We went down to Pebbly Beach today, which is just below our house on the north side of Mannion Bay (the beach on the other side is called Sandy Beach). We went down because this morning after Finn and I did the recycling, we were sitting in The Snug having an espresso and some sandwiches when Ken told us about a barge that had washed up on the beach. Said we should go have a look at it, maybe salvage some wood off it.

So we headed down around 2:00 and sure enough there was an enormous mussel encrusted barge pitched up sideways on the beach at the mouth of Rosebank Creek. It was about 25 meters long and stood probably 2.5 meters high, probably 10 meters wide. All wood, mostly rotten and built from huge beams bolted together with long bolts of iron. It looks for all intents and purposes like a beached whale, and it had that same air of forlornness about it, discarded, dead, smelling a little ripe, at the end of its days.

After exploring the barge we hung around the beach and timed the Barrow's Goldeneyes who seem to stay under water for between 25 and 30 seconds per dive. We also saw three Pelagic Cormorants flying north out in the channel, a small plane registered C-GNZI (here's a picture of it - it flies out of Pitt Meadows airport) and a Kingston class naval patrol boat (number 702 "Nanaimo" I think out of HMCS Esquimalt) heading out of the Sound. Towards the end of the afternoon, a Washington Marine Group tug hove into view towing chip barges (numbers 469 and 473 in the fleet).

It was a day of observing and noticing things.

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