To Blog or not to Blog

I'll bet there are thousands of blog posts out there with that title.

Last post was EIGHT YEARS AGO.

Lots has changed. I forgot I had this blog. I'll start posting again.

Hopefully someone will see it!

squinting

Freebie porch swings!

To the trepidation of my wife, @yarnsalad , I joined the local Freecycle list. If you aren't familiar with it, Freecycle is an organization that helps people give stuff away. Free. It's run on Yahoo groups, and the messages pop into your email. I was hoping that maybe someone nearby would be giving away some lawn furniture or porch swings.
And they did! Very first email that came was for porch swings! After some kerfuffle with messages and email, I got an address about 20 miles away. I pottered out there in the #floundertruck, and in front of this little house...were two porch swings!
I have to say, they were pretty crusty. This climate does horrible things to wood. I looked at the swings with a critical eye, wondering if they were worth the effort. I picked one up, and it was pretty light, so I put them both in the truck. I was thinking that if one or another didn't work out, at least they were free...and I can always huck them in the dumpster if not. Believe me, if I don't feel it can be resurrected, it cannot be! I am apt to attempt to restore things that are so far gone that they in fact only act as patterns for a new item...

On the way back home, I stopped at Lowe's and grabbed some paint and some decent quality wood screws. I cheaped out and skipped new chain (though I may go back for that later...dunno).

Well, I haven't taken any pix yet (but I will...and post them) but they are turning out better than I hoped. Total cost so far: Gas $7.50, Lowe's $37. If it stops there, then I get two porch swings for a third the cost of one new one.

I didn't meet the people giving away the swings, but I did go to their website http://themagooroom.org/ which seems to be a shelter for blind cats. I once had a cat that went blind, so this sort of twigs for me. Give it a looksee, and remember that they are cool Freecycle people!

Just in case you didn't notice...

...I added a thumbnail bar of recent uploads to my Picasa account. These are all pix from my handy iPhone, until I can afford a new camera that does good macro and has image stabilization for my shaky hands.

July 24 2011

Note to desk erectors; particle board and nails don't get along!

Strange fish I have seen

Ucluelet is a wonderful, wild place...surrounded on 3 sides by the sea, lashed by wind and rain that often falls sideways (or even up!)...you are never more than a few steps from adventure!


My job is pretty adventurous. At least, compared to some of my former jobs. I spend a lot of time on the docks, observing the fish that come up during commercial trawl offloads. I always have my trusty iphone with me, and although the picture quality isn't exactly what you would call archival, it does document some of the fishiness rather well. And I like fishiness!

Here are some of my favourites...

These are Opah, Lampris guttatus. These ones came up in a hake trawl. They were pretty beat up by the pump (the fish are pumped out of the boat by a big vacuum cleaner thing) and as you can see, the heads were almost torn off. Each  of the two were about 17 lbs. I tried to removed the otoliths, but they appeared almost gelatinous. I haven't had a chance to ask anyone about that, yet...

 This is a Prowfish. The scientific name is Zaprora silenus. 

Check out the amazing sensory organs around its eye in what appear to be logarithmic spirals! There is no lateral line in this fish. I'd speculate that these pores might be some sort of modified lateral line.

The jaws are small, and the teeth are ridged, like a bandsaw blade. Little is known about these guys, other than the smaller specimens eat mostly ctenophores and salps (read: jellyfish).

I found a tiny juvenile one at one point, and it is frozen at the office. I'll dig it out and post a photo once they remove the (hundreds of pounds of) tagged sablefish off the top of it.

A close up of the fascinating pores.

The crew at the offload plant commented (more than once) that it looked "like a lingcod with its face smashed in."

Lots of invertebrates come up in the trawls, too. I'd say this is evidence of hitting the bottom with the trawl, since I have a hard time imagining a Brown Box Crab swimming in the midwater zone. Try to imagine a Sherman Tank swimming midwater...

Lopholithoides foraminatus  is a pretty cool looking animal. It's not really visible in these photos, but there is a perfectly round hole between the claws and the first set of legs. It is formed by a half circle on each. I will get a photo close up of that if I get another chance...there's one in my freezer, so I'll dig that up later. 

This is a pretty common fish in the trawls. It comes up in most of the hake trawls as well as the groundfish. It's called an Arrowtooth Flounder, or around here, Turbot. It isn't actually turbot as most people (especially chefs) know it. It's horribly mushy even before you beat it up with the pump. I cannot imagine wanting to eat this stuff, but they retain it. There are comments on the mushiness all over the net. Trust me people, it didn't go bad. It was jello even before it died. 

