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Dave Duffy Blogging headline


Want to Comment on a blog post? Look for and click on the blue No Comments or # Comments at the end of each post.

Archive for the ‘Gold Beach Beat’ Category

Dave Duffy

Claire Wolfe to blog on BHM’s website

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

A series of Pacific storms has been hammering us for a week. Today the whole area lost power so I had to put on our emergency propane lights, which worked just fine.  Propane lighting is a great backup to electricity.

But the real big news is Claire Wolfe will begin blogging on the website as soon as we can get her blog set up. I’m delighted she has finally agreed to return to the web with a blog.

The wind was a fairly steady 40 mph at my house, gusting to 60.

Between candles and our backup propane lighting, power failures such as we now have don't bother us much.

Dave Duffy

A golfer’s dream course at Pistol River

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

Gold Beach High School player Matt Anderson tees off into the ocean from the proposed 15th tee box. The proposed green is to his right.

I got a guided tour of the upcoming Crook Point Golf Course this morning from Grant Hornbeak, project manager for what is destined to become the most beautiful and most-fun-to-play golf course in the western half of the United States. Due to open in the summer of 2011, I think it will surpass Bandon Dunes, 40 miles to the north, and Pebble Beach, south of San Francisco, which are Oregon and California’s best coastal courses. Pebble Beach will host this year’s U.S. Open.

I was invited to tour this new course because of my involvement with youth golf, specifically the Gold Beach Youth Golf Team which Backwoods Home Magazine sponsors.  In fact, the whole golf team was invited, along with the two high school coaches, Mark Hockema and Toby Stanley.

Grant Hornbeak, right, the project manager for the proposed Crook Point Golf Course in Pistol River, discusses the hole layout for Number 18 with GBHS Assistant Coach Toby Stanley, as Head Coach Mark Hockema looks on.

Toby Stanley, standing on the cliff that is the 18th tee box, points to the green across the ocean and beach on the far bank.

Thirteen of us spent a couple of hours in the occasional drizzle walking the rugged terrain, being careful not to fall off the several cliffs that overlook the Pacific Ocean. The sky alternately brightened and darkened and it rained for the second hour, but I got a few decent photos as you can see.

A dozen members and coaches of the Gold Beach youth golf team braved the rain for the tour. Grant Hornbeak shows us the layout of a hole on a map.

What a wonderful place this will be. It will become the “home course” for the Gold Beach High School team, so the Crook family, which has owned the land as part of the 4,000-acre Crook family ranch since 1857, thought we needed to have a look. In addition to the main course, which will be a major challenge to a rank amateur like me, they will build a special nine-hole short course that kids will be able to play free.

I got a chance to hit a golf ball off the tee box on Number 15.

The main course features several tee boxes perched on cliff outcrops. The greens are four and five hundred yards away over canyons that lead hundreds of feet down to the ocean. Talk about heart pounding excitement! I think it will be hard to keep your mind on the tee shot, what with a cliff straight down behind your back and the pounding of waves against sea stacks between you and the green. Whales also migrate by here on a regular basis, and fishing boats dot the horizon, attracted by waters made productive by the deep unwelling of cold water from the close-in continental shelf. You’d have to stop play just to take a photo of everything else that’s going on.

The Crook family has hired Dye Designs, which has designed championship courses around the world. Plans call for five holes along the water’s edge, another five high enough to afford panoramic ocean views, and eight winding through a spruce forest containing several streams. Ocean-front cottages will be available for rent by vacationers, and of course there will be a clubhouse and restaurant. Arcadia Vacation Homes will handle the cottage rentals. Seven are already built and available for rent now.

The course will cost about $135 to play, which is half the price of Bandon Dunes. This area could use a golf resort like this. It will bring both jobs and tourist dollars to our battered economy.

Dave Duffy

What if . . . global cooling has begun!

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Here’s an interesting story on CNN.com about how unusually cold the country has been, and there’s no sign of it letting up in the near term.

What if global warming disaster was totally wrong and instead the world is facing global cooling disaster, which means that we are about to go into a deep freeze with the top third of the United States and the top half of Europe under ice? Here’s an excerpt from my BHM Issue No. 116 editorial, “How do you save freedom in America”:

“Rather than global warming, earth is probably due to enter its next ice age. Global warming activists base their evidence on about a thousand years of climate change, but they conveniently ignore the much more compelling climate data of Antarctica ice cores which show temperatures and CO2 levels for the last 400,000 plus years.

In a well developed scientific model known as the Milankovich cycles, it is the tilt of the earth (varying over 41,000 years), the shape of earth’s orbit (varying over 100,000 years), and the earth’s wobble (varying over 26,000 years) that accounts for most of earth’s changing climate. This model has been under refinement by climate scientists since 1842, and as recently as 1999 the British journal Nature published a graph correlating Antarctica ice cores taken in the 1990s with the Milankovich cycles. It showed roughly 110,000-year cycles, with ice ages spanning about 100,000 years and warming trends lasting about 12,000. It has been 12,000 years since the end of the last ice age, but let any scientist bring up the possibility of global cooling rather than global warming too loudly and he will not only be labeled a kook, but run the risk of losing funding at his Big Government-supported university.”

The only question there is for the world is what is the actual length of the warming and cooling cycles that affect earth. Scientists know from ice cores that global warming comes on slowly, spanning tens of thousands of years, while global cooling comes on quickly, perhaps in as little as a decade or two. The geologic record indicates that global warming is now coming to an end and global cooling is at hand, but that could mean, in geologic time scales, that global cooling could be as much as 10,000 years off, but probably not more than that, or it could be only a few hundreds years, even less, away.

But what if . . . dum de dum dum . . . it has already begun, and this winter is our first “killer” winter!

I’m engaging in wild speculation, of course, but it’s not much wilder than the speculation about global warming. In fact, science is on my side. I have 400,000 years of ice cores backing up my wild speculation. Global warming doomsayers have about a thousand years of iffy data.

Global warming enthusiasts are correct though — the earth is warming. But it’s always warming, unless it’s cooling. It’s never not doing one or the other. The problem is that the ice core data tells us that warming is gradual and the last part of it, what we call the interglacial, lasts anywhere from 10-20,000 years, while cooling is relatively sudden and the really cold part of it lasts for about 100,000 years.

I don’t know about you, but that bothers me. In fact, it must really bother me because I talk about this subject in my December 7, 2009 post too.

Dave Duffy

Trying to catch crab the day after Christmas

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

Robby pilots boat back to dock with pelican escort perched on motor.

Lenie got me a crab hoist for my boat for Christmas, so naturally I had to go crabbing the day after Christmas. My three sons and Erik (my son-in-law who is home for Christmas leave) went with me. We were all very eager to go since the Dungeness crab season opened only a couple of weeks ago and big catches with big sizes are being reported. I had even gone out and bought four “better and heavier” crab pots because my new hoist would be doing the work of pulling them in.

But none of us bothered to check the ocean forecast. It was sunny with mid-50s temperatures, and I could see from my living room window that the ocean a mile and a half away had no