Tide is Low



You learn a lot about tides when you live on a house on piers over the water. I soon heard about “King


Tides,” a particularly high-water mark. Where I’m at, King Tides came in December and lasted until February. High tides here are usually about 11 feet, but a King Tide meant the tide was going 13 feet, and there were probably going to be logs knocking around under our house, sounding like they were going to knock the house down until we removed them.

A couple of weeks ago we experienced the other side of extreme tides, a low tide of negative three feet. Low tides were typically about a foot on the positive side. The water was much farther in front of our house than usual, so we took a walk down to our beach.

As we walked the waterline, water spouts were going off all over the place. It was like lawn sprinklers. The source: the elusive Geo Duck (pronounced gooey duck) clam. Some indigenous tribes around here get permits to harvest the Geo Ducks in deep water, and do so with breathing apparatuses and devices to evacuate the clams from the ground using pressurized air, or water, I’m not sure which. That’s probably what it would have taken to extract one of these from our hard-packed, clay beach. But it was cool to see all the spouts of water. If you look very closely at the pictures, you can see water spouts, too. That’s an indicator of how frequently they were spouting – I was able to capture them with my phone camera.

 



 


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