Estuaries
| 5/30/99--Yesterday I took my first kayak trip--a naturalist
tour on Padilla Bay. When we started the tide had been coming in for about 2 hours. Much
of the bay was still mud flats. We waded into shallow and very warm water and kayaked
north, against the tide and the wind. We stopped 2 hours later to rest. From where we beached we could see (through binoculars and thanks to the naturalist) 2 bald eagles perched close together on a tree branch, near their nest. Their should be fledgling eaglets now. The trip back took have the time, because now the wind and tide helped us. We almost lost 2 kayaks while we were resting--the incoming tide almost floated them off. The water was choppy but still, amazingly, bath water warm from the sun during low tide. So much eel grass was floating that our oars would catch in it and we would have to stop to clean them off.
|
|
| About Padilla Bay | Padilla Bay,
between Fidalgo Island and the mainland, is an estuary at the salt water edge of the
large delta of the Skagit River. It is about eight miles long and three miles across. Because the bay is filled with sediment from the Skagit River, the bottom is very shallow, flat, and muddy. It is so shallow that almost the whole bay is intertidal. This means that it is flooded at high tide but when the tide goes out the whole bay empties out exposing miles and miles of mud flats. Tidal changes are very dramatic, and affect human and animal life on the bay.
This condition allows unusually large eelgrass meadows to grow. There are nearly 8,000 acres of eelgrass in Padilla Bay.Eelgrass is also home for millions of worms, shrimp, clams, and other invertebrates which are food for great blue herons, eagles, otters, seals, as well as humans. This is why Padilla Bay was selected to be a National Estuarine Research Reserve.
|
