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This cruise seemed to have more wild animals and birds than most of the others. We heard loons every night, always a joy. There were great blue herons and ravens and a bald eagle, besides the usuals that Alice and Harry are best at describing. For creatures, we saw several snakes but no rattlers. |
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We saw two bull moose one morning.
Mary saw a fisher cat. And we saw beaver and muskrats and signs of
raccoons.
One moose is on left, while the other is more easily seen near middle of picture |
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But there was one awesome visitor ...
Our usual nighttime anchoring style is to find some rushes or muddy spot
on the shore and pull the boat in so it's soft aground. Just to sleep
better I throw out an anchor into the mud. Usually the rode is all bunched
up exactly where I put it the night before. One lovely night on Jumbo
Island we did just that and fell snugly off to sleep.
The adrenalin rush came at one minute to midnight. The rumbling center
hatch woke us in an instant. Leo, remembering ducks-on-deck in the
Chesapeake (but ducks don't fly at night), pounded on the overhead to stop
the racket. Silence. Now the forward hatch came under attack. With
a quick move, the port hatch cover was lifted up in the air as far as the
shock cord would allow and then snapped loudly back to the deck.
With that, Leo beamed a spot light and we saw the front hatch lying
crooked and open. Leo quietly adjusted it back into place, turned
the light off again, and we waited. Nothing. No critter scrambling
on the deck; nothing wadding in the water. No noise whatsoever.
It was a complete puzzle. It actually seemed impossible that there
was no other hint of what had just happened.
After
15 long minutes, Leo shone a light onto the deck and we saw a big muddy
swath across the starboard hatchcover. But we could see nothing outside
the boat to give us a clue. We lay back down, very still I might
add. After 45 minutes more of shallow breathing, we felt we could
talk. It seemed unlikely to have been a person because we would have
heard something else. But it had to be something with hands or good
working paws, we thought, like a raccoon. And maybe it just leaped off
the boat silently. Maybe. But eventually we went back to sleep,
satisfied that the event was over.