuated by trees in the campground, so there was very little buffeting of the RV.  

The batteries were at 75% in the morning.  The furnace had run intermittently through the night.  We ran the generator to run the heat pump and make coffee, as well as to put a few more amp hours into the battery bank, in case we didn’t end up with much direct sunlight to charge the batteries.  

We did go into Long Beach to do a little exploring and discovered a huge frying pan that was also in one of Ben’s old family photos from the 1960s.  The building that had been beside it was gone, or it had been moved to a new location.

  

Ben also wandered through a “Free Museum,” which was very much like a huge Ye Old Curiosity Shoppe, complete with all sorts of odds and ends.  These included “Jake, the Alligator Man”, supposedly discovered in a swamp.  

It looked like a mummy with a human head and upper torso mated to an alligator’s body and tail.  There was a huge collection of coin-operated amusements from the turn of the century and lots of taxidermy, including a two-headed calf, one-eyed lamb, and a shrunken human head from South America.  

We had lunch at Castaway’s in the heart of Long Beach’s tourist district and found it surprisingly refined and high quality.  The décor, service, and food were all unexpectedly nice. We had a bowl of their chowder, which had clams, crab, and bacon in a flavorful New England-style broth, and had cod and clam strip plates which came loaded with fries and a decent scoop of tasty coleslaw and homemade tartar sauce.  We wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Castaway’s to anyone looking for a nice place to sit down and have a meal in Long Beach.  

The wind and rain persisted through most of the day, but late afternoon, there was a break in the clouds and the rain ceased for a couple of hours.  Ben headed out to the beach at 5:30 p.m. with the tide predicted at 0.0’ at 6:29 p.m.  There were breaks in the clouds allowing some direct sunlight on the beach which helped make it feel a bit warmer.  The wind started around 25 mph, so still fairly brisk, but not as bad as yesterday.  

The clams were still not showing on their own. Ben ended up pounding with his clam gun inverted to get some clams to show and got his first clam at 5:45 p.m.  Then watching closely, he could spot occasional clam neck in the receding water when it was just a fraction of an inch deep.  They made a “V” in the last sheet of water that would give away their position.  Sometimes a pounding was necessary to confirm the exact spot, but Ben soon had his limit of 15 clams.  Janet came to the beach a little later and was looking for classic clam shows, but only managed to find one.  Ben then  pointed out and pounded out clams to reach Janet’s limit as well.  That was a bit more work than in the past, but certainly more successful than yesterday.  It did help that the wind was probably 10 mph less than yesterday, because we could see ripples in the sheeting water today.

We got the clams shucked, cleaned, and put up in the freezer.  We ran the generator while we were doing the clams and used the induction cooktop to also make Mac and Cheese with beans and other leftovers from home.  

The dig switches to AM starting tomorrow morning, so we’ll set our alarm clock and hit the beach at 6 a.m. for the predicted 6:58 a.m. -0.1’ tide.