Camping, Diving, Hunting-Easter 2020

This has been a weird spring. There is a lot of bad stuff going on in the world at the moment and sometimes it can get to you. That is why my fiance Alice and I decided to go camping over Easter weekend. A weekend of being out in nature, away from people, cell phone service, and bullshit. We decided that no matter what the weather was doing, we were going to go. We lucked out and had amazing weather the whole trip.

We left Thursday after I got off work. I work 4-10s so I have three day weekends which works out really well for doing fun things and having a life. We got out to the campground, a spot about 20 miles out the road called Ohmer Creek Campground about 6:30. I started work on the fire and Alice started getting the tent set up. My grandparents were coming out that evening to sit by the fire. I hadn't seen them in over a month so I was really excited. The problem was, we had really green wood that wasn't completely dry so starting the fire wasn't going great. My grandparents got out there a little after 7 and I gave up on the fire for a while. I just wanted to visit with them and not worry about the fire anymore. We measured out six feet and planted our chairs and talked for a while. It was great catching up. Eventually, we got a small fire going so we at least had a little heat.

That night got cold. Somewhere in the 20s. Alice and I froze our asses off but it was still really nice to wake up out camping. I had planned on diving that morning but with no sleep and being cold all night, that just didn't sound like a great plan. So we got up, built a small fire, made some coffee for Alice and had breakfast. It was nice having our butane stove for coffee and cooking so we didn't have to rely on a fire. We decided that we would go hooter hunting for a while then head back to town and grab some more blankets and a better heater. With snow still covering most of the logging roads, we were limited on where we could go listen, but we heard some birds and got one picked out. My grandparents came out that night again and brought some drier wood and we had another good time.

Saturday morning it was time to dive. We got up, I started a fire and made coffee for Alice and we had breakfast. I quickly put my wetsuit on in the cold morning air and we headed for the dive site. I was diving Olsens Log Dump again. There were huge minus tides that weekend and I was excited to see some new bottom. We got everything in the water without incident and I started swimming around, with Alice in the kayak watching over me. I was looking for dungeness crab and found 4 undersized and no legal-sized crab. It was a fun dive with pretty decent visibility. Alice's family came out for a fire around lunchtime and we had a nice afternoon catching up with them. We went for a drive that evening and listened for birds and to make sure the one we had picked out was still up there. He had moved a little ways from where we first heard him but he was still there. We cooked deer roast and spot prawns over the fire and dipped them in BBQ sauce that night for dinner. It was a welcome change from hot dogs.

Sunday started the same: fire, coffee, breakfast. This was the day we would go try and find the hooter we had picked out. We got to where we would start in on the bird about 1 in the afternoon. It took us about 50 minutes to get up the very steep hill he was on. He was sitting in a very tall spruce tree. After about an hour of looking from all different angles, I was about ready to give up. I took my backpack off and took a drink of water and as I was doing that I looked up at a branch on the tree, a branch I had probably already looked at, and saw something that kind of resembled the head and neck of a grouse. I put the binoculars on it and sure enough there he was about 60 yards up. I got out my shooting sticks, took a rest and squeezed the trigger. The bird disappeared but didn't fall. All the thoughts started running through my head "did I miss?" "did he die on the branch?" "did I wing him?". Then after about 3 seconds down he came, freefalling out of the tree. It was a good feeling to get the first hooter of the year.

We got down off the hill and headed back to camp. I started a fire and we cooked some hotdogs for one last camping dinner then tore down camp and headed home. It was an amazing weekend away from everything and a great way to kick off our camping season.