On Wednesday the 18th, I got done with work a little late and then went down to Stanley Park to have a walk and shoot some photos. My sighting of a Double-crested Cormorant in Surrey a couple of days before had piqued my interest in this species and I vaguely recalled that the cliffs of Stanley Park were supposed to be home to many of them. Besides that, there's a pond or lagoon there that is supposed to be a good place to find scaup. (Scaup are ducks, and they come in two varieties: Lesser and Greater.)

I ended up parking near the swimming pool at about 7 pm and heading out towards the water. It was quite a nice evening, and lots of people were out biking, rollerblading, and walking on the seawall. I joined them, and had been walking for fifteen or twenty minutes when a cruise ship passed on its way out of port.

As you can see in the photo above, the day was a little hazy, but that promised an interesting sunset.

Every couple of minutes, a cormorant or two would fly by, close to the water.

I always hoped that the next turn of the seawall would bring me around the cliff to a place where I could see where the cormorants were coming from or going to, but that never happened. It seemed they were always headed further around the bend.

I kept walking and went under the Lion's Gate Bridge. Right after that, I encountered a number of fishermen with nets on long poles. They were fishing for smelt, or at least, for something that sounds like "smelt" when filtered through their thick accents and my poor hearing. When a school of fish would show itself near the surface of the water, they would dip in their nets, dumping their catch in big plastic buckets when the school had passed.

The sun was getting fairly low and I didn't walk much further before deciding to turn around. I had gone about halfway around the seawall, but walking the other half didn't appeal to me as there would be less light on that part of the seawall than on the part I had just walked. I took a few shots from where I turned around. This one is a shot across the water to the docks in West Vancouver. It shows a sulphur port on the right (the yellow mound is sulphur) and some seagulls in the foreground.

Here's one taken westward, showing some of the docks of Vancouver.

It was now a quarter after 8:00 and the sun had slipped behind the mountains to the west. I had paid for parking until 9:00, so I had to pick up the pace on my return.

I did stop and take a few more pictures, though. Here's one--the silhouette of a cormorant that had landed relatively close to the seawall.

And here's a look at a fisherman and some others on the seawall in the sunset. The fishermen had spread out a bit from where they were before.

My final subject of the day was a boat headed out of the harbor in the sunset.

I made it back to my car a little after 9:00. I had run out of sunlight on my little expedition and hadn't made it to the lagoon to check out the scaup. That was okay with me, however, as I was wearing some new sandals (orthotic sandals!) and my feet were hurting from the adjustment to them. I don't think I would've gone any further even if I had had the daylight.

Happy to be resting my feetsies,
Tom