Sunny Cold Day

 So we survived the really cold weather and the snow. It really didn’t snow that much down here, it was pretty much gone by the afternoon.  A friend up near Waldport got so much snow that her power went out for two days.  I guess heavy snow on the lines and trees brought down a bunch of power lines. So I can’t really complain about the weather as we had it pretty easy.  We left the water running in the sink all night and the portable heater on high and we had no frozen pipes.

So because it was so sunny and the tides were low in the morning so we decided to head to the beach.  We went up to Yachats and checked out smelt beach.  This beach was used as a hunting, fishing and gathering place for local tribal people. They would come here when the smelt fish were running strong. They would use large triangle nets with poles that created a pocket so that the fish could be caught by scooping and tilting the net upwards. Unfortunately due to over fishing the smelt population is not big enough for fishing anymore.

This beach didn’t actually have sand. It was more like very fine gravel.  As you can see from the pictures it is very rocky. We found a bunch of the tiny agates. Can’t wait to get home and make myself and agate candle.  I have seen them in local gift shops but instead of buying one I want to make my own.  You basically take a larger container, put a smaller candle holder inside of it. Then you fill up the space in between the two containers with the small agates.  You then put epoxy over the rocks so they stay put.  When you burn a votive or tea light candle the agates sparkle.  This picture shows the basic idea.

Here is the beach in Yachats

As you can see from Len’s coat that the breeze was still really cold, but the sun did have some heat in it and as the day went on, I almost wanted to take my sweater off. 

After smelt beach we headed to Stanfield Beach.  This one is very rocky, found a few agates and then Len found what he thought was another big agate but it looks like it was actually gut on a saw. We think that maybe somebody just brought it to the beach and placed it out there for someone to find.  I don’t think that there is anyway that this was done naturally.

It was facing this way up, so Len thought it was just a regular agate until he turned it over.

This is the side that was done with a saw

The beach it self is had to walk on but the area is beautiful. The bridge the dunes and the agates made it all worthwhile.