A brief excursion to Westport

Last Friday I took a brief, afternoon excursion to Westport, Wash.

The brief part of the excursion was my time actually in Westport. It's an hourlong bus ride from my apartment in Hoquiam around the Grays Harbor bay to the fishing town on the Pacific coast. Once you're out there, when traveling by bus, you can either choose to cut your time short and catch the next bus back (which gives you about two hours), or make a day of it. Usually I make a day of it, and then often end up ready to head back but waiting around for the bus to show up. So on this occasion I tried giving myself a just a two-hour window.

Well, there's way too much out there to cover, as a photographer, in two hours. You can wander around the Westport Marina photographing and visiting the sea lions, as I did in the post linked above (which includes video of the sea lions barking). You can also visit the Fisherman's Boardwalk, which provides a nice vantage point on the fishing boats moving in and out of the marina. Then of course there is the Westport Light Trail, a 4.5-mile paved walk along the beach (I haven't shared a post of photos for the trail, so no link).

For this brief trip I focused on the area around the Westport Viewing Tower at one end of the paved trail, near the mouth of the harbor.

There were plenty of fishing boats traveling to and fro on the harbor.

The shot above was taken from the viewing tower. My first stop of the day, however, before the tower, was to climb over the seawall of boulders you see above to visit the beach and waves in between the jetties. There is a series of perhaps a half dozen jetties along that seawall, which form U-shaped nooks perfect for shy photographers avoiding observation.

In the last two photos above, you can see the city of Ocean Shores across the bay.

There were a fair number of brown pelicans cruising along the waves that afternoon. This one decided to do a flyover when I was on the beach at the bottom of the seawall. I imagine I see dinosaur ancestry in these birds; it certainly looks to me like a pterodactyl.

After exploring the jetty nook, I climbed back over the rocks to the road and walked up to the top of the tower for awhile, but I was really interested in being next to the water. I went around the bend to the beach on Half Moon Bay, facing the Pacific Ocean.

In the first shot of this series, I'm still looking across the bay to Ocean Shores.

On the horizon above you can see the points of Westport on the left (which is actually the 3-mile Westport Jetty) and Ocean Shores on the right that form the harbor mouth. That's technically where the Pacific Ocean starts, though I'd still say those are ocean waves.

Returning to the trail for a new shot of the viewing tower I noticed, to the left of the tower...

...an ocean vessel on its way from the Port of Grays Harbor in Hoquiam out to sea.

At that point I started to get nervous about the bus showing up. I had forgotten to take note of the time; I had no idea when it would arrive or how long I had been wandering around the tower. I took one final shot of the viewing tower and then headed back to the marina and the bus stop.

Halfway to the bus stop I realized that the vessel I thought had been heading out to sea had actually turned around. I hurried back to the viewing tower and see what I was missing.

Well, I had completely missed the action of the big ship turning around in the bay. All it did from that point was slowly drift up the harbor back the way it had come. I have often seen ocean vessels at anchor in the bay here; maybe the vessel was dragging its anchor looking for a hold. I'm not sure.

A little miffed that I had missed the action, I took a final shot of one of the pelicans floating by and headed for the bus.

It's probably the best capture of the ghost of the Olympic mountain range on the horizon.