Today Rocked

The alarm went off at 5am (I know, crazy to see me saying "today rocked" when it begins with something before 9am, but stay with me here). We layered up, made coffees, and had a hard boiled egg then headed for the bay. We went out salmon fishing with Laird Brown on the Maranatha from Dockside Charters (we've been out with him twice before and he's great). Laird took five of us out today in search of salmon. It was a great time. We caught three (two wild, thrown back) and one nice Coho keeper. The ocean was calm, the fishing was fun, and on the way back in we saw a whale.

Here are a couple pics of what it looked like this morning:

We had our salmon fileted (two bucks at the dock), put it in our cooler on some ice, and headed back to Tidal Raves restaurant for lunch (again, second time in three days). We had smoked shrimp, shared a cup of clam chowder, and each had a crab louie salad (delicious, all of it). Then we stopped at the store and got a few things for our salmon dinner, headed back to the Airstream and showered, and had a nice impromptu visit from Cory & McCale (and Cory's niece and nephew, and our granddaughter Mimi, woohoo). As we were heading down the beach to hang out for the afternoon, we saw another (or the same) whale quite close to the shore and really got a great view of it! I read up that when the whales are feeding they come in quite close (whew! it wasn't about to beach itself and die). 

Here's one of the not-so-awesome shots of it, but you can see how close it was to the shore (it's a steep drop off, but still!) (click for larger photo).

Then we played in the sand a bit, friends headed back to Portland, and we prepped our freshly caught salmon for dinner. We chatted with our neighbors and they were really into the Airstream so we invited them over for a bit before dinner. Grilled the salmon with some mushroom skewers, grilled asparagus, and cannelinni beans, with a nice bottle of wine we brought home from Paso Robles. Just before dinner was served, our neighbors were on their way out to a dinner engagement in Depoe Bay and brought us homemade desserts that they made: lemon cake with lemon frosting and gooey chocolate brownies. How sweet!! We ate dinner as we watched the sunset, then had dessert, and that was our day. Oh wait, and this: