Hello, Geezer coming back to this forum. Paul B

(If you can't see the pictures you can sometimes click on the "X" to see them. If not, make it up 😁 )

This beautiful morning I didn't go for my beach walk. My wife wasn't doing very well last night and I wanted to make sure she was OK which she is and I am happy.

I cherish those beach walks as that is my happy place. I usually get to the beach in under 5 minutes because it is only a short walk to the stairs and a pleasant walk down 176 wooden steps.



I stop a few times on my way down to just watch the vast expanse or nature with very little man made things except the steps.



There are a few "landings" on the long way down where I look east and see the sun rise. It's always awe inspiring and starts me thinking of how lucky I am.
Sunrise Sept 2.jpg




At the bottom I step on the rocks as this beach was formed by a glacier and it very rocky from tiny smooth pebbles to boulders larger than my house.
Rock on beach.jpg



At one time, all those small rocks were as large as that huge boulder. If it's low tide, I cautiously walk on the algae covered rocks and look for flat rocks that I can lift to see the life under it.

Normally I find hundreds of amphipods, crabs and sometimes baby eels which quickly scuttle under another rock.



Algae rocks.jpg



Those rocks are very slippery so I am very careful because there is no cell phone service here which I see as a plus.

The very rare times that I see another Human either fishing or walking their dog I notice that I have never seen one of them looking at their phone. I never look at my phone unless to take a picture and don't think I ever checked my E Mail on my phone. I grew up without a cellphone and those times were the best in my life.

As I walk there is a 150' sheer sand dune on my left. I alternate my walks to walk just at the bottom of the dune where all sorts of interesting nature falls down to the beach or I walk just at the breaker line to see what the sea has brought in at the last high tide which travels up about 75' or 100' almost to the dune.

A few times a week I stop to help a conch or stranded horseshoe crab who unfortunately is on his back and can't right himself.



I wonder if they remember me the next time they come close to shore.

I normally walk west to another set of beach steps which gets me to a road that I take back to my house, but sometimes when I get down the steps I walk east towards the sun. About 3 miles away are 5 WW1 shipwrecks half on the beach but only one is still visible and it is only large timbers. I have no idea why those ships were beached there so long ago.

I can look 360 degrees and almost never see anything man made except the stairs I came down. There are no sounds except the wind, surf and seagulls. Sometimes a fishing trawler sails by a few miles out and I hear the low drawl of his aging diesel engine.

On a clear day I can just about see Connecticut 25 miles out.
I can't believe I reached a point in my life where I can experience all this beauty. I grew up in New York and worked in Manhattan for almost half a century never realizing that places like this still exist.

When I bring people here, they can't believe the beauty and solitude, especially in New York.

As a small Kid my cousin built his own home here at 16 years old. He was on the Ed Sullivan show for this. (Google him) That was in the 50s and this place and much of eastern Long Island had few people here and the roads were dirt or gravel.

It has changed a lot but there are still some places left like this and I am so glad I can experience it in the short time I have left to enjoy it.
 
are they reef safe? I thought they had a reputation for nibbling on corals but they sure are pretty
I have had quite a few of them and they are reef safe. They may bite something off a coral but they hardly have teeth so I doubt they will harm a coral, but of course different fish have different personalities, so it is not unheard of.

Glad to hear your wife is okay. Those beach walks sound magical especially with a sunrise like that.
Thank you Robin. My wife is better today but MS is a progressive disease and never gets better. Some days it is bearable and sometimes she is in intense pain.

As for the beach walks, I love them and would have a hard time living without them after I experienced it for the last 6 years. :D

I can't wait to get out of the house early in the morning, before the world gets up just to marvel at it.









 
It rained last night so I figured I would go worm hunting on my morning walk.

I walked and walked and found 3 worms. Just 3. Not a very accomplished hunt.

I walked 5,000 steps, sucked up $14.00 worth of oxygen and burned up 400 calories and have almost nothing to show for it.

I did find a place with a bunch of dead, wet leaves which I kicked over.

