6FPS V8#11: On the Oregon Coast

6FPS
Written by Chuq Von Rospach

E-mail: chuqvr@gmail.com • Site: https://chuq.me

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Daylight Savings has ended, the sun is setting before 5PM, and we are back into the Big Dark part of the season. It’s also cool and wet: our forecast shows precipitation for the next ten days, with two inches of rain forecast. Fall is definitely here.

In early October, Laurie and I spent ten days out on the Oregon Coast — see below for my writeup — and had a wonderful time. We came home reset and rested, and since then, it’s been a bit of crazy. When we arrived home, there was water flowing through the garage from where the well gear is. That’s usually a bad thing.

So, we brought in the well maintenance folks, who spent a good 15 minutes looking for the source, and finally noticed a tiny pinhole in a copper pipe. That was in a place that required fixing by a plumber, so we brought them in and talked it over. We ended up deciding it made sense to update the well setup, replacing most of the piping with PEX and upgrading the filters, so we now have bigger and better filtration with an added carbon filter. Not cheap, but it was a good investment — the cost of “just” dealing with the leak was about half the cost of the full upgrade.

I also had to call my current landscaping company to let them know I was cancelling service; I’ve moved this maintenance to the same group that took over my irrigation system a year or so ago. I really liked working with the old team, they did good work, but there were a couple of nagging issues I’d talked to the owner about and she was never able to sort them out for me.

The new group is going to cost a bit more; my estimate is probably 5% over what I was paying, but we’ll be doing more work on an ongoing basis so I won’t need to schedule in special visits (at extra cost) as often.

We also talked about future plans; I have the second round of tulip and daffodil bulbs I want planted. Also, when we moved in, we replaced a number of roses (in very poor shape, this is not good rose territory) with grasses, and I’ve never loved them. So I’ve been thinking about replacing them in the spring.

Well, we ended up deciding to do both the bulbs and the replanting now; again, it’ll save some money, and they prefer planting going into fall/winter to lets plants establish a bit before the end of rains in the spring. I’ve been trying to move more towards things that are both native and generate fruits or berries — and, of course, flowers and color are a nice bonus.

We had been talking about planting Oregon Grape, but ended up thinking they’d outgrow the area, instead, they suggested something I hadn’t considered: blueberries. So year, in the next week or so, we’ll be removing all those non-native grasses and replacing them with a combination of sword ferns and a variety of blueberry varieties. So that’s about to happen.

It’s also the time to have the irrigation shut off for the winter; the tech came over, we opened up the crawl space, and he said “I hear water” (hint: that’s bad). So he went in, turned off the irrigation, found the leak, and of course it was on the house supply side of things.

So, we called in the plumbers again, and they were originally booked for a couple of days, but then called back to say one of their team freed up, and so they came over, evaluated the issue, gave me a quote, turned off the water, and 90 minutes later, it was fixed and they were on their way.

The culprit was a solder seam that, back when then house was built, improperly soldered. Here we are, 40 years later, and it finally gave out. The copper failure at the well was also a 40 year old piece of copper. Does that mean we’re at risk of future failures? Always an option, but there’s no indication anything is likely. It’s amusing in a way to have two plumbing failures in the same with completely unrelated causes, but, well, that’s how it goes some times.

So October, with the vacation, the fall plantings, two plumbing emergencies and the well upgrade, turned into an expensive month, on top of what’s been an expensive year. That’s just the luck of the draw sometimes….

Remember that Sony A6700?

Remember a few months ago I talked about buying the Sony A6700 to supplement my camera gear as my wide angle and macro kit? I love that body and how it operates.

But, since then I’ve used it twice. Which puts this purchase far into the “should” side of Should vs Want. As it turns out, though, getting it tuned into a good thing. While we were on vacation, Laurie was using her fuji gear, a complaining about getting the autofocus to cooperate. After some discussion, we arranged a trade. I took her Fuji gear off her hands, and she now owns a Sony A6700 and the Sigma 20-200 lens, and she was a happy camper the rest of the trip.

