This rock houses Common Murres (birds). You could stand and listen to all the birds and when looking through binoculars you could see birds everywhere on the rock even along the steep cliffs.
We all took turns looking through Wes' binoculars. Adelle had a hard time seeing things though and would get frustrated.
Lydia looking through the binoculars.
All of the trails were so green and you could hear the birds chirping all around.
We got down to the lighthouse and realized it wasn't going to open for another hour or so. So we did some more exploring before coming back to the lighthouse.
We all enjoyed looking at the various plants and flowers along the trails. There were large, fuzzy bees that were very attracted to these pink flowers.
We found this large guy along the trail. It is called a banana slug and is absolutely HUGE!
We went up the trail to the Octopus Tree. This tree is 105 feet tall an is estimated to be 250 to 300 years old. The tree has no central trunk, but instead the limbs branch out looking like and octopus.
We saw this view down to the ocean. You can see three arches rocks and the beach. The sea caves are actually down somewhere on that beach.
Once the lighthouse was open we went inside and climbed the short staircase to the top.
The lighthouse is made with many glass prisms. This lighthouse has both red and white panels to signal out to sea. The lighthouse is no longer in operation and is maintained by volunteers.After exploring Cape Meares we headed back to our place to have lunch. We had set up an appointment to go crab fishing in Netart's Bay and we were all really excited.
We headed to Netart's, rented our boat and headed out into the bay.
The bay is surrounded by sand bars or spits as they are called and keeps the water pretty smooth. Would you like to know how to crab fish? I'll give you some crabbing tips!
Make sure you have your life jackets!
A beautiful girl to throw out and pull up your anchor.
Crab rings with bait. In our case we used large, dead fish. The rings, bait and supplies were all provided with the boat rental. First, you go out into the bay looking for deeper water. The water will be darker where it is deeper. Once you have found your spot throw out one of the crab rings. You keep doing this until you've thrown out all your rings. We had three. You wait a bit (we usually didn't wait too long) and then you go pull up your rings.
Wes pulled up a lot of the rings, but in the end I helped too. 
He was also our handy boat driver. You get all wet and stinky pulling up the crab rings, but it is fun. We weren't very lucky this time out.
Even though there were five crabs in this ring they were all too small or were female. With Dungeness there are very specific laws that need to be followed. They need to be big enough (you have to specifically measure) and they have to be male.
You can keep as many as these Red Rock crabs that you find regardless or their size or sex. We only got one of these guys. He was actually missing a claw. Can you see it? We headed further out into the bay hoping we would have better luck, but our rings actually started coming up completely empty. We tried one more time to throw our rings out, without any luck.
Wes even wired in some extra bait, but unfortunately it didn't yield results for us.
This seagull followed us around most of the time hoping for our bait. He did get lucky a couple of times. We saw a seal following us too.
We did catch two of these scary looking crabs. They are called spider crabs. They went right back into the bay. Since we only had the one Red Rock we threw it back since it wouldn't feed all of us, especially since it only had one claw. We headed back to the bay thinking we were out of time. Come to find out that we actually had rented the boat for 3 hours instead of 2 which really disappointed us! It was too late to go back out, but I bet if we had stayed another hour we would have caught some dinner.Everyone felt sad including Adelle who started crying. Everyone at the boat rental shop was looking at us. Honestly Wes and I felt a little dumb. We were all smelly and wet so we headed back to our apartment to get dry clothes on.
Since we didn't catch our own crab we went out to eat crab. It was expensive and honestly we could have gone crab fishing two more times for the amount of money that dinner cost, but crab fishing is pretty physically exhausting!
This was our view at the Pirate Cove's restaurant overlooking Tillamook Bay.
What a face! We didn't catch any crab :( Wes made this face at my request.
Wes digging into the crab!
Lydia loving every yummy bite!
Adelle even pushed aside her crab melt sandwich to try her hand at getting her own crab meat.
We then headed to the store, bought a few movies, and headed back to our place to settle in. Even though we didn't catch crab it was still a fun day.
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