20250412 Saturday, April 12, 2025. Easy Limits. Limited Solar Charging

20250412 Saturday, April 12, 2025. Easy Limits. Limited Solar Charging

We hit the beach at 6am where Ben had scouted it out the afternoon before.  There was predawn twilight, but it was not enough to see clam shows in the dark.  So we had our headlamps on and began our search.  We did start seeing clam shows as the tide receded, and it was helpful that the wind wasn’t too strong driving the surf up the beach.  As the sun rose above the eastern horizon, we were able to see clam shows in the reflection of the eastern sky on the wet sand.  Janet was able to get her 15 clam limit by 6:30 a.m.  It took Ben another 15 minutes because he was trying to be a bit pickier and looking for larger shows further down the tide line.  Still, we had our limits well before the bottom of the low tide, which was at 6:57 a.m. at 0.4’.  

If the weather holds, that bodes well for tomorrow, which will see the tide drop to 0’ at 7:29 a.m.  On Monday, it will drop to -0.2’ at 8 a.m.  If we are successful on both days, our RV freezer will pretty much be full of razor clams.  We cleaned and put up the clams using the RV’s lithium batteries for boiling the water and also microwaved some rolls for breakfast and used the Keurig to make coffee.  This had discharged our batteries to about 30% capacity.

Clam enema time

We took the Bronco into Westport and parked it in front of the City Hall, where we could get good cellular service and zoomed our kids.  Then we went back into Aberdeen to have lunch at the Dairy Queen.  As we drove past the Westport Winery and International Mermaid Museum, we saw a huge crowd there.  The parking lot was pretty much full.  While at Dairy Queen, we found out that there is a Mermaid Festival this weekend, which runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.  We were too late to hit it on our way back to Twin Harbors today, but it will give us something to do tomorrow.

We experienced occasional sprinkles of rain alternating with sun in the morning.  As the day wore on, there was more sun and less sprinkles.  Our solar charge controller sometimes reported charging currents from the solar panels at 10A, but the Battery Management Interfaces on the lithium batteries only reported charging at 2.5-3.0A.  It’s unclear why there is such a difference.  We had been hopeful that a sunnier parking spot would mean we might not have to run the generator, but after most of the day, the batteries had only recovered from about 30% to 40%.  So we ran the generator in the afternoon to get the batteries up to at least 80% to assure we can make it through the night and have reserves to be able to process clams in the morning.  

We went for a walk around the campground and discovered some trails that we had not known about.  Unfortunately, most of the trails ended up flooded out.  We also walked across the highway to the east part of the State Park which is closed, and saw that the entire campground area with utilities was sitting in the middle of a small lake.  The groundwater must be right at the surface this time of year.