Fri Oct 24, 2008 12:55 pm
Paul,
I'd make some remark about summer just being more full of non-summery things to do. However, with the weather this year being what it was around Anchorage, I'm more inclined to say I'm still waiting for summer to start!
Our own trip started with me noting wistfully to the man I was dating that I'd not had the opportunity to do most of the things many Alaskans have grown up doing - because most of my friends haven't them done since they were legal to drink. He was looking through a tide book a few hours later, and mentioned there was a clamming tide coming up. I smiled at him, batted my big green eyes, and said "Sounds like a great date!"
Well, as he hadn't gone clamming in seventeen years, he had to call his father to ask where Polly Creek was. His half-formed plan of just the two of us and a nice bonfire quickly changed when the old man happily added himself to the party in exchange for showing the way, and then a roommate came along in search of adventure and food in return for gas money.
We checked the weather on the planned day, and it seemed to say things were probably better further south, but we left Birchwood after loading the plane in the rain, and taking off after the drizzle had tapered off and the second plane flown in to meet us and pick up the roommate. Fortunately, it was better the further away from Anchorage we got - bright blue skies with only little bits of cloud by Polly Creek. On the way down, he handed the stick off to me, and though I couldn't see a single instrument or most of the windscreen through his shoulders, I did okay at keeping her straight and level , then following the mountains on side diversions to see if we could spot any animals, or any fish runs.
When we got to Tuxedni Bay, I sincerely thought we were going to land at Polly Creek itself - but instead, the old man landed on a still-wet sandbar, about a mile off shore. From the angle of the sun on the ripples of water still trapped on top of the sand, it looked for all the world like he'd gone in, but we saw him stop and pull his tail around, then get out. So we set up and landed alongside him. The sandbar was only about 150 feet wide, but it seemed a couple thousand feet long - definitely not a short field. The little ridges than running water leaves in sand tried to rattle my fillings out as he landed, but the plane treated the sandbar just like it was any gravel strip. Well, except for the tundra tires flinging muddy sand on the underside of the wings, and the way he added a little extra power to pick the tail up and plop it back down on the far side of a pool of seawater.
With that, we got out, and the old man ran us through what to look for, how to use our tools, and then we set to. Two of us hadn't done it before, so we got paired with the folks who had done it - seventeen and fifteen years ago. Occasionally, the old man was given to staring around, and saying "It's so quiet. Times were, this place would be covered with airplanes." Me, I was busy kneeling on the sand and gulping down water during breaks.
The tide started to come back in - not that you could see it getting closer to the sandbar so much as the sand underfoot was getting softer, clams digging away faster, and water levels in the roles rising quickly. We quickly dug and grabbed a last dozen clams, and hauled our booty to the planes. Equipment got passed back and forth. The old man took off first - and at the last, the tide came in quickly. Thousands of feet of sandbar shrunk in minutes to a couple hundred feet, and a hundred and fifty feet across to 50, then thirty feet across. We took off, splashing more salty mud on the underside of the wings, past the many holes and mounds like a bands of demented gophers now being smoothed back into the sea.
It's definitely on my list of places to go back next summer, when my airplane has her wings back on!
were you at Polly Creek?
