Leaving Galveston on the Boliver Ferry

Having decided to pass up the chance to hunt for parking in the vicinity of the Pleasure Pier then hike the requisite distance back to the pier (ugh!) to photograph targets of opportunity, there was really nothing left to keep me from heading to the ferry. The wait, queued up for the ferry, wasn't horrible. It was a beautiful day. I was ready to be on my way but unconcerned with schedules. On the other hand, I was still 305 mi from home and had been up since 3AM.

Heading Northwest from the slip near the eastern end of Galveston Island, across the channel on Pelican Island a few points off the starboard beam is Seawolf Park. It was far enough away that I couldn't make out too much detail but I could, and did, record it for posterity. The Navy gray memory on the left is the Edsall-Class Destroyer Escort USS Stewart (DE-238). Center stage is the Gato-Class Submarine USS Cavalla (SS-244). And, what appears to be a black blockhouse on the right, is actually the sail or conning tower of the USS Tautog (SSN-639). Whether or not there's a special connection with these particular ships and Galveston, I don't know. I just shoot what's available. All three were damaged to some extent during Hurricane Ike in 2008, but things have apparently been put right in the years since.

Remember all the pelicans from yesterday's post? Today it's sea gulls. Remember the deplorable lack of sea gulls on my last trip on the Ocracoke Ferry in 2013? My first ride on the Boliver Ferry made up for it. Not having shot birds for awhile and as yet not fully comfortable with the new Canon, I neglected to reset the shutter speed for these shots. The focus was fine, but I really needed a faster shutter speed. Oh well, next time.

The variety of gulls here surprised me a bit. On the North Carolina Outer Banks. . . on my earlier trips. . . there had been almost certainly several different species (herring gulls, ring-billed gulls, and laughing gulls at least), but here all the gulls looked like they'd been cloned, the result of some mad Aggie scientist's fiendish experiments.

But given the paucity of birds on that last trip to OBX, I was happy to have these follow us across the ship channel to the Boliver Peninsula. The protocol here is apparently to feed the gulls from the aft ramp and the kids took their work seriously. If they were slow to part with their treats I have no doubt the birds would have snatched them from the kids' fingers. . . or snatched them and the kids' fingers.

On Hatteras and Ocracoke I saw geese and ducks, herons and egrets as well as gulls and pelicans. Here I saw pelicans at the seawall and over the ferry dock. And I saw gulls following the ferry. No sharing the same skies? Hold on. In the center of the picture, a quarter of the way up from the bottom edge, there's a nineteen-bird formation of pelicans. That will have to do for variety.