Fishing Float at Second Beach, La Push, Washington
I have a modest collection of fishing floats and buoys although none of them came from Mud Bay. The trophy float shown in the photo isn’t part of the collection. There are more details after the jump about this float plus a photo of a world-class collection.
As the photo caption says, the float was photographed at Second Beach, La Push, Washington. That’s about a mile south of the Quileute tribal headquarters, which are in the village of La Push at the mouth of the Quillayute River. The river mouth is sheltered by St. James Island, and some tribal members keep their float-laden fishing boats there.
So this particular float likely wasn’t far from its home port when it washed ashore. But some other beachcomber found it, not me. That’s even though my definition of “found” is fairly loose. If there’s no thrill when you first see an abandoned float, you didn’t find it.
Perhaps the float finder wanted to add a nautical decoration to Second Beach with this beachcombing trophy. Perhaps he or she doesn’t collect floats. Whatever the case, at least a dozen other hikers on a sunny day in late January passed on it too. Like the rest, I left it in place, hanging from the drift log where it had been staged.
It’s not as if Second Beach needs any man-made decorations. Wild and unspoiled, its half-mile of hard-packed sand is bookended by two rocky headlands that are impassable at beach level even at low tide. Sea stacks form a gallery of vertical statues just offshore. The north headland features a hole-in-the-wall gunsight view of the next beach to the north. A 20-yard-wide strip of jumbled drift logs brought in and abandoned there by Pacific Ocean storms borders the beach on the land side. From there, Second Beach abruptly gives way to a dense coastal evergreen forest.
On the drive back to Kalaloch, I stopped at John’s Beachcombing Museum, which is just outside Forks. The photo below shows a totem pole of floats, balls, and buoys—one of the many exhibits of discarded seaborne treasures collected by the retired plumber during decades of beachcombing.
A Tsunami of Floats
I wonder if he would have passed on the Second Beach float.
Link to an older post on collecting floats: Buoy Collection Envy.
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