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Fleet Week Thursday: Tours begin on Rose Festival Ships in Portland

One final wrap up today on the Rose Festival Fleet which begins tours today in Portland. Ships are located on the seawall in Tom McCall Park, 10-4. Get there early because tours end promptly at 4 and if you are waiting on land at 4 you may not get in.  And I also wanted to share again that I learned some updated information yesterday from the Rose Festival Website that indicates that you need Real ID to board for a tour. Here’s what it says on the Fleet Week page: “When arriving for public...

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Waterspout off the Long Beach Peninsula shows the serious nature of local weather

After our near-miss with a severe storm that walloped Washington to the north of us, a thunderstorm off the Long Beach Peninsula yesterday spawned a waterspout in the ocean off Long Beach. The waterborne tornado moved on up the coast to Tokeland and beyond. And we have more weather on the way.

Don’t be tempted to feel cavalier about the fact that this round of weather “wasn’t so bad.” It could be next time. Winter on the coast means staying informed and being prepared.

Bomb cyclone with deep low pressure shapes our coastal weather this week

An intense low pressure storm called a bomb cyclone is churning out in the ocean a couple hundred miles offshore of the Oregon and Washington coast. While it’s not predicted to make landfall here locally, it will send us some walloping winds, seas and rain.

We’ll talk about what to expect.

The ubiquitious, but seldom noticed, Quonset hut

Today a look at a common but oft-overlooked maritime structure – the Quonset hut. First designed and built for the US Navy in 1941, they were styled after a WWI version called the Nissen hut. Once used in military installations during WWII, the Navy sold them surplus to the public after the war, and the rest, as they say, is history.

And we’ll hear what is probably the quintessential artistic work regarding this unusual style of building: Fisher Poet Jon Campbell’s reading of his hilarious poem, “Quonset Hut,” in which he refers to the Quonset hut as being a testament to Rhode Island’s “indigenous school of meatloaf architecture.”

Image: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

As weather improves, a backlog of ships getting back to work

Whenever the Columbia River Bar at the mouth of the river temporarily becomes too dangerous to cross because of bad weather, the result a day or so later is a backlog of ships that have been waiting to leave or to arrive. That creates a steady stream of vessels, 24/7, until everything is back to normal.

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