When I got back, I sent the Fuji gear off to KEH, which to my surprise, gave me enough in return to pretty much cover picking up a used Sony A7V, which is now in my possession, along with a 2X teleconverter.

I have only taken it out once, because life has been crazy and wet, and when I did, I got the settings wrong (it was shooting JPEG, not raw, and at way too slow a shutter speed) — but it was clearly obvious how much better the autofocus is. My initial take on the 2X is that the images are too soft for my taste, but I need better testing at a proper shutter speed before I make any real judgment. If you’re curious about the differences between the Sony A7IV and V, check out this video.

And now, the Sony A7IV has gone off to KEH, along with the macro lens I bought and used once, and that money coming back will finish paying off for the A7V and the 2X, and cover a nice chunk of…

Of something. I took a long, hard look at whether to update my lens for more reach; I thought a good bit about the Sony 200-600, but ended up deciding going bigger, heavier and more expensive for 40mm of reach (compared to my 100-400 + 1.4X). Nothing else really seems to make sense for the kind of shooting I do, unless, of course, I wanted to spend $10K+ and go back to using a tripod (no, thanks anyway). I did decide to experiment with a 2X to see if I like the results, and that experiment is ongoing, but I’m leaning against living with an 800mm F11 lens kit. I may stick the 2X in the bag for special situations, I don’t know.

The other thing I’ve been pondering is upgrading my spotting scope. I’ve identified one I like, and the Sony A7IV return will cover a good part of that, so that’s where I’m leaning right now — unless, of course, the house has another surprise in store….But nothing is currently decided here, so stay tuned.

Social Stuff

So, after consideration, I’ve decided to start posting to FaceBook and Instagram again, as well as continuing to use BlueSky. These seem to be the best mix and to be honest, the place where I get the most feedback (and “engagement” in social media jargon) is Facebook. I’m considering this an experiment for a few months, but we’ll see how it goes. I considered getting active on threads again, but I can’t see any real reason to (I’ll be happy to hear why I should consider it).

As part of figuring this all out, I made a decision to cancel my account on Glass, which I really like but realize it’d been months since I posted to it. I talk more about that decision in Some Small Site Updates if you want more about this and some of the other tweaks I made to the site this month.

I may also rename the blog area on the site something else, either ‘articles’ or ‘writing’ or ‘postings”. The term blog feels really dated these days, and I want to move on to some other way of describing it. I’m open to suggestions on this idea, while I try to decide want to do.

And finally, it turns out there are a number of Washington birding resources available on WhatsApp, a platform I’ve never touched or looked at. So I will probably be experimenting with that and see if I like it. Because what my life needs is even more social media sites to eat into my time…

In the Workshop

With the time out on the Oregon Coast, the workshop was a lot less busy in October, but I did get around to building a quick and dirty set of outfeed tables for the miter saw.

Most of the shop time has been spent on deciding what aspects of it were annoying me, and figuring out how to solve (or reduce) that. I’m currently working on an outfeed solution for the table saw. In both cases, it’s a way to improve safety (you don’t want pieces of wood falling off the device while the blade is spinning), part convenience (because I don’t have to think through how to keep the wood from doing unsafe things when it splits in two, and partly just annoyance (having to pick up things that fall is annoying, plus you risk damaging a corner when it drops).

I don’t have room for a full miter station the way I have the shop set up, and don’t really need it, but I did need the support wing’s to be a bit longer to better hold the wood. Same with the table saw — another couple of feet of table will keep things from flipping off, which could potentially catch the blade as it drops, which would be bad.

I have one more annoyance project to do, which is to figure out my clamp storage, I’ve tried a couple of things, and didn’t like either, and I have a third idea in mind, so we’ll see. Fortunately, projects like this are generally a few days of pondering and a couple of days of tinkering, so it shouldn’t take long, and I enjoy the challenge of figuring it out.

And after that? I have a thing or two I want to try to build before Christmas. We’ll see how that goes.

My Favorite Thing (this month)

This month my favorite thing is a new toy from the folks at Twelve South: the Airfly Drive. It’s a little dongle that plugs into the wired CarPlay port on your car, and converts it to wireless CarPlay.

I’ve tried a couple of this type of connector before and didn’t like any of them. This one will connect to your phone via Bluetooth, and once you set up the connection, the phone will automatically connect in when you start the car — no need to plug it in or connect anything.

Unlike previous attempts at this, I detect no lag between pushing buttons and things happening, and to date, it’s connected every time, quickly and reliaby, so I’m quite happy after a few weeks of using it. The only negative: your phone isn’t charged, which is okay for shorter trips, but on long trips, I still want to charge it. My Ridgeline does have a charging pad on the console, but with a case on the phone, it doesn’t work reliably, so I’m still going to keep a charger and cable around, but in general won’t be using them.

For only $40, I consider this a nice quality of life improvement.


New Wallpapers!

I’ve released a new set of wallpapers for your enjoyment. You can access them below, and enjoy!

See you next issue!

What’s New From Chuq

On the Oregon Coast

When Laurie and I go on vacation together, we normally wait until after Labor Day to avoid the worst of the crowds (and prices). This year, we spent ten days on the road, mostly on the Oregon Coast, which we love to visit.

We had talked about making a trip back into California, but ultimately decided against it because of the amount of driving it’d require. Our trip on the coast was about 1,500 miles total, easily half what the California trip would have been, and meant we got to spend more time at our destination and less time driving there.

We started with an overnight stop in Ridgefield, which allowed us to visit the Wildlife Refuge that afternoon and again the next morning — and, of course, have dinner at In’N’Out. Early October is early for the best visits to a refuge like Ridgefield, but I find there are interesting things to see here year round (but late November into March is prime time for winter birding).

Bandon

After that we drove south, heading out to the coast to Tilamook, and then down to our first stay, Bandon. I’ve only visited it a few times, but I really have come to appreciate the city. We stayed at the Best Western Plus at Face Rock, my first time there. We really enjoyed it, with a room with a nice view of the ocean (but not Face Rock).

Bandon is a town that has embraced tourism, but isn’t, well, touristy. One aspect of that is that it has more, and higher quality, restaurants than you might otherwise expect for a town of this size. It’s turned the downtown area near the harbor into shopping district with is nice but not kitschy. I’ve been trying to figure out what about the place attracts me, and I realized it feels very much like Morro Bay did in my visits there; a comfortable and welcoming place that has enough going on to keep you interested but is still pretty relaxing and laid back. We ate three dinners there, the first somewhat at random as a place called the Wheelhouse, the second at Tony’s Crab Shack and the third at a Mexican place called Rancho Viejo. All three were really good, but Tony’s Crab Shack really stood out for the quality of the food — I had a smoked salmon and cranberry jelly sandwich on focaccia and while I was wondering about the combo, it was amazingly good.

Another highlight is Face Rock Creamery, which has a very nice deli and amazing selection of cheeses; I love their Vampire Slayer. Laurie and I tend to do cheese and charcuterie with crackers for one meal daily on the road, and having a place like this to stock up is a nice benefit.

We spent the time there just exploring and birding; overall, the birding was slow — we were too early for many winter visitors, and the summer birds had mostly left — but Bandon had one of the birds I was planning on chasing: in one of the blackbird flocks were a few Rusty Blackbirds as well as some Tri-colored blackbirds. So one afternoon, there I was, sitting in the car on a gravel driveway next to an HVAC company, peering through the binoculars at a flock of blackbirds hoping to find the Rusty — and after about ten minutes, I did. Two, in fact. The Tri-colored never showed up, but the Rusty Blackbird was a life species for me (#321), and that was a nice addition to the trip.

Newport

After the stay in Bandon, we headed back north for three nights in Newport. Our stay was a place called Agate Beach Motel, a 1950’s era motor inn with about ten rooms, all of them one bedroom apartment studios. I’ve stayed here before, when we can get it — it’s very popular with the surfing crowd because of it’s access to a good beach, and with people who have big fluffy dogs. The owners have put a lot of work into updating and maintaining it, and are great people. It sits just south of Yaquina Head and has great views, and in fact one of the images I have on my wall was taken here a number of years ago.

Newport is near the center of Oregon’s coast, set on the bay where the Yaquina river meets the ocean. It’s a nice town, larger than Bandon with a couple of historic districts — the harbor area is one and a busy tourist area that includes, of all things, a Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Since we visited, that area was devastated by a fire that destroyed the main seafood processor in the region, and that’s going to impact the economy for a good while.

Also in Newport is the Oregon Coast Aquarium, a fun visit that I try to get to every time. It’s on the smaller side — I can usually wander through it in 2-3 hours — and it has a nice focus on the regional ecology and fish. As a bit of ancient trivia, this aquarium was one the home of the Killer Whale Keiko, the animal the film Free Willy! was made about. Now, it has sea otters, a really nice aviary full of seabirds and shorebirds (puffins!), another with turkey vultures, and some really nice, kid friendly tide pool exhibits, plus an area that has rotating themes.

Just north of Newport is Lincoln City, home of the regional outlet mall, which doesn’t seem to be doing well given how many empty spots we found, but was a good excuse to hit the Columbia Outlet to pick up a better winter coat. We spent our time here mostly wandering around and birding, but it was slow and we didn’t find anything all that special, but it’s a nice excuse to wander around and explore. Birding was so slow we didn’t bother to head up to Yaquina Head, a big summer bird nesting area, because we just didn’t see a reason — well, that and the lingering fog that we figured would plague us up there. Newport was also the one day we hit rain on the trip, which, given it was early October, is less than we expected.

A regular stop for food for me in Newport is, of all things, a place called Super Oscar’s, a little hole in the wall taqueria that’s part of a small regional chain on the coast. The other meal of note here was a place new to us, called the Gyro’s Guys, which was outstanding.

Seaside/Astoria/Cannon Beach

Our last stop on the trip was the north coastal area. I normally stay in Astoria, but neither Laurie nor I have spent much time in Seaside and so decided to stay there this time, at the Best Western Ocean View.

To be honest about it, my initial impressions of Seaside weren’t great. It suffers from quite narrow streets and so getting to the hotel felt like a bit of a rat maze. When I first saw the hotel, it’s paint job set a bit of a low expectation — that said, the inside of the hotel was in great shape, and we had a really nice room with a very good view of the very wide beach and the ocean. This is a place I’d stay in again, although I’ll probably shift back to the place I prefer in Astoria for future trips.

We explored from Long Beach (WA) in the north to Cannon Beach to the south. We spent time (as birders do) at the Cannon Beach sewage treatment settling ponds, where we found…. Mallards. Oh well. Laurie really likes to stay in Cannon Beach, so we wandered around there a bit, as well as through Astoria.

If Bandon reminds me of Morro Bay, then Cannon Beach reminds me of Carmel, CA. It’s a nice little town, and typically pretty crowded. On the south end, there’s an area known as Tolvano beach, where we ended up with a nice little surprise.

We parked at the beach to go look (in the distance) at Haystack Rock, and while there, Laurie pointed to the sand near us and said “that’a weird bird”. And it was — it was a Lapland Longspur. A few of them appear along the coast in winter, but for me, it was another lifer species (#322), quite a nice bonus on a trip with fairly quiet birding overall.

Three meals of note in this area: Mo’s Chowder is a regional chain with outlets up and down the coast, one at Tolvana beach, where I had a good bowl of chowder and some really nice fish and chips. We also dined at the Astoria Brewing Company along the water in Astoria, which is a good brewpub with solid brewpub food; think burgers, fish and chips, and Laurie had a really nice Reuben. Their beers are quite good, and they always have some nice ciders available, and their shakes are large and tasty, but this time, I went for a nice Italian side (because I’m boring these days, I guess).

The final meal was our breakfast as we headed home the last morning, where we stopped at Pig’N’Blanket in Astoria, which has become a tradition for me on these coast trips. That restaurant was, in fact, the first place I actually sat down in a restaurant to eat post Covid. They’re warm and welcoming, the food is solid diner food, and it was a great way to close off a fun ten days on the road.

My general take on Seaside is that it’s not for me. The retail and food options seem pretty clearly aimed at families — lots of arcades, fudge, and the like. I didn’t really enjoy driving through it, which is an artifact more of when the streets were laid out and not about how well maintained they are — it’s a nice town, just not the kind of town I prefer.

If I compare it to Bandon, I’d say that Bandon has learned how to embrace tourism, where Seaside feels like it’s chasing it. Seaside might be more interesting to me if I were 25, but today, it’s just note my vibe. I still prefer Astoria, which again, I’ll say reminds me of Morro Bay.

Tilamook

I do want to mention Tilamook, which is about 90 minutes south of Astoria. It’s a big dairy area, and as you might expect, is the home of Tilamook Cheese, which has a big factory outlet and restaurant along 101. It’s possible to find some of their limited quantity cheeses you won’t find in the supermarkets (their extremely aged cheddars, for instance) but most years, we don’t fight the crowds there, and instead head up the road a bit to a place called Blue Heron.

Blue Heron is another smaller, local creamery that has a shop with a focus on regional and artisanal goods. We stopped there on the way down to Bandon and stocked up on cheeses, crackers and sausages for our lunches on the trip, and on our way back north to Seaside, and we’re still finishing up some of the finds here back at home. It is well worth a stop to see what interesting tidbits you might want to grab

And then we headed home. The nice thing about this trip was that the longest driving leg was 5 and a half hours (Ridgefield to Bandon), and I do appreciate being able to get to or from Astoria in under three. I’d originally planned a couple of side trips on the way home to bird but I was ready to get back, so we skipped those and drove back directly.

And now I’m starting to ponder my next trip to the coast — perhaps to explore a bit more in places I’ve never really put much time in, like Florence or Depoe Bay. We’ll see what might happen.

Recent Photography

As I create new images and re-process older ones, I post them on my site in the Recent Work area.

Not much camera work this month, but I finished up the processing of the images on my Puffin Run that I mentioned last month (see the link above for all of the images). Laurie and I are spending some time on the Oregon Coast this month for some birding and, hopefully, photography, and we’ll see what happens.

For Your Consideration

Birds and Birding

Photography

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

Free Wallpapers just for Subscribers

New Wallpapers (November, 2026). A new set of 12 wallpapers are now available.

You can download this new set from the 6FPS Secret Wallpaper. The previous set of wallpapers are now with the full public set at Public Wallpaper page.

These are available only to you, my favorite people who happen to be subscribers to 6FPS. The previous set of images I released here are now available to the general public.

Download an E-book

I have eight e-books available. All are free for you to download and read with no obligation. You can download them from my e-book page on the web site.

These are the books that are available:

  • Birding 101: Hints and Tips for the New Birder

  • Merced National Wildlife Refuge

  • And the Geese Exploded: A Life With Birds

  • Birds of Santa Clara County

  • 2021.1: A Year of Transitions

  • 2020.1: Images from the year when Covid changed everything

  • 2019 (1)

  • 2019 (2)

About 6FPS

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com). 6FPS is Copyright © 2025 by Chuq Von Rospach. All Rights Reserved.

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Where to Find Chuq

Chuq Von Rospach

Birder, Nature and Wildlife Photography in Silicon Valley

http://www.chuq.me
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