Puffin Thinking

Puffin on my mind... a couple of kinds of puffin. Mostly the bird kind, of course; the plump little waterbirds that are the nearest thing around here to a penguin. There are a few puffins to be found here in my home waters, and elsewhere up-Island along wilder shorelines. I've only ever seen one puffin, and that was from my kayak.

Borrowed from Wikipedia, this puffin with a capelin looks like the one I saw.

It's inspiring just to mention them, though. Turns out the word has wandered into a few blog posts here. Guess I'm a sucker for the cute little things.
I'm also a big fan of my mother, who is a puffin' away on her e-cigarette instead of smoking. It's a big thing to change from smoking to puffing vapour, but if she wants to try I'm on her team. She's always done what she set her mind to. Mom used to go kayaking when she was a girl, in Cadboro Bay and The Gorge, in little kayaks shaped like bananas or lithe little riverboats with no raised coaming around the cockpit. She learned to do what they called an Eskimo roll with no skirt or tuiliq, just over and twist and up, whooping with laughter. In those days, a paddle was simple, just two ovals of plywood nailed to a broom handle. That would be about 1950, when her brother's friends lived a stone's throw away from the beach at Cadboro Bay. Mom remembers going kayaking with her brother and friends, and the friends' mother warning them not to go too far from shore or Cadborosaurus would get them. No sea monsters ever came around their noisy chatter, as far as Mom can remember. And these days the water seems to be cleaner than it was then, for there are otters and herons and sea anemones in the bay but she says she never saw any when she was a teenager.