Began the year immersed in my favorite subject. Hope yours is starting brilliantly too.
Considering the 2012 Polar Bear Dive
Polar Bear Dive day is upon us.
At noon tomorrow, Jan 1, 2012, Whidbey Islanders will join other polar bears around the world in welcoming the New Year by running shrieking into water that’s about 1/3 their body temperature.
I’ve never done it, but this year I’m considering, because I’ve been reading The Flinch, which is about facing things that make us recoil in horror. The Polar Bear Dive strikes me as the Mother-of-All-Flinches.
The 2012 dive goes down at Double Bluff beach, near Freeland.
Registration starts at 10:30.
That’s where my Flinch takes over – right there at that lag.
What happens between signing the medical release at 10:30 and actually rushing into the near freezing water an hour and a half later? Sit in the car with the motor running? Head to the nearest bar to get buzzed on hot buttered rums?
Personally, I’d much prefer to sign one minute and plunge the next, before I have time to come to my senses.
Whidbey awoke this morning to ice coating everything and a white frosted beach. Tonight rain and snow are forecast. So the morning should be just about right for polar bears.
More info at the Whidbey PBD Facebook Page.
Photo of Polar Bear testing the water is from Nathan 2009‘s Photo Stream.
Tags: cold water, New Year's Day, polar bear, The Flinch
Water Photo of the Week: Bye Bye 2011, Welcome 2012
This is my last Water Photo of 2011. And it’s my first ever stolen Water Photo. The others have all been my own, or freely given, or from the Commons. This one I outright swiped.
It’s from my favorite science journalism critique site, Knight Science Journalism Tracker. They didn’t attribute it, so I can’t either.
PS: I have it on good authority that the world is not going to end in 2012.
Water People: Hugh Shipman delivers the goods on how to treat your beach and bluff
Coastal Geologist Hugh Shipman will speak next Monday at Langley City Hall. You want to be there.
Here’s your chance to meet one of my favorite water people in person. I highly recommend you take this opportunity.
Who is Hugh Shipman and what does he know about Bluffs and Beaches?
Hugh Shipman, a Coastal Geologist with the Washington Department of Ecology is an authority on seaside bluffs and beaches. He knows the makeup and history of Whidbey’s shores and seascapes like no one else. And he can tell you all about your nearby beaches and bluffs and what you need to know to help maintain them.
Hugh is also the author of Gravel Beach, a blog about the geology of beaches. It’s one of my favorites. He recently made it even cooler when he activated Google’s format chooser. Now you can see his photos in classic blog style, or a magazine layout, or in a great mosaic. Head over there to enjoy some fine beach photos and get a sample of the kind of info Hugh will share.
Here’s the list of people who need to meet Hugh Shipman:
- Anyone who owns a piece of beach.
- Anyone who lives on a bluff.
- Anyone who likes to go to the beach.
- Anyone who cares about the stability of those bluffs that tower over Puget Sound beaches.
- Anyone who would prefer not to see major chunks of land slide down across roads, railroad tracks and beaches each winter.
- Anyone interested in learning about the various kinds of stone, sand and clay they find on the beach.
- Anyone who lives on Whidbey.
- Anyone interested in the Shoreline Master Program that’s being updated for 2014. (Think I got the date right this time.)
- Anyone who – like me – simply enjoys hearing Hugh expound on his favorite subject. He’s an entertaining speaker and an approachable expert.
- Anyone who’s always been baffled by the idea of hydraulic hill removal. (The Denny Regrade is but one local example.)
Hugh Shipman on South Whidbey’s Bluffs & Beaches
Monday, January 9 ~ 10 a.m.
At Langley City Hall
NOTE: Beaches and bluffs do not respect property lines. So if your neighbor is endangering your bluff or beach through bad management practices, forward this notice to them too. Even better, do the neighborly thing and invite them along. In the end, if you have to drag them to Langley to hear Hugh, they’ll thank you for it.
Thanks to Barbara Bennett, Program Coordinator for WSU Extension Island County Beach Watchers for passing on the news.
Invasion of the King Tide
Headlines today coupled the intriguing phrase “King Tide” with Puget Sound.
Having lived on the shore of the Sound my entire life, I thought I knew most of the terminology about this particular marine environment. But I’d never heard of a king tide. Perhaps it was a misprint – could be the writer meant spring tides, or to say something about tides in King County, which borders the Sound. But after seeing three mentions from various news agencies I turned to Google.
King Tide is simply an Australian term for an extremely high tide. Ah ha, so what we have here is another invasive species.
That’s a joke of course. I actually like adding new useful words to my vocabulary.* Though this one seems just a little fluffy. Extreme high tide strikes me as a fine description of what’s happening. Besides, we did away with that whole king thing a while ago.
Linguistics, semantics and primogentiture aside, this is a good time to head to the beach with the camera.
Actually, any time is a good time for water photos, but around the world, municipalities, kingdoms and states are watching these extreme high tides for clues to what may happen as sea levels rise due to climate change. And they’re looking for help.
Washington’s Department of Ecology is asking citizens to share photos of very high tides in their areas. You can see and share your photos on Washington King Tides Photo Initiative’s Flickr Group. Other West Coast states and British Columbia are hosting Flickr Extreme High Tide photo sharing sites too. But they’re insisting on calling them King Tide sites. Whatever, share those photos.
*What I won’t add is “the” to Puget Sound. I want everyone to stop saying that. There is no such thing as the Puget Sound, it’s just Puget Sound, okay? We don’t say the Mount Rainier, don’t say the Puget Sound. Thank you.
How to appreciate a species
Tidal Life takes place primarily where the land meets the sea, and it’s no secret to anyone who’s visited this site before that I prefer that everyone who wants to spend some time in that zone has the chance.
A lot of animals and birds spend time in that zone as well, and it’s a basic tenet of Tidal Life that the more wildlife in the zone, the better. Another basic tenet is that the names given to groups of creatures are fascinating. An exaltation of larks, a pride of lions, a gaggle of geese.
While it’s true that animals and humans often clash when they meet up at the water, I like to think there are more people who enjoy watching wildlife go about its wild life, in groups or singly, than thugs who want to use it for target practice.
Mike McVay, leader of a local movement to ensure that Whidbey’s publicly owned beach access points stay public, sent me a video that celebrates a sight that’s best seen over the open water. And to see it over the water you have to get to the water. I’ve seen this behavior many times, though not so dramatically as in this clip, and each time wondered at the skill and cohesion of the group. I have to admit I’ve also wondered, why?
The stars of this show happen to belong to a species that a lot of people don’t like. (Heck, name a species that somebody doesn’t like.) But as with any group that gets in the way of our immediate self interest, there’s much to appreciate if we take a step back, sit still, and watch.
A Murmuration of Starlings
This video Murmuration is from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.
Beautiful work Sophie, thanks for sharing.
And thanks Mike for sending it along.
Tags: birds, conservation
Water People Special Edition: Memories of Jan Holmes
Rainy Prairie View, a watercolor by Jan Holmes
One of my heroes passed this week.
Jan Holmes lived with cancer for several years, but she didn’t let that stop her from trying to tell everyone in the Puget Sound region about the wonders of marine creatures. She seldom even slowed down her work for WSU Island County Beach Watchers.
Though I never did a formal profile of Jan, she has been part of Tidal Life from the beginning. In December of 2009 she appeared, wading across the mudflats on a snowy night in search of eelgrass samples. Just last year she was honored as the 2010 Cox Conserves Hero for Western Washington for her contribution to environmental science to safeguard the health of Puget Sound. She also figured prominently in Watching the Eelgrass Grow, an earlier blog I published when we first started the Eelgrass Mapping Project.
Whether teaching newbies how to identify the creatures they found on the beach, managing the annual Intertidal Monitoring program or handling the underwater camera as it skimmed along the sea floor to check out the habitat, Jan was always, infectiously, in action. In fact, just a few weeks ago she was up in Vancouver, presenting a poster about the eelgrass project at the Salish Sea Conference.
Under the name Periwinkle Press, she and her friend Mary Jo published the EZ-ID species identification cards for naturalists to use on the beach. In her “free time” she painted whimsical watercolors of Whidbey and underwater scenes.
Indefatigable is the one word to characterize Jan. She was always active, upbeat and engaged. She made things happen. Many have been inspired to emulate her, few have succeeded.
Jan lives on in the ongoing programs she started for Beach Watchers, in the useful tools published by Periwinkle, in her art and in the hearts of every new Beach Watcher who ever tried to memorize the Latin names she rattled off so easily.
She’ll be especially present to anyone who spent time on the beach with her. Every time we turn over a rock, we’ll hear her excited call, “Oh, look, look, look!”
That was Jan’s magic. She made it impossible not to share in the wonder she found.
Water Photo of the Week: The Frosty Goodness of a December Sunrise
There may be frost on everything in the neighborhood, but there’s fire in the sky.
Each December I end up posting a photo of the winter sunrise. This time of year the colors are more brilliant, and the contrast to frosty roof tops is shocking. An image like this gives me hope. While most of our days might be dark, gray, cold and labor intensive right now, there is still a sun up there, it’s still warming us, and the easy times will come again.
Photo by Tom Bartlett
Water People: Don’t just get on Drewslist, get to know Drew
To the untrained eye the above image is simply six dots. But to Whidbey islanders this mark, like the Z of Zorro, identifies a vital message from a swashbuckling local hero. It probably makes a few of us salivate.
Of all the islandy things I’ve featured on Tidal Life, by far the most popular is Two of the 10,000 (at least) reasons Whidbey Island will keep on rocking my post about the online activities of two helpful citizens of Whidbey Island and the net – Van Van Horn and Drew Kampion.
Van’s Quote of the Day is inspiring and I recommend it, Drew’s offering though promises more immediate gain of one kind, or another.
Instant gratification
Drew’s List is THE PLACE to buy, sell, promote, advertise and generally find out what’s happening on the south end of Washington’s Whidbey Island. (I’m not sure how Drewslist works for those on the north end, can someone report?)
It wasn’t always this way…
The start of Drewslist
When Drew first started sending messages about Whidbey events and such to his friends and acquaintances, not everyone was pleased.
I remember one friend saying something like, “All that stuff Drew sends, it just gets to be too much.” (Hah! Back then, we didn’t know from email overload.)
I personally missed several months of Drew’s emails when I changed my address. I contacted him to be put back on the list when the number of his messages that were being forwarded to me by friends just became ridiculous.
The turning point for the list
Drew continued in his informal way until one day a hole developed in Island communications. The Langley Forum, another popular local information source that was run as a community service by Langley Councilman Robert Gilman, became too politicized. When Gilman announced that he was discontinuing the forum, those who used it to keep up on events and exchange information bemoaned the loss of what had been a helpful resource.
Someone posted a bit of virtual hand wringing, crying “what will we do?” and asking someone to start a new site where announcements could be posted, minus the name calling and snark.
And someone else responded: “We already have that, it’s called Drewslist.”
When I read that my eyes popped. “Yikes,” I thought, “poor Drew is about to be inundated by the hordes that have been raising Hell on the Forum.”
Drewslist goes island-viral
Apparently Drew was thinking bigger than I. He welcomed the Forum refugees, expanded his list and just kept on hitting Send. More and more people sent him things they wanted to share with the community – the plant sale to benefit the Land Trust, the offer of gardening services, registration information for an art class, a plea for help finding a ring lost at the playground, whatever, Drew shared it, free of charge.
When the flood threatened to overwhelm us all, Drew made the list more user friendly (and probably more creator friendly as well) by formatting the emails into categories, always set apart by those triple colons.
Now every day he publishes -
::: Housing Report :::
::: Jobs & Services :::
::: Events :::
::: For Sale, Wanted & Free :::
::: Classes :::
::: Health & Healing :::
::: Restaurants :::
And every now and then – amazingly infrequently given the amount of work he has taken on -
::: Drewslist :::
which is his understated request for donations to keep the dots, and what’s between them, coming.
What has any of this got to do with water?
Drew happens to live, and publish to his list, on an island. But there’s far more that connects him to Tidal Life.
A water person, Drew spends a lot of time thinking about ocean things. His life and his career have been based on interaction with constantly moving water.
The former editor of Surfer magazine, Surfing magazine and Windsurfing magazine, he continues to write for those and other water sport publications and websites. He is also author of many books about surfing and the sea, including, Stoked: A history of Surf Culture, The Book of Waves, The Way of the Surfer, Waves: From Surfing to Tsunami, Greg Noll: The Art of the Surfboard and The Lost Coast.
Noteworthy is the fact that I’ve never seen any of these books advertised under the Drewslist ::: For Sale ::: banner. That, in these days of 24/7 marketing, shows remarkable restraint. I don’t have to be so reticent though. I will tell you that you can buy Drew’s books via his website, www.drewkampion.com and that you should go there and buy them now.
Drew Kampion with Jack O’Neill
As we speak, Drew is off to another set of islands, somewhere in our watery world, for another surf related project. It may be Surf, Sex and Sandals: The Latin Art of Mixing Business with Pleasure, the autobiography he’s working on with Fernando Aguerre, co-founder of the Reef sandal and surfwear company. (My own beloved old Reefs appear in this Tidal Life self-portrait!) It could be a PR for the story of Jack O’Neill, inventor of the modern surfing wetsuit, Jack O’Neill: It’s Always Summer on the Inside, published just last month. Or perhaps Drew the surf photographer is snapping photos of big wave surfers at the Billabong Pipe Masters competition on Maui’s North Shore.
Hey Dude, I just came here to sign up for Drewslist
There’s an old joke that goes something like this: Last year 100,000 people bought electric drills. But not one of them wanted a drill. What they wanted was a hole.
A certain segment of the visitors to this site that talks about he wonders of oceans, marine mammals and living on the coast, will have arrived because they have something to sell.
They didn’t come here to learn about the activities of people who love the ocean. They weren’t looking for great surfing books to give as Christmas gifts. They didn’t want to hear about a guy named Drew who had a clever idea for getting the word out. Though they may have searched for Drewslist in hopes of unloading a used wetsuit, which would be kinda karmic.
Well then, here’s how to sign up for Drewslist: send a friendly email to drewslist at whidbey dot com, and in a friendly way, ask to be put on the list. That’s all there is to it. But I hope you find that you get more than you bargained for, and that you’re glad to know the surfer dude behind it.
Drew signs each email with this touch of surf philosophy:
Life is a wave. Your attitude is your surfboard. Stay stoked & aim for the light!
I would argue that getting that reminder every morning is actually the biggest benefit of subscribing.
Photo of Drew and Jack O’Neill is from O’Neill South Africa
Photo of the Week: Clouds Over Two Islands
As I was driving home from work tonight a strand of frothy cloud stretched the length of Whidbey Island. At either end it joined into a massive cloud bank.
Watching these clouds I flashed back to another atmospheric display over Stonehenge last month.
A rainstorm had chased us all the way from Montacute to Stonehenge. I love saying that – From Montacute to Stonehenge – so resonant, try it, sounds like the title of a novel or movie. But when we reached Salisbury Plain the rain stopped and the wind whipped the clouds into shapes that made me understand why this place might inspire folks to try a little magic.
Tags: cloud formations, magic, Stonehenge
