Mostly to partly cloudy. Occasional showers. Temperatures in the 40s. Light winds.
I didn’t get out until this afternoon. After taking care of my radio show for tomorrow, I drove out to Starrigavan.
Approaching Magic Island, I could see the parking lot was overflowing. I did not need to wait long before the milky colored water came into view. Herring season is on.
I saw more milky water by Kerr’s Island, and stopped there to look around after turning around at Starrigavan.
With no eggs spotted (by me, at least), I suspect this might be one of those false spawns I’ve heard of. If I remember correctly, it’s thought to be young males that sometimes color the water before the females are ready? I’m not really sure, but I expect experienced herring egg harvesters know what’s up.
It’s hard to say how many fish were in the water. I did see a few get caught by gulls. However, my best guess is fewer than 100 gulls were present for this little vent. That’s pretty low, which makes me think maybe not many fish were in the water.
Plenty of eagles were up in the trees, but they weren’t doing much to go after fish. I’m not sure if they were already full, or if the fishing just wasn’t that good.
I spent some time watching the channel, and was a little surprised to see about as many gulls there as I had seen out the road. I suspect long-line deliveries will start coming in over the next few days, so that will likely result in higher gull numbers (depending on what happens with the herring).
Only three of us showed for ultimate this evening. We played catch for a bit before calling it quits. I did have an idea for a mashup of frisbee and baseball. There would be no pitcher, instead the ‘batter’ would throw the disk however they wanted. From there it would be like regular baseball. A caught disk is an out. You can tag or force outs at a base (no base stealing, though). Based on some brief experiments, I think it might work better on a smaller field. With 90 feet between bases, throwing a soft grounder towards third base is difficult to pick up and throw quickly accurately enough for an out. It’s also difficult to throw very far beyond the infield as a batter without floating it enough that a fielder could easily run to it.
I was hoping to get out on the water more for herring season this year, but Connor’s schedule is pretty full up, so it’s looking like that won’t happen. Maybe next year.
My iNaturalist Observations for Today
