Flowering Fiction: Vacations and Happy 4th of July!!!

Vacations are very nice, but sometimes so is coming home. After 5 days at the coast, it was kind of nice to come home and relax before getting back to day to day life and what better to be home just in time for the 4^th of July! J Last Thursday after three hours in the car we arrived at my aunt and uncle’s beach house for our family reunion and headed straight to Mo’s. On Friday we enjoyed cheese cube samples and ice cream at the Tillamook Cheese Factory. If you’ve ever been curious about how they make and package cheese, I’d highly recommend you take a trip down there. They have a viewing area in which you can watch the factory employees cure, package, and box up the cheese. It’s pretty educational for anyone interested in learning about cheese. J

The next afternoon my brother, future sister-in-law, and I headed out to Netard Beach and tried our hand at clamming for the first time. We actually turned out to be pretty successful! ^^ We pulled up 24 Purple Varnish clams and 6 ghost shrimp. The shrimp didn’t have much to them, but the clams were absolutely delicious and tasted fresher than any store bought clams I’ve ever eaten. Digging through all that sand though made my arm awfully sore, which didn’t help at 4:30 a.m. the next morning when my step dad, brother, and I stumbled, bleary-eyed out of bed and headed to down to Tradewinds Charters in Depot Bay and boarded the Amigo to go deep sea fishing. With a crew of fourteen we set out passing three fat and sassy seals basking on the rocks, enjoying a comfortable life of ease. Maybe twenty minutes out, we dropped 10 crab pots, one of which I got to throw out personally, and headed out to catch some monster fish. All in all we reeled in about 10 fish. ^^ I pulled up four; three were sea bass and the other a tiny fish I didn’t catch the name of. For bottom fishing it was actually pretty quiet and when the wind started to pick up, the fish stopped biting.

What we didn’t catch in fish, we hauled up in crab. Altogether the total tallied up to 70 keepers (you can only keep males that are over a certain measurement). From there we headed back to the bay and disembarked. They cleaned the fish and cooked the crab right there by the docks were seagulls and seals gathered around in hopes of catching a stray morsel. Once we got back to the beach house, I took a good looong nap hehe. ^^
The whole weekend stayed pretty overcast with quite a bit of rain here and there, but the sun did make a nice little appearance on Sunday afternoon for the tail end of our fishing trip. Now I'm home much to the relief of my two cats, although they aren't very happy at the moment with all the fireworks going off.