I took a photo of this one because of the funky parasite growing out of its eye. 

This is another weird parasite. I really know nothing about critters like this. It was iridescent and attached (very firmly...I couldn't cut it out) to the rearmost gill arch and skull.

FYI, this is a Rougheye Rockfish (Sebastes aleutianis) which is a common bycatch species in the Canadian trawl fisheries. I haven't had an opportunity to try eating it...but (aside from that green turd parasite) it looks tasty.













Which is in direct contrast to this fish.
This was in the fish case at the Market on Millstream, near Victoria, BC.

Neither my wife, nor I could identify it in the case, which is why we took a picture. Upon reflection, it seems that is is a Pacific Ocean Perch (Sebastes alutus) that is so old that it has lost all colour. Positive identification came only when I spotted a POP that had been left on the floor in the corner of a fish plant for several days. Miraculously, the birds had not found it...and it looked just like this!




Some years squid are more common than others. I missed last year, when hordes of Humboldt Squid washed up on the beaches here, and many more were caught by the fishing industry. Sport fisherman enjoy catching them because they are epic fighters.
Because I missed the Humboldts last year, I was delighted when this big boy came up at one plant.

That is me holding up the mantle (90 lbs +) as snapped by a crappy cellphone.

However, when I got around to identifying it properly, I discovered that it wasn't a ferocious Humboldt after all! It was a Giant Squid (even cooler!) and potentially could have grown much bigger than this! It is, in fact, the largest squid I have personally seen.

The species is Architeuthis dux. There is debate over the scientific classification, as there may be several species of Giant Squid but insufficient information exists. This could be any one of those, but for now they are all covered by the one name.

Not to say there aren't other large squid. This is a trio of Red Squid from a hake trawl. --->

To be fair, I call them "red squid," but I've no idea of their taxonomic classification. They could be 3 seperate species...

 While I'm on invertebrates, my wife (who does similar work) emailed me this picture from one of her offloads. She wanted to know if they were "sea slugs."

Rather than nudibranchs, these are in fact some kind of sea cucumber...which are echinoderms, related to starfish and sea urchins. I didn't get to examine these personally, so I cannot tell you which species they are.

Check out this funky dude! I actually had to get out my fish book for this one. I can't remember seeing one while diving, and while I knew it was some sort of poacher...I couldn't dredge it up from the inner recesses of my mind.

There isn't a lot of information on poachers, but I believe that is is a Blacktip Poacher, Xeneretmus latifrons.

I'm quite surprised I don't have better photos of this one. It is a shark (I love sharks) and I was pretty excited when it came up. I knew instantly that it was Apristurus brunneus, the Brown Catshark. It was more gelatinous than I thought it would be, which may be partially due to coming through the pump. However, all specimens I saw (there were a lot over about 4 weeks) were the same. I had a couple in my freezer for a week or two, but I guess I never got a good pic. Here's one of me examining the mouth, though.

This fish is a common sight for divers...but fishermen (commercial fishermen, at any rate) don't seem to know (or care) what this fish is. They are pretty uncommon in the trawl, which is why this Kelp Greenling (Hexagrammos decagrammus) appears here.

This next one was taken by my wife at a groundfish offload. I didn't get a good look at it, so I have to assume that it is a Black Eelpout, Lycodes diapterus.


You are welcome to contest my identification. There are several busloads of eelpout species, and they are NOT my strong point.

Here is another eelpout. This one I did have the chance to examine. It was pretty big, the biggest of about 8 that came up in this offload. I held it up to one of the plant workers (an old guy named T-pot who really really really knows his fish) and he said he had no idea. The comment was that it looked like a screwy Gray Cod (or Pacific Cod). It really did. Which helped me identify it as a Wattled Eelpout, Lycodes palearis.

Actually, I'm nowhere near sure on that identification, as I did not have a chance to count dorsal rays. Nor do I really know my eelpout species.

Any other opinions?

This last one is a real charmer.

I found it on the floor of the plant while bringing my wife some lunch. It has the consistency of that glow in the dark slime you get out of Zellers vending machines. 

My first thought was "Blobfish!" But no, the blobfish is a spectacularly blobby being, and this one isn't quite blobby enough to be the bloberific blobfish. I love saying blobfish.

