We changed our plans. Originally from having a relaxing start to the day, hitting the boat for a couple of hours and then heading to nice dinner. We ended up getting on the boat earlier, having a nice long wonderful boat ride, and needing a little bit of recovery time before nice dinner!
This time the boat was a fast motorboat, and we did some zooming! It was really really fun. First we slowly got out of the harbor
Then it was zooming time!
I again took out my binoculars and we spotted lots of stuff, the highlight for me was a flock (raft?) of at least 175 surf scoters! They are a cool looking duck with white on their necks that at first fools you into thinking they are maybe buffleheads. But they are bigger, the beak is wrong, and they have other markings that will leave you doubting until you look it up, and find they are scoters! That was pretty great. We went super far, further than Deborah had gone before, so that was really cool. Again a lot of sandpipers I wasn't able to ID, even though I looked at some in a guide last night. I did see some that I was confident about, including a long-billed curlew, which was really cool! Oh and some brant which were really hard to ID. Looking up a black duck with a white neck ring was useless. Merlin eventually came up with it, but only on try 3 or 4 of going through the process. But we got there! I really need to study my sandpipers and plovers etc. for next time I'm here. Here's the checklist:
https://ebird.org/checklist/S153361223
Here's my best bird pic, of the brant. I miss my superzoom!
Then we had a really fantastic dinner at a nice restaurant on the water. I wore a skirt! So fancy! It was beautiful and delicious and I got to spend some really great quality time with Mom.
Then back to Deborah's to again basically collapse exhausted!
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