South Spit of the Humboldt Bay

We left the dogs in the motorhome so that gives us 4 hours to burn. I thought we'd head to the South Spit of Humboldt Bay and South Jetty.

The South Spit runs you right through the Mike Thompson Wildlife Area and the western snowy plover habitat.

From the hills above the spit, it is a little hard to see the end. The spit does a very good job of protecting the Humboldt Bay from the ravages of the north coast ocean.

We found some western snowy plover's running about in the mud. They have been decimated all along the western coast but find some sanctuary here in Eureka.

 The South Spit is a 4 1/2 mile paved road out to the end of the South Jetty. When I say paved, I may be generalizing that term "paved" a bit because they had so many axle busting potholes it was scary!

The South Jetty of Humboldt Bay is over 5000 feet long, about the longest jetty Donna and I have ever been on. We thought the 8x8 wood laying across in cement was strange until we learned at one time a train went to the end of the jetty.

At first we weren't going to walk out to the end of the jetty but then saw, what we thought, was a freighter waiting to enter the bay, so we decided to walk out 

to the end.

Turns out that the freighter that we to saw was a Corp of Engineers ship called Essayons. The Essayons (French for "let us try") is  the largest "hopper dredge" in the Corp of Engineers arsenal that travels to all the west coast harbors in California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii clearing sandbars from river estuaries and bays.

The Essayon dredges the channel up to 90 feet deep, sucking up the sand/water sluice and when full at 7000 tons takes it out to sea and dumps the sludge, then comes back into the channel and does it again.

This is the first time I have seen "dolosse", a South African invention of interlocking 20 to 40 ton blocks. There are over 5000 of them on both the south and north jetties of Humboldt Bay to protect the jetty from winter storms.

A couple of happy campers that just walked out almost a mile in the ocean on the jetty. Some folks we talked to that were fishing here mentioned that yesterday they saw nearly 20 whales in and out of the jetty....damn we only saw seals!

Although this is a "black oystercatcher" bird on the rock...there were a couple of them picking in the mussels so I guess they eat more than oysters.

Can you just imaging how big the wave must of been to throw this multi-ton tree root onto the jetty?

Some of the scenes returning from the South Spit.

Humboldt Bay from Humboldt Hill.

I thought these trees were cool.