 I photographed it with my little flashlight to get a sense of size.

When I showed this to my friend from Stellar Coffee, she exclaimed "It looks like a burn victim!"

Uh, yes.

Now we call it the Burn Victim Fish.

But it does have a scientific name, and I wish it were Victimus flammablis....


This little devil is a Pink Snailfish, Paraliparis rosaceus. 


That's all I have for now, but I'll post any others as they come up.

Fumigator!

One of the great things about Ucluelet...no, the greatest thing, is the fish. Though it is hard to see initially, Ukee is about fish the same way Tofino is about surfing. One way or another, the fish in the sea (and the lake, river, and creek) drive this town. Even if you aren't excited about eating fish (such as my friend Dean), there is a lot of fun to be had looking at fish...the mini-aquarium, the fish plants, the boats, or even just staring off the dock or bridge.
Me, I love fish. I love eating fish, I love looking at fish. I love catching fish. I even love communing with fish...I can hang out all day staring at fish in an aquarium or during a dive. And my job involves fish...counting, identifying, sampling...fish!
When we moved here, we went looking for a fish store. That is what one does in every other place I have lived. We couldn't find a fish store in Ucluelet (there is one, but it is only open seasonally, and it isn't really all that great.) and we went more than a month trying to figure out how one goes about getting a halibut or salmon or rockfish without going out and catching one yourself. Lacking, as we did, any fishing gear or a boat, catching our own was a bit of a stretch.
But, as we got to know people around here, fish started to flow our way. The most glorious, fresh, lovely fish ever. And since we cannot eat fish as fast as it flowed, our freezer started to fill. Halibut, Sockeye, Spring salmon (what they call King salmon in Alaska), Yelloweye, Quillback, Sablefish, Albacore Tuna...it goes on. That's what is in my freezer now, along with some spot prawns. And now freezer space is becoming an issue, even with two freezers! And it is compounding, now that I have got back to trout fishing in my spare time...

And that got me thinking. About smoking. Smoking fish. When my father lived in Ottawa, we used to go to this fish place in the Byward Market. They sold this amazing smoked trout...rainbow, brown, cutthroat, and Golden trout (looks like a trout-shaped goldfish). They also had arctic char, but I never got to try that. But I remember loving it. Big treat. Not to mention that lox is impossible to find around here...though salmon candy and heavily smoked salmon is pretty prevalent. As I was doing all this thinking and dreaming, there was a defunct hot water heater in the driveway, waiting to be taken to the (tiny, on the border of a national park) landfill. The more I looked at it, the more it looked like a smoker. Until one day I knocked the cover and all the insulative foam off of it (big job! took all day!). Then it really really looked like a smoker.

Another couple of weeks went by until I mustered up the courage to take a recip saw to it...a la van (long story)...and clean it out. The next thing was smoke.

Going online, I found that making smoke comes in two main flavours (ha ha)...the one that appealed to me was using an electric element to make heat, and burning chips. The lovely assistant offered up her old electric steam cooker, and I pulled it apart to find the perfect little cast element in the middle. A quick test fire on the hearth confirmed it got hot enough to make smoke, so I rigged up a tomato juice can and an old stainless travel mug as a smoke injector. After attaching it, I filled 'er with maple chips, and fired it up! Yay! smoke! Only the unit started to look a little weird. As I was moving in for a closer look, the aluminum casting around the element sagged and splashed onto the pavement. Wow! I took a photo as it burst into flame, and I decided that I was happy it wasn't making steamed broccoli anymore.
Unfortunately, even after cleaning the remaining aluminum off the unit, I wasn't able to make it work. So I went to internet plan B, which involved spending money (damn.)

I went to a Pet Smart and bought a nineteen dollar aquarium aerator. After looking at photos and videos of products such as the Smoke Daddy and the Smoke Bullet, I fashioned my tomato juice travel mug smoke injector using a small bucket, a lid, a cheap pizza tray, and some plastic tubing...and liberal amounts of silicone RTV gasket maker.

Today I am using the smoker (which we have dubbed either the Fumarole or the Fumigator, I'm not sure which...I might paint it green with teeth) for the very first time....there is salmon, ling cod, and sable fish in there. It is a cold smoker, and the temp probe hasn't gone above 17* C since I started the operation 4 hours ago. I can use it as a hot smoker simply by putting a heat source (which I would rig up with a Johnson 419 temperature controller) in the tank, and still using aquarium injected tomato mug fume injector 2010! Next post...smoked fish taste tests!

An old post, reposted

I used to blog on MySpace. Interestingly, I wrote about the beach that I now live near. Below is an excerpt from that blog that still rings true to me...

Beach revel-a-thon Current mood:  awake If you read my post below, you know I went north to the beachiest beach in bc. Normally when I go to long beach (it should really be called log beach) ....(section removed for brevity)... This time I was there on BC Day Weekend, when not only are the tourists out in force, but so are the locals. It was actually hard to find parking at the beach. That was distressing, since I usually get an entire lot to myself...but I worried less about break ins. It's not like there is anything valuable in my van, but around about 1990 CHEK TV ran a news article on my kind of van (there are tons of them here) thatshowed you how to break into them!!  Well, since then owners of Yoda Vans get smartasses breaking our doorlocks just for kicks. I swear I'm gonna retrofit the damn thing with Mercedes locks one of these days...I digress. I have never seen that many people at that beach. You have to understand that long beach has a very slight gradient to it, so when the tide is out, the beach is massive. Like a plain of sand. And on this oversized soccer pitch there were clusters of people. Most obvious were the globs of surfers with their rental wetsuits and soft top longboards. Two kinds, there...gaggles of girls on a surf school adventure, sometimes with a few lanky emo boys in tow. They decorate their cars and play hopscotch or volleyball on the beach. The other kind is groups of redneck hockey boys who have, for a brief moment, forayed into the world of waves and home grown spirituality. The only part of it they get is the home-grown, and they sit in circles smoking in their wetsuits. None of them really surf. There are also locals and real surfers surfing, but they are in the water, not on the beach. They look at the posers and head straight for the water. Thus they become part of the water culture and the parking lot culture, but really regard the beach as an obstacle between themselves and the waves. On a busy day at Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, thousands of tourists that are NOT surfing or bodyboarding show up. Most of them in bathing suits even though they do not enter the water past their ankles. Knees if they are brave, though they laugh and point at kooks like me swimming without a wetsuit. But there was something that I realized when I was there. Beaches are for kids. Adults who are adults and have embraced being an adult do not belong on the beach. Watching kids on the beach is like seeing your pets with a box. Somehow, they can eke every fun part out naturally...running full tilt with a stick dragging it in the sand. Sitting in the shallow waves and ducking each one. Sand constructions and drip castles. Forts. Even skimboarding. Kids absolutely belong on the beach, and it speaks to the most elemental part of them. Unless an adult has a specific activity that requires the beach, they really have no idea how to enjoy themselves. What I saw on the beach really divided the beach-going adults into three types. (Yeah, I love classification...I should have gone into taxonomy or cladistics) The local adults we can lump and dismiss...they see the beach everyday, and to them it is a resource. Generally they are on their daily walk, or bike, or using the beach as a way to get home/work. They are cruising, and barely have time to favour you with a smile. Generally recognizable by deep tans, dogs, and a well-used look to their clothes (but not scruffy!) The next group is tourists who have travelled a really long way to be here...Germans, Japanese, Italians, Koreans, Chinese, or Mexican tourists. They feel the need to exploit the beach, and are DOING something...trying to fly a kite, making human pyramids (truly funny to watch), beachcombing, taking panoramic mosaic shots of the beach, videotaping, whatever. They are generally in family groups or tour groups, and they are happy and behaving like....well, like kids. They are there to be on the beach....they chose to go to the beach instead of the botanical garden or the golf course. The last group are the ones that kill me. They are the short-haul tourists. They drove here from their home. The vast majority are from Vancouver and Victoria or even from Alberta and Washington State. They have driven hours and hours with this destination in mind. They said "let's go to Long Beach," and packed their minivan or SUV or BMW with stuff, and made the long highway trip to the beach. THIS beach. And when they arrive, with their hotel booked and their park pass paid, they seem to expect something. They march out onto the beach, and survey the land...usually they will remark on how beautiful it is, followed by a complaint about the number of people. If it is deserted..."there are no people! Where is everybody??!?" If it has anyone on it, there are too many. They take a picture that they will later delete off their camera when they discover how boring a picture it is. Then they are at a total loss. They simply cannot let that kid part loose to enjoy the new environment. Not wanting to abandon their comfortable car (it is subconcious, they would bristle if you were to suggest it) they stray very little down the miles-long-beach. They walk in circles and kick the sand. Then they sit for ten minutes before they realize the sand is bothering them by blowing in their eyes and it really isn't as warm as they thought it would be. And then they leave. I have to admit I often arrive at the beach as an adult. It sometimes takes me a good half hour to relax and begin to see the possibilities. I think the parents who sit on the beach have the luxury of living vicariously through their children, as they build towers out of crab shells or make collapsing water channels. I suppose many of the adults who have little connection with the silly in themselves populate the resorts, where adult-oriented activities of fine dining, drinking, and cultivated appreciation of natural pulchritude are force-fed into their systems so that they can relax enough to have sex. Is that the cynicism in me speaking? Or am I jealous? Personally, I like the dusty grimy gritty camping expedition where the bulk of your cash goes to gas, and the natural pulchritude is free. Adventure manufactures itself for the adventurous. The food is dusty and requires little preparation. The drinking involves throwing odd things in the fire. And if there is sex to be had it is spontaneous and filled with discomfort like mosquitos and sharp rocks. Or cold. Hey, sorry. Did I say I was an adult back there? Yeah, I am prejudiced...and these fucking mosquito bites itch like hell.

