Wildlife Notes:
- I don’t need an alarm clock here because my neighbours get excited when the sun rises. Eagles do a few passes of the island and freak out the gulls. The growing concentration by the jetty of sea lions bark and bellow ever so slightly louder in the daylight.
- This afternoon, I got word from an ecotour boat that a northern fur seal was spotted several nautical miles west of the ecological reserve. Hopefully the seal stops by here like one did in December and April. Before that, a fur seal had not been spotted at Race Rocks in over four decades!
Facility work:
- Clean the 44 solar panels first thing this morning before the guano got baked on by the sun
- Clean the windows of the main house
- Laundry load of sheets and towels used before I got here in July. There was plenty of solar power to accommodate the extra power load of the washer and dryer. While the dryer is heated with propane, the motor still draws a few hundred watts of power.
- Remade some of the depth sounding charts around the island that are getting hard to read. We used these charts to see how many litres of diesel are in the tanks by dipping a ruler into the tank to measure the level.
Vessels:
- Ecotourism: 22
- Private: 3
Weather:
- Sky: Partly cloudy
- Wind: variable directions 3-25 knots
- Sea: rippled in morning, up to 2′ chop in the afternoon
- Air temperature: low 18 °C, high 26 °C
- Seawater temperature at max flood: 11.6°C
Photos from today:
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- Two pigeon guillemots and a black oystercatcher
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- Since you can’t smell the California sea lions through a photo, the flies might give you a hint of the sea lions’ putrid stench.
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- Harbour seal in the East Bay
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- Mount Baker, a volcano with glaciers, towers over the Salish Sea. The tankers and cargo ships between here and Baker are anchored at Constance Bank, south of Victoria.
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- A large forest fire is burning across the border directly south of Race Rocks, in Olympic National Park, Washington.
*All wildlife photos are taken at the furthest distance possible, and may be cropped to improve detail.