When I did that a multitude of Night Crawlers ran away. No, they literally RAN.
They were much to big for me to feed to my fish as I thought they would eat the fish so I didn't collect them.

Worm.jpg
 
We are having company this week. Friends that we have had over 50 years and their Daughter and mine grew up together from Kindergarten through college. Anyway. They were born in Italy and are fantastic cooks. He even owned a restaurant for a number of years so I can't just throw something together for dinner.

I am making a nice meal along with home made rosemary/olive oil bread. Unfortunately my oven broke this week and I ordered the part to repair it.

It's the Gas safety valve that keeps the gas on after the oven lights. It is easy to replace (if you know what you are doing) but my left hand is swollen and I have an appointment with a doctor who will give me a cortisone shot to fix it.

My problem is that I can't get that shot for a few days and I need to bake bread tomorrow and I can't really use my left hand so installing this valve will be tricky as I need to use two hands to grip the wrenches to remove the gas line and part.

Hopefully, one of my friends will be around to help with the wrenches until I get my hand repaired. It's fun getting old. ;)
 
Today I got a little bored so I wanted to do a little tank maintenance. For some reason my rock migrates closer to the front of the tank and being I built most of my rock, it is in big pieces so to move one, I have to remove a lot of smaller rocks.

I needed to move the entire reef structure on one side back so I could clean the front glass. I have been noticing that this yellow sponge is growing everywhere. But only in the dark. It's visible here because that piece used to be turned over.



I don't think this stuff can take over the tank like that sponge from Hell that I got rid of a year ago and it is soft so I can remove it if I want and it is not photosynthetic, so it won't grow on the corals where the light is.

It looks kind of nice. The tank is cloudy here because when I was moving the rocks around, I had the diatom filter running and I stirred up everything.

This filter I built I don't normally use diatom powder in because it has a 5 micron cartridge which is small enough for general maintenance which is what I am doing now.
 
This Watchman got a little to big for my liking. About 5", and I think he ate a bunch of small fish, namely all my yellow clown gobies.



There is no way to catch anything in my tank with a trap or net, so I made a tiny hook out of a needle. Baited it with a clam and went fishing.
Hook to catch Watchman.jpg


I tried to film it so I set up my phone and put it on video, but the fish wouldn't come out of the back of the tank. He was back there all by himself so I figured I would try to get him there. There is only one place where I could get a hook down there due to the rocks and corals so I lured him to that spot with some clams that I shot with one of these.



When he got there I lowered the baited hook near him and he took the bait. I quickly lifted him over a bucket of water and he jumped right in.

In a few minutes I will drive him back to the LFS I bought him from a few years ago. He is not hurt as there was no barb on the hook and I have caught fish in the past like this with no problems.

Watchman in bucket.jpg
 
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It rained last night so on my morning walk I took my worm collection stuff. I guess it didn't rain hard enough because I only got 2 worms.

The streets were drying up so the worms made it back to the dirt before I got there but there were dozens of huge nightcrawlers all over the street.
I didn't take any of them because they were like 9" or a foot long and I don't keep any moray eels or whale sharks. If you cut up one of those giant worms in 1/4" pieces, all the guts fall out and you are left with tubes of worm skin and the parts of the worms I want are the guts.

I like worms about 3" long and skinny, that way I can cut them up into bitesize pieces and the guts stay inside so they can get inside my fish where I want them :cool:
 
When I went into my Man cave to put the worms away it was dark and my tank light wasn't on yet. I noticed one of my Pigmy Waspfish on top of a rock looking bored but I know he was hunting as they are nocturnal and want to eat at night, sort of like one of my old girlfriends who may have been a Vampire.

It is very hard to feed those fish because I rarely see them so I quickly cut up a fresh worm and by the time I was ready to shoot it into the tank, he was gone. I couldn't find either one of them so I just shoot some worm pieces among the rocks in the hopes that he will get some before the hordes of hermit crabs and bristle worms.

 
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