Poaching

When I travel, I tend to do it on the cheap. As a result I am pretty familiar with the street foods and grocery chain foods of many countries. Now that I've "settled" all those fancy continental equipment intensive dishes mock me with their luscious simplicity (did I contradict myself there?) from the satin pages of my (many) cookbooks.

The other day I walked to the local Co-Op to buy milk and some cookies for Stacey. As I passed through the veggie section a display of Bosc pears caught my eye. I vowed then and there to master the intimidating Poached Pear.

First I googled poached pears. Hundreds of wonderful pictures assailed me, so I stopped for an hour to admire them all. Well, the first few hundred. I looked at some recipes as well, and it seemed pretty simple. All the recipes made it seem as if making this show stopper of a dish (to me) would only take 18.345 minutes.

Because I liked the color of the really red poached pears, I decided to use red wine.

Here is where I started...a bottle of screw-top Malbec/Shiraz blend that a guest brought us and four firm Australian Bosc pears.

Then I went to our prodigious spice shelf to look for additional flavourings. Perusing the spices and making a blend in my head is my favourite part of cooking. I grabbed a bunch of likely looking things with a sort of a purple theme. 

I really like cooking with flowers because most people regard them as an ornament rather than a foodstuff. One of the flowers we have in abundance in our home is lavender. I even have a huge jug of disastrous lavender wine in the fridge. I decided that Lavender Poached Pears had a nice ring to it and grabbed the jar of purple even though warning bells were ringing in my head. I also got some orange peel and star anise. I looked for my vanilla bean but it has gone missing.

Armed with my flavours, I scratched out a recipe. Here it is as first penned:

4 Bosc Pears
3 cups red wine
1 tsp lavender flowers
1 tsp granulated orange peel
1 star crumbled star anise
1.5 cups sugar
add water to cover pears

I chose the pan/pot with the lowest volume but highest sides so that the pears would fit but the liquid would cover the pears. I put the pot on med-low (4) and added the wine, sugar, and spices. As it heated up I started to peel pears. I used a tupperware potato peeler (my wife came with a complete tupperware accessory set) but if the pears had been any softer than they were I would have had to use something sharper. It went pretty well, and I tried to collect any dripping juice into the pot. The wine mixture was getting warm so I lowered the pears into the pot with a slotted spoon...unusually prudent for me. I'm a pretty messy cook.

I managed to fit all four pears into the pot. I guess in my irrational mind I expected them to stand up, but they all fell on their sides. I poured water from the kettle to cover them, but they just floated. In my earlier poached pear research session I had seen a way to keep the pears covered in liquid using parchment paper (great stuff, I always keep some around). I cut a pan-sized donut of parchment and it kept the pears basted beautifully.
I waited until the pears were simmering lightly, and sat down to read a manga. I meant only to read a few pages, but I got really sucked into this incredibly formulaic story about a kid who can shape metal with his bare hands. Not a great read but it still ate time. Thankfully, those pears take a lot longer than just 18.xxx minutes to cook and when I finally finished reading Metallica Metalluca they were tender enough to push a small knife through but still firm enough to hold their shape. Way to go me!
I was a little disappointed with the colour...I was hoping for the deepest darkest red like the photos on the web. These were a delicate orange-purple. But a nice shade for something with lavender in the name!

























