Boy's weekend out!

Hello, everyone! On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, we four intrepid Bowes boys (excluding the little rascal Benjamin) set out in search of adventure on our annual camping expedition -- and there was a ton of adventure to be had! We all agree that this weekend was our best camping trip together ever, which is saying something!

    On Thursday, we arrived at Safeco Field at 11:45 AM in time to catch a baseball game between the Seattle Mariners and Boston Redsox. It wasn't like watching the D-backs, of course, but the lowly Mariners actually played some good baseball. The game went into extra innings, with the Redsox winning 8-7 in the tenth. My little brothers and I even danced our way onto the fancam, if the funny gyrations we made with our mitts on our heads could be called dancing. For some reason totally beyond my comprehending, Daddy refused to join us on the fancam in front of thirty-thousand fans. :0)


   After the drawn-out game, we headed for Bainbridge Island, to a camping spot right on the Hood Canal.  Along the way we stopped to get some vitals (hotdogs, potato chips, and Pop Tarts :0) ) to go along with all the seafood we planned to catch and reached the campground at around 9:00 P.M. With the light fading fast, we set up camp and, after s'mores and ghost stories, hit the sack.

 I was up at 6:00 and had a roaring fire going by the time the other three bushy-headed, bleary-eyed campers stumbled out of our tent. We had a quick meal of Pop Tarts toasted over the fire, and then headed out for a full day of crabbing, claming, oystering (is that a word?), and fishing. Our catch was bountiful. We caught 11 crabs (10 Rock and 1 Dungeness), a small bucketful of clams and oysters, and a hefty Rockfish. Timmy had the pleasure of reeling in that big fish; it was literally a ten-minute fight!

  But this was not all Timmy caught. Five minutes later he hooked another fish -- a big, whopping fish from the looks of it, as his pole was bent almost in half. You will not believe what the fish turned out to be -- a shark! That's right, A SHARK!!! Well, in all fairness it was actually a Dogfish (a fish in the shark family), but it looked like a shark all the same to us country Bowes boys. Being about three feet long and weighting 30 pounds, the "shark" was too big to really fit in our fish net, but it got tangled in the netting just as Timmy's line finally snapped. In a rather bold move for thinking it was a shark, I reached down and grabbed the Dogfish by the tail, hefting him into the boat (I made sure to drop the heavy thing by Daddy and Joe-Joe's toes, though :0)  ).We finally got our net untangled and retrieved our lure, and after admiring our thirty-pound catch, termed a "baby shark" by the two younger boys, we released it back into the Hood Canal.

  That night, Friday night, we had an all you can eat seafood buffet! The Rockfish alone could have fed all of us, and we had so much crab that we couldn't eat it all! When we finally migrated to our tent, our stomachs were full to bursting with seafood and our ghost stories were filled with tales of deadly sharks.

On Saturday we did some catch and release crabbing and fishing in the morning, and then packed up our campsite.  We played a hard fought game of whiffle ball after lunch, a game that Joe and I lost on a walk-off hit, and headed for home after that. All in all, it was a great trip!