Icy Lookout and Beautiful Sunset

November 28th (Thursday)

We awoke to quiet and stillness. Through the night the wind had progressively gotten less and by early morning it had died off completely. It was a beautiful glassy calm, sunny, cold morning.
We went out to check our prawn traps, and it almost felt warm. The air was still quite cold, but because their was no wind, it felt warm in comparison to the last couple of days. On our way out in Kiki we noticed a large area on the glassy water that looked weird. We went over to investigate and found that it was a large thin sheet of floating ice. We saw a couple more areas of ice on our way, and I imagine that fresh water must have had a chance to freeze overnight, and then had gotten lifted up and carried away on the morning tide.
Between our two prawn traps we got 47 keepers. Interestingly, if you remember how many large females we were getting in Seaforth Channel, out from both Mouat and Wigham Cove, well here we only got one female in each trap. That’s a huge difference in the number of eggs that will be laid here. I wonder why?
We went ashore in the afternoon and walked across to West Beach. The water was so calm and the swells were so incredibly small, I think that it may have been the calmest we had ever seen it at West Beach.

We took the trail up to the lookout and were surprised by how incredibly frozen everything was.

The beauty of the ice highlighting the seashell.

Large sheets of thick ice covered rocks where streams used to flow. Dozens of icicles hung off of the moss-covered top of a rock face. Patches of old mud on the trail, left over from the heavy rain, were frozen into mud crystals.

The lake at the top of the lookout was frozen over with ripples made from the Northeast gale still frozen in place.  

The steps and boardwalks up to the lookout were also quite ice covered, and we had to be careful on the way up, and especially on the way down, but it was worth it. We got a beautiful view. We could see over many distant mountain ranges to many snow covered peaks in the distance, the air was crisp, clean, and clear.

View of West Beach from the lookout.

View out over the ocean as the sun began to set.

Back down on West Beach we stayed for the sunset. It turned out to be absolutely spectacular. First the colour started around the area where the sun was setting, which was on the left hand side of our view out from West Beach. Gradually the colour spread across the clouds at the horizon to the right hand side of our view, the colour faded from the left side before spreading up into the sky and back across to the left. The layers of colour kept changing in intensity and colour, and the sunset lasted for a very long time, before it finally faded away all together.

Back at home I made us some chocolate-huckleberry cupcakes with some of the frozen huckleberries that we still had from when we picked them with my parents in Discovery Bay. Jason made us an epic seafood chowder with fresh Prawns, Dungeness crab, and Salmon. I made some fresh biscuits to go with it, and we had a large side of leftover, awesome, garden-fresh salad. It was amazing.