Sunday, September 13, 2009

Rods, Rhodies and Fish



This weekend was the Rods and Rhodie's Car show in Florence. Festivities start on Friday, but the car show runs Saturday and Sunday on Bay street in Old Town Florence. The road is closed nearly the length of Old Town and hot rods of all makes and models, older than 1972, line both sides of the street for viewing. What a perfect location. I was amazed at the amount of cars (around 200), and the variety.



Plenty of people, and their dogs, walked the street browsing the cars and doing some shopping. If you go, you should know that many of the cars make more noise than a normal car, and others prove that they have the horsepower by squealing the tires now and then. This is most prevalent at the cruise in on Saturday night. For approximately an hour the cars take laps through old town so that you can hear their throaty rumble as the cars pass by.



Above is a view of the Cruise-In from River Vista's front porch. After the Cruise-In, the street fun continued with a street dance and live band.


FIIIISSSSHHH!

Yes, salmon are in the Siuslaw river! While the guys spent their time at the car show, I was riveted to the view from our deck. Saturday saw a dramatic rise in the number of fish in the river. More were jumping, and most importantly, I saw people catching them. Around 1:15 pm I saw the first fish caught. By 1:35pm I had seen 4 caught. Once the word got out, the boats flocked to the area. By the time dusk came, having taken time out for dinner and the Cruise-In, I saw about 7 fish caught for the day on my stretch of river. The fish continued to jump long after the last boat headed back to the dock.



The seals also were eating well. I spied one on Sunday that looked like a dead, bloated seal floating feet first downstream. Then he moved. He did a back flip and swam away. Later I caught one on video trying the same trick, only he was being harassed by a young seagull. The young brown bird thought that the seal should feed him and kept after the seal until he left. The mom seagull just follows the whole ordeal as it moves around.