The calendar says that it’s June 6th, but when I look outside, I see March, or maybe early April. Last night it rained bucketloads, and when I got up this morning, I had all kinds of new drips and leaks around the woodstove chimney. The other thing this means is that my open skiff, tied up at the dock in Skamokawa, would need to be pumped out.

When I went down to the dock, the skiff was more full of water than I had ever seen it, so I switched on the batteries, which should start the bilge pump. But today, nothing. So I went and got a bucket and started bailing out. Part way through, I realized that someone had been in my boat. The stern line was untied, and my flare box had been moved and opened. Further inspection revealed that a bunch of circuit breakers had been flipped on or off, which is why the bilge pump hadn’t come on. Someone had tried to steal my boat! The only thing that stopped them was that I had padlocked and chained it to the dock, something that I had sometimes thought was overkill for such a quiet rural area.

This is the second time in a week I have found evidence that someone has either ripped me off or tried to. About a week ago, on one of my walks up to the back of the land, I found that someone had come and stolen all of my no trespassing signs. Not just torn them down, as the slob hunters will sometimes do, but stolen them outright, leaving no trace. I also found that someone had stolen the transmission, radiator and hood off of an old pickup truck that was parked on the log landing up in back. Metal thievery has been a growing problem out here. About a month ago, someone chopped down and stole about 1200 feet of the phone line that feeds Skamokawa, leaving the whole area with no phone service for a day. A couple of weeks later, thieves stole about 1000 feet of power line that supplied a pumping station nearby. An aluminum skiff with expensive engines hanging off the back is apparently also a tempting target.

So, when I realized how close I had come to losing the skiff, I decided it was time to pull it out of the water and put it back on the trailer at home again. This sure makes it less convenient to use on short notice, but if the would-be thieves had carried bolt cutters with them, I would have no skiff at all now. So I decided to go for a little spin before I hauled it out.

This has been a cold and rainy spring, and the water level in the river shows it. The beaches have been covered with flotsam and jetsam for a couple of weeks now, and the water is fast moving and high. This channel marker has a piece of wood jammed in it at a level that is almost two feet higher than the high tide was supposed to have been lately.


Number 35 again

Normally on an incoming tide in this part of the river, the water flows upstream, backwards from normal river flow. Today, I was out in the middle of an incoming tide, yet the river was still flowing strongly out. I measured over 2 knots of current with the GPS. This pile jetty or wing dam is choked with logs and debris.


pile jetty clogged with logs

On the way home, I decided not to buck the wind chop and I took the quiet passage inside of Price Island, called Steamboat Slough. No matter how choppy it is on the main river, it is always flat and smooth in the slough.


Yamaha P60

The skiff is safely on the trailer at home now, where I can clean the algae off of the bottom, do some repairs and get the boat ready to go ocean salmon fishing when the weather gets nice. This year’s season has been sharply curtailed and moved around on the calendar, but if I’m lucky, I might be able to pick up a few fish before the season closes.