Mud Bay Blog

My sister first noticed the Mud Bay bubbles (see photo) during a visit a couple of years ago to see my new house. Since then she keeps asking “Have you found out what causes them?” When conditions are right – high tide and calm water – an area maybe 40 yards out from shore seethes like the cauldron tended by Macbeth’s witches (OK, an exaggeration but you get the idea). And apparently this has been going on for years, at least according to the former owner of my house. “It’s just air bubbling to the surface,” he said. Sure. But why there and what causes it to be released?
Continue reading →

I ordered a set of personalized license plates for my pickup truck a couple of years ago right after I bought the house on Mud Bay. Not surprisingly MUDBAY was taken (it’s registered to the Bremerton owner of a silver Mercedes). I learned this from browsing a database of vanity plates on the Tacoma News Tribune web site. What did surprise me was that MUDBAY2, 3, and 4 were also gone—to a family living on Lopez Island. Nor was MUD-BAY available. So I settled for a spelling-challenged version (see photo).
Continue reading →

Pickleweed (Salicornia virginica) is the dominant plant growing along the shore at the mouth of Mud Bay. A low-growing succulent, pickleweed is found in the intertidal zone, meaning it is completely under water some of the time. Thus pickleweed is classified as a halophyte, a type of plant specially adapted for life in salt water. When the roots take up salt water, the plant’s cells filter out the salt and move it to the tips of the leaves. This process allows the roots and stem to remain salt-free and to grow new leaves when the old ones cannot hold any more salt and die.
Continue reading →

If you notice the tides a lot like I do, there are instances when you want to know the official times and measurements for the day’s tides. It’s not enough to look out the window and think “that’s a really high tide” or “looks like at least a minus two.” Of course it is easy enough to buy a tides booklet like Dot’s Fishing Guide at a hardware or sporting-goods store. But Dot’s is limited in the number of tides tables it includes and they always seem to require both a time and measurement correction for your location.

Years ago I stumbled on a great online resource for nationwide information on tides. For my state alone (Washington), it lists 166 locations, including one close enough to Mud Bay that no corrections are needed: Tracyton Dyes Inlet. The web site is easy to use and has never been offline when I have tried it. You can get the tides (and moon data) for up to 14 days at time—present, past, or future. If you need a longer interval, copy and paste the first fortnight into your word processor, change the start date, and click “Get Tides” again. Kudos to the good folks who provide this useful web site:

www.saltwatertides.com