Mornings are brighter now

The sun is rising a little earlier every morning! Now it's a much nicer experience getting out on the water early in the day.
I wasn't the only one on Cadboro Bay this morning. There was a little crab boat taking in their traps, with a little train of seagulls following it around to eat the scraps. There's no way to be sure how many crabs are crawling around down there under the dark water, but one way to guess is that the crab boat comes around less frequently this winter than it did last winter.
Aside from the crab boat and my little inflatable kayak, all the other boats in the bay were tied up at the yacht club. I made it out and around Flower Island without seeing anyone else on the water. The rough line of the Cascade mountains stood out against the bright sky in the east, but I didn't quite go out far enough to see the cone of Mount Baker... the little breeze was picking up outside the shelter of the headland.
I thought about that time on the water this evening while watching some tv show about looking for lake monsters. The show made a big point of the investigators, onshore and in a zodiac, getting all excited about a splash and a moving shadow in the water. Frankly, it looked more like group hysteria than the times our paddle group has seen big animals, birds, and fish. If we made that many squeals and shouts, we would never see more than a tiny bit of something far away and going farther.
This morning I paddled quickly through the same little channel where last spring a huge sea lion or elephant seal howled at me. (No, I don't know which kind it was -- I paddled away so fast my Eliza turned into a hoverboat, while behind me the beast kept up the noise to chase me away. See the post on our blog here.)
That big beast may not have been as big as the lake monster the investigators were looking for on their tv show, but hey! I saw a lot more of it than the blurry smudge on the tv show.
While I haven't yet ever seen a bona fide Cadborosaurus sea monster here in the bay, an elephant seal or sea lion is close enough for me, especially when it's close enough TO me.