2026-06-08 Rain Rain Go Away.....Dam tour!

There be Dams!

We had a pretty slow morning.  The forecast was for light and variable wind throughout the Columbia River Corridor, and rain throughout most of the day.  Unfortunately he forecast held true!

Blaine, Kent and I went to Sailworks.  Don't worry, Louise, I only bought a few washers - total cost $10.00.

Blaine and Kent decided to head to the Bonneville Dam for a tour.  It had been a lot of years since any of us had been to the Dam.  I remember Herman the Sturgeon, who was a 70 year old fish back then - I doubt he is still around.   

Kent and Blaine learned a lot....  The Bonneville Dam is one of the first dams built on the Columbia river in the 1930’s to provide power to Portland.   It was constructed where the river was partially blocked and narrowed by a massive slide hundreds of years ago.   The tour was self guided and lots of fun.   Kent particularly enjoyed the old photos and video of the river redirection and construction.   There are actually 3 dams, two power generating dams and one spillway for excess water.   There are also two fish ladders with underwater viewing of the fish moving upstream to spawn.   There are currently close to 100,000 fish a day using the ladders which is amazing considering that this is not the big fall spawning run.   Dams are considered extremely important infrastructure for flood control, power generation, navigation, and irrigation.  

Because Blaine looks like such a suspicious character, they insisted on searching his van before letting him into the area.   Lucky they let "his kind" in at all!  

Kent said that this was a great way to spend a day in the rain!  If you are interested in more information about the dam, here is a link to the Bonneville Dam Wikipedia Site.

Kent

Ross spent most of the day working, and cleaning up the condo and preparing the basement in preparation for Robert's arrival tomorrow.

I spent most of the day working on my racing quad's organizing and consolidating the software to take advantage of some new features.... basically I had a mess that wasn't organized, and I had been waiting for an opportunity to spend a day sorting it all out.  It involved lots of rabbit holes, but by the end of the day I got it working pretty much the way I wanted it to.

We had a quiet evening again.  Some of us watched the Blue Jays game which was a bit of a disappointment.  They had great opportunities with 2 on base and the winning run at the plate, both in the 8th and 9th inning, but they just couldn't get a hit, even though they had their big hitters at bat!

We are looking forward to getting on the water again tomorrow, assuming the forecast holds!!

Thanks to Blaine and Kent for the  photos!


Blaine was impressed with the hose nozzle!

Fish Ladder

Spillway






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