Bigfoot, Part 3

Last October, I took a video sound recording of a strange noise.  Not animal, not human.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, something ripped the tarp off our dug well, breaking a good sized rope to do it and flinging it aside.

Well, last night, I set up the camera to take star photos.  While outside setting things up, I heard a strange sound.  Not animal, not human.  I called Pam outside to hear it, but it stopped.  OK, whatever.  I took a few pics for composure, then set the shutter and went inside to watch Boardwalk Empire on DVD.  Later, I "developed" the photos and loaded them into my Startrails software.  Stacking 16 minutes of 30 second photos, this is what I got.

This blurry thing at the bottom of the photo is a fairly large tree.  It could have been shaken by a bear.  Or a pair of raccoons fighting high in the tree.  Or an annoyed Bigfoot.

Waterford Tugboat Roundup, in Photos

Sometimes, you just need to get off the mountain.  As much as we love it here, in truth, there's not much going on.  Besides rocks.  Bleecker always has rocks.

Saturday, Pam and I got our boat fix and traveled to my hometown of Waterford, New York to attend their annual Tugboat Roundup.  What a hoot!  There were real tugboats, little itty bitty tugboats, recreational I-wish-I-was-a-real-tugboat, and many vendors and displays.  We spent  many hours there, visiting and checking it all out.

Here is the day, in photos.  I'll let them speak for themselves.

Olivia the Hunting Dog

We bought Olivia when she was just a puppy.  We were living aboard our trawler in Savannah, Georgia and Pam was working as a vet tech.  The veterinarian was selling German Shorthaired  Pointers for a friend and  Olivia was the last of the litter.  No one wanted  her because she didn't have enough freckles.  Yep.  No, I don't know why hunters want freckles.  Maybe because it camouflages them?

Pam brought Olivia to our marina to shop here around.  As I expected, Olivia found a home.  With us.  She quickly grew from a little puppy to a massive Pointer.  Female Pointers should stand 23 to 24 inches at the shoulders.  Olivia is close to 30 inches.   Why so tall?  She learned to pull oysters off the pilings at the marina at low tide and eat them, shell and all.

The pic below was taken on the beach at Jekyll Island.  Oliva found a seagull feather and was in seventh heaven.  She was running past me at full gallop.  I'm lucky I got her in the frame at all.   Notice how gently she's holding the feather.   It is all in the genes.

I was on Google Earth the other day and I looked at our property.   They've updated the satellite photo so that it shows our cleared property.   The details are amazing.  You can see the foundation just to the right of the pin, our screenhouse just left and a bit lower, our storage trailer, and even the stone walls that I built.

Ah, the stone walls.

Olivia is a hunting dog.   That's what she does.  She constantly has her nose to the ground, sniffing for whatever she can find, and little will stop her from getting to it.  In the pic below, Oliva has destroyed part of a stone wall to get at mice.

Just look at the size of some of those rocks that she's moved.  Chevy, the male pitbull, looks on with interest.

So, I guess I'll be rebuilding stone walls as long as we have Oliva.

Bigfoot Tracks

HA!  Got it!  Do you remember last fall when I posted a blog with a video of some strange animal noises in the woods not far from our cabin in Bleecker?

I sent it around to various people and no one could positively identify it.  Some thought some odd coyote or fox noise.  A bigfoot expert said it sounded like a bigfoot but different than what he's familiar with in the Pacific Northwest.  The best thing would be to find a footprint.

Well, this afternoon, Pam and I loaded the dogs into the car to head over to our property when Pam noticed that the tarp was off our well.  I stopped and we checked it out.   When I worked on the well in the spring, I tied the tarp down with rope around the well.  The rope was pulled off and tossed off to the side, and next to it was the tarp.  We couldn't figure out how that happened.  Then Pam found the tracks.  Two of them. One filled with water, but luckily one was imprinted in mud.

In the first photo, Pam's finger is pointing at the heel and her other hand is by the toes.

We put the tarp back over the well and tied it down again.

Later, Judi and Bill came over to see the tracks in person.  Sadly, they had pretty much faded away and it was difficult to see them.  Since they came over about five hours after I took the photos above, that means that the tarp was pulled off early this morning by whatever made that track.