I left them on the plate to cool while I strained the liquid and started to reduce it to a nice syrup. I bumped it up to a soft boil and tasted it. Something was missing...fruitiness maybe. I looked around and saw a decrepit old grapefruit. I juiced it and added the juice to the mixture along with a splash of vanilla extract.

Then I stirred and stirred and stirred. Then I got bored and went back to the computer. I started reading about the capital of Mayotte, which is called Mamoudzou when I heard a hissing sound. I ran back to the stove to find syrupy mess boiling all over the unit and a burning sugary smoke cloud curling toward the skylight.

At least sugary messes clean up easily with boiling water.

I transferred to the other unit as the messy side was cooling. Then, drawing on my practice from making marmalades in the winter, I stirred the mixture while watching the temp on a candy thermometer. When it was approaching 250* F I whisked it off the stove and left it to cool.
Unfortunately, with such a vigorous boil a lot of the aromatics were vapourized. I grabbed a lemon and squeezed half of it into the syrup. Then I zested half of it for some decoration.  After cooling the syrup I coated one of the pears and spooned a bit onto a plate. Setting the pear on the syrup, I then added some lemon zest and the green leaf is a bit of Italian parsley for decoration.

Then I called my lovely wife to the table for a taste test. We snapped some more pictures of it before digging in.

The taste was better than I had hoped. At first it seemed as if the lavender would overwhelm all the other tastes, but after that boil the flowery resin was knocked back to a hint of floral zest. The harshness of the reduced wine worked well with the grapefruit, anise, and the lemon and zest worked well too.

It must have been good because we polished it off in about 90 seconds!

I regard this as a bit of a success, and I want to try poaching the pears in stout next. I also have a huge stock of apple ciders, quince wine, and plum wine. I'm gonna need more pears!

Or how about root beer or cola poached pears? I'd need to water it down...

The other three pears are now in the fridge living in the syrup. I'm going to see how they chill, and I may consider putting up (canning) some pears in this fashion so that I can enjoy them in the depths of winter. What shall I attempt next?

Low Tide Part 2

Another fun example of the low tide. This trawler was moored at the hake plant. Usually the hull or at least the deck can be seen, but in this pic all you can see is the flybridge.

By the time I got downtown (a whole two blocks from where this started!) my flip flops had dried out enough for my feet to stay on them. Onward to Big Beach! It was only just past seven in the morning, and although the sun was shining hot and bright, no-one was around but me. By the time I'd walked to Cynamocka I was stripped down to just tshirt and shorts. 

This is my first summer living in Ucluelet, but the salmon berries seem late. These were the first ones I'd noticed. Maybe the birds are getting to them before me. 

The pic below is how it looked at Big Beach upon arrival. It's hard to see, but quite a bit more shore was exposed...those two rocks in the center of the picture have been pretty much obscured by waves on other visits.

Correction; other visit. This is actually only the second time at Big Beach. For me. The last time I was here with Stacey after the opening of Ucluelet's new community hall. This was the first real visit where I could explore to my brain's content. I started scanning the beach as soon as I got there...the tide was starting to come in...o no.

First I found this:

Actually, I am ashamed to say I have no idea what it is. I believe it to be animal, not vegetable. But it could be a coralline algae for all my knowledge. Hopefully someone will pipe up in the comments and direct me to the appropriate web article.  And there was a LOT of seaweeds to look at. Phycology is not my strong point, but   I know the common names for some of them. The funky nubbly bit of red and white is Turkish towel seaweed. This piece is a bit...dead. The red stuff (rotophyll?) is being bleached out. My mother always got excited when we found this stuff on Pender, and that excitement lingers even though it's as common as nails around here.

The one on the right is hard to identify as well. It doesn't look like any of the Laminaria species I know. My guess is some type of Alaria  but those usually have a prominent centre stalk. I'm sure it's pretty common around this area...it gets wrapped around salmon and stuffed with lemons. Then the whole package is wrapped in foil and steamed. Yummm! This specimen looks a little discoloured for that kind of treatment. Most of the seaweeds or algaes around here are edible. It is surprising that nobody is collecting and promoting this abundant and free source of food. Maybe it will have to be me......?



Believe it or not, the wacky patterns on the rock are seaweed as well. Apparently these growths (as well as the tar spot looking things on the rocks) are part of the life cycle of the leafy seaweeds. It wasn't until DNA analysis was done on seaweed that anyone discovered this. Evidently the life cycle of these plants is crazy complex. The company that Stacey works for retains an army of people that know about this stuff, and they use surveys of marine algae to determine the relative environmental health of habitats. I tend to associate biodiversity with biohealth...which makes this area very healthy!


On Hornby Island much of the rock is sandstone, and the wind and waves have hollowed out little holes and pockmarks. The rock around here seems to be largely volcanic (igneous, is that right?) but also has lots of little holes and pocks. Some of the holes are really deep (longer than my fingers) and spaced pretty far apart. I wonder if these have been worn in the rock as well, or are they part and parcel of how the rock was formed? Escaping gas bubbles? A combination of the two?
The cool thing is that the rocks themselves are almost like colony animals...

These pockmarks are almost too perfect. I have no idea how they were formed. I'm sticking to my bubble/foamy rock theory...

The limpets and barnacles sure love these rocks. I assume there must be microscopic algae all over the rock for them to eat...the limpets, anyway. Barnacles are filter-feeders....they wave their back legs in the water to gather floating bits of detritus. Which is a fancy way of saying they eat floating garbage. Mmmm. I've no idea what the feathery algae on the top of the rock is, but there is some Ulva  near the bottom. I even see a little red shore crab peeking out from the bottom. It seems to me one could spend a lifetime studying just one rock like this!










The seaweed on the left is common around here. It's called Dead Man's Finger (Halosaccion).  Limpets and snails eat the stuff, and kids love to squeeze it to make it squirt. After all that talk about salmon and seaweed, one has to wonder if stuffing these babies with crab meat or halibut might be nice....? I shouldn't blog on an empty stomach. Everything looks like food.

The stuff on the right that looks like deformed dead man's finger is actually called Sea Cauliflower. There are two seaweeds that are very similar both known as Sea Cauliflower. I think this one is Colpomenia peregrina. The other one (Leathisia sp. ) is slimier and softer.


This stuff on the left is some kind of Sargassum, which I think is a recent arrival to our shores. A lecture in 1996 pointed this out as an invasive species, but it's pretty ubiquitous now. It grows into massive clumps which break loose in storms. When cut loose it grows pretty fast and those clumps can become sargassum islands! Almost.

There was tons of eelgrass like green spaghetti. There are no eels in eelgrass, it just looks long. Maybe they call it surfgrass here, even though there are no surfers in it. It sure looked pretty, though.

The pink glop in the next pic was in a narrow crack in the rock. I think the camera flash did a good job here. I'm pretty sure this is some kind of tunicate colony. The other encrusting animal around here is Bryozoans, and they don't have siphons (the part that looks like little volcanos). Tunicates are sort of cool because they are a link between animals without backbones (invertebrates) and brave animals with backbones (us.) Tunicates have a notochord (pre-backbone) when they are developing, but they absorb it as they mature. I have noticed this same trait in aging men :-)

Below is a tiny teeny leather star (Dermisterias imbricata). It looks like a magic wand above my finger. They eat sea anemones and sea cucumbers.

This green shore crab made a nice shot with the reflecting water. He could see me taking the picture even 6 feet away.

As I got closer to the water, there was less to see. From diving in similar areas I knew that there would be tons of cool little animals living underneath the masses of seaweed. But the sun was hot, and digging in the seaweed to expose them didn't seem like a great idea. Besides which, balancing on the EXTREMELY slippery rocks in my flip flops was starting to make my feet hurt. And while I was lucky to get a day with almost no surf to speak of....the tide was beginning to come in rather quickly.

The whole place looked like a clear-cut forest. Only instead of being hauled away to become toilet paper and sundecks, it was just lying down for a rest. Until the surf came back to animate everything. I guess this would qualify as an eclipse for all the little sculpins, crabs, lumpsuckers, and anemones. I hope it also protected them from my weighty steps.

The wide shots are from my iPhone and stitched together with a great little app called Autostitch. In default mode it can get a little blurred, but panoramas in the future should look better.

I had so much fun poking about in the shallows. And best of all, this was just the first of three days of low tides.

I really wanted to show the fallen forest to Stacey (asleep in bed) the next day.

The panorama below shows 180* with the Black Rock Resort in the right hand third. I will go back and take a panorama at high tide so that you can see what a difference 10 or 12 feet can make.