By 7, though, the rain was threatening again and the wind was blowing up and it didn't feel like the time to go down to Lighthouse Park for an evening picnic and a spot of whale watching, but we went anyway. Too cold, however, to be sitting around on the beach picnicking. We unpacked our chicken-and-brie sandwiches and our chips and our wine and sat in the car, spilling food all over ourselves. And watched. No sign of orcas.
But it would be kind of hard to see them because the waves were kicking up quite a bit: at least as much as when we had the tsunami wave this past winter. The sea gulls were valiantly flying sidewise across the beach with the heavy winds coming in from the south, off the ocean. I saw one crow fly backwards while rising slowly, in this way backing into a comfy, if unsheltered, position on a piling about ten feet above the water.
And then came to my eyes a big red kite. Not a diamond-shaped kite, but one of those fancy kinds that are flat, but when they are buoyant are like an arched air-mattress. Some guy in shorts and a t-shirt was running along the beach, and boy was it easy for him to get that kite up in the air. But then, once it was up, he followed it out into the water. And there I was, watching wind surfing, something I'd never seen in real life before. And up very close. He was moving very, very fast through the water on some kind of board...well...like the wind. The kite wasn't on a string, of course; it was on a harness and he was manipulating it to take him to the left, to the right, way out in the waters and then, suddenly, it lifted him right out of the water and he was flying. Wow!
We watched him with unalloyed delight for about fifteen minutes. Again and again, he went right up in the air and he never fell off the board into the water, and the wind blew like crazy, and he was going back and forth like crazy, and then a second kite showed up in the air, followed by a second guy, this one in a wet suit, following the kite through the water. The two of them raced around for another quarter hour or so and then they came in, one at a time, as easily back to the beach as if they were walking on the water, not flying through and above it.
I talked to the first guy a little bit and found that his small board is attached to him with straps, which is how he can go up in the air like that without losing the board. But, he said, the other guy was using a surf board and it was not attached and the fact that he managed to stay pretty much upright all the time (although not to fly up in the air) was very impressive. He also said that it was really too stormy to be using a big kite and if he'd realized how hard the wind would be blowing, he'd have brought a smaller one, and that it had been very tiring. Either way, we couldn't have had a finer show.
Oh, never saw any orcas.
