Attack of the Spider Protestors!!!

(picture borrowed from http://ukdf.blogspot.com/2008/10/that-camel-spider-urban-mythand-answer.html)

This story is not about camel spiders, but since I have a friend who is about to deploy to Umm Qasr (stay safe Jim!), and I couldn't find any pictures on-line to explain this situation graphically, I decided to share with you these scary, hairy arachnids.  I have no idea what the two pictured above are doing.  You have to read the blog I found the picture in to get more details.  Yikes!

I seem to be in a Seattle mode lately, and this story is one from 1997, when I first returned to Washington State to attend graduate school at the Univ. of Washington's School of Marine Affairs.  While I was looking for a place to live, I stayed with my friend Lynn in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle.  She has going out with a local Seattle-ite (there really aren't too many of these, but lots of pretenders...) named Noel.

It seemed like in the first week or so I was in Seattle, several Greenpeace protesters attached themselves to the Aurora Bridge and rappelled down until they were suspended only a few meters above the water.  They did this to prevent 'wasteful' (their term, not mine) factory trawlers from departing Seattle for the Bering Sea.  They had a net that they attempted to  string from one person to the next, intending to block the entire width of the waterway.

Noel was a former sailor on some of the NOAA ships which travelled to the polar regions, and he had purchased a surplus skiff from NOAA.  He proposed that the 3 of us get underway in his boat and see what was going on.  I rarely turn down a boat ride if the weather is good, so ......

Once we got on scene, I started to have second thoughts.  There was a Seattle PD officer on the north side of the channel, shouting things like, "you are in violation of a U.S. Coast Guard security zone!"  And, "you are subject to arrest for blocking the channel!"  The first statement made my heart skip a beat, as I didn't want to be a Law Enforcement case for my own agency.  The second statement just made me laugh, as the only two vessels in the channel were us (in a ~20 foot small boat) and one guy in a kayak.  If you click on 'the channel' link above, you will see that there is a lot of territory for navigating among the spider protesters.  They were able to turn back two trawlers, then their net malfunctioned, and a third trawler got through.

We talked to a few of the spider people for maybe half an hour, with Mr. SPD yelling at us the entire time.  Since he didn't have a boat, and no Coasties were showing up, I hoped for his sake that he had some throat lozenges in his pocket.  There was a rigid hull inflatable boat at a floating dock on the south side of the channel.  He was the support boat for the 'spiders', throwing food up to them, and presumably receiving bags full of soiled Depends products that they were using to deal with processed foods and liquids.

I admire their dedication to their cause, but apparently it wasn't important or successful enough to record for posterity on their web site.  [Or maybe my searching skills just leave something to be desired.]