Last week’s full moon brought to mind this picture from a year ago of an old farmhouse on Michillinda.
Category: Fruitland Township
Chris leaves a wake while retrieving a stick during a sunrise walk this past weekend.
The gorgeous clouds are the advance team for the rain which started just a few minutes after she returned with here prize.
From a sunrise paddle on Muskegon County’s White Lake.
As is normal for our weekend mornings, Chris once again decided that life is far too short to spend too much time getting too much sleep – especially if there is a possibility that someone might be irritated and irrigated into taking her out for a hike.
With the (very) early start, we made it to the big lake in time to catch the setting of last night’s beautiful full moon.
Don’t let those small speckles in the photo trick you into cleaning either your glasses or your monitor. They are the navigation lights of just a few of the many boats fishing off the channel this morning. So many, in fact, that it seemed as if the stars were testing the startling new concept of shining both above and below the horizon.
And not all of the fishing action was off-shore. While the boaters were out chasing their salmon, both the north and south walls of the channel were filled with anglers hoping to add perch onto tonight’s menu.
If you walk the beach even occasionally, you realize that this size of crowd isn’t normal, but then neither are the number of perch. The schools are so inordinately large that most of the fishermen are simply doing a quick visual reconnaissance over the wall before dropping their lines right into the middle of a lot of fish. Not quite as easy as dragging them from a barrel, but it could be worse!
Lest anyone think that this sums up the pre-dawn (!) action, at this same time, on the eastern end of the wall, the crew of the dredging ship, Carol Ann, was heading out. Their work is the reason for the large black pipe that you will find stretched across the south wall. It will be moving sand from the bottom of the waterway onto the beach.
Chris was surprisingly unimpressed by all the early AM activity and insisted on heading home for breakfast. Said insistence being equivalent to a wave insisting on going ashore, we departed. Shortly after leaving the channel, the sun finally showed up and seemed no more moved than Chris by all of the action.
The White Lake Jump and Click Your Heels Tournament proved to be a huge success this past Saturday. The contest is a longstanding tradition in the area, which has played host to the event for many years.
To those unfamiliar with the “click-off”, as it is called among competition veterans, the rules are no more (and no less) complicated than those for stone-skipping or leap-frogging, both of which are often played in conjunction with the Jump/Click.
In Jump and Click Your Heels participants leap to a height sufficient to allow the clicking together of their heels before the gravity of the situation ends each round of play. Points are then self-awarded for any number of factors, including vertical lift, volume of “click”, and, especially, aesthetic form.
It is understood that some area residents missed this weekend’s tournament. Understandable in that it was (as always) both unscheduled and spontaneous. For those wishing to attend or contend the next bout, another lovely Michigan weekend is only a few days away.
Chris decided that this morning would be a perfect time to explore the southwestern shore of Duck Lake. Her instincts couldn’t have been better.
As we turned the corner from Duck Lake Road onto Scenic, the sun finally made it’s first appearance of the day and made up for sleeping in by putting on quite a show for us.
When Chris finished her swim, we headed down some seemingly impassable trails that she insisted were otherwise, we came upon these Dwarf Irises (Iris lacustris Nitt).
We understand that these are endangered. This makes sense having never run across them before – and not finding many this morning either.
According to “Michigan wildflowers in color” by Harry C. Lund, these are found almost exclusively on the sandy or gravelly shores of Lake Michigan or Huron and the boggy areas adjacent. He list it as “a threatened species do not disturb”.
Categories
Damp Daisy, June 21, 2008
Waking up during last night’s big storm, we found that the rocking chairs out front were quite moved by all of the wind and rain. Indeed, for a while it looked as if some sort of ghostly tea party was underway.
Rumor has it that the real origin of the margarita cocktail involved a woman named not Margarita, but Daisy. And yet, she is said to be the inspiration for the name. It just so happens that one of the species name of the flower is…margarita!
A spider inspects an old isolation spindle near a horse farm on Lakewood Road in Fruitland Township.
Looking east along the shore of White Lake on the morning of June 7, 2008.