Ashore 5

Day 24, midmorning  . . . fog reduced visibility to half mile or less along the beach and tower, and given my dose of Christian upbringing, I hoped I would tell a resurrection story, but alas, as I got close,

Le Papillon still rode the swells of sand,

piloted by wishful thinkers.

Moving on beach billows gets one nowhere, and I prepared to head off the beach, until I noticed

beyond the crowd, an unusual visitor, who

inspected the starboard hull,  moving and then lying a long period,

ear to the ground, seeming to divine–or attempt to–

the fate of the schooner.

It ambled around the stranded ocean voyager, conjecturing and

contemplating and

cajoling it to

follow it seaward.  All my ears could tell was that seal encouragement was ignored by the schooner just as much as human encouragement was convincing this seal to return to the water.

More seriously, the seal is believed to be a juvenile male gray seal, about four months old, healthy though tired, which would–if left unmolested–return to its watery realm.

Yes, I took these fotos with a zoom and avoided interfering with a marine mammal.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp on Easter, 2011.  Click here to see how saltaire38 ties this seal to a Fire Island tradition.

Ashore 4

It’s 1430 hours, April 17.  Day 17 of Papillon‘s misery.   Click here on Saltaire38′s blog for fotos a few hours earlier . . . at high tide, showing Le Papillon awash.   Here was Day 10.  After yesterday’s blow with gusts over 25 mph, I was curious.   So was that mallard, not to inject a canard into this story already rife with them.  The most striking change is that

she’s now oriented roughly southward, even somewhat south south west, compared with eastward since I first saw her.  Yes, that’s a car in the distance, and low-level sand blowing across the beach.

Furthermore, she’s been sucked down, but surrounded stern to

bow along her both sides with

 a fairly deep lagoon.

Thousands of fotos will linger for years, no matter whether she

gets an assisted departure or

a shifting sands burial.

All fotos by Will Van Dorp.

I’m reminded of this wreck from Tierra del Fuego and southbound650.

Unrelated:  since this is the actual tax day, enjoy (or suffer)  biankablog’s “accountancy shanty.”