This week I had a three day kayaking tour to take out. After many requests for more arduous and lengthy kayak trips, we scheduled a three day trip with trips of 14-20 miles per day. We got four people signed up for this trip.

The first day was a trip from Deep River out to Portuguese Point, on to Knappton cove and back again. The Onieda Road boat ramp was damaged in the big storm in early December, and is now closed for business. We launched across the river at a friend’s dock instead, and headed downstream with the tide.

Portuguese Point was called “Cape Swell” by Lewis and Clark, and they didn’t mean, “oh, this place is just swell!” They encountered the ocean swell that used to be able to roll right up the mouth of the river in the days before the jetties went in, and their men were getting seasick. We didn’t have that problem.

The next day had a forbidding weather report, and we opted to take a day off from paddling and drive out to the coast to check out the museums and the beach. We started out on the north jetty looking for birds, but the impending weather front wasn’t friendly to bird watching, so we just did a little weather watching instead before heading up to the visitor’s center.

While we were at the Lewis and Clark interpretive center, the storm front came ashore, filling the sky with huge snowflakes in an instant. Hello? It is almost the end of March, and this is the beach!

The last day, we paddled from County Line Park back to Skamokawa, and encountered almost every kind of weather that we could: snow, hail, rain, wind and sunshine.

Way back in the beginning, I promised something about shiitake mushrooms. I just ordered some new spawn and will be making up a batch of new logs this month. A couple of days ago, I went up to look at my old logs, which I had assumed were just about used up, being five years old already. I was surprised to find a whole bunch of new mushrooms growing out of the logs! Levi and I cleaned up and reorganized the logs, and picked the mushrooms that were good. I split these with Levi and put my half in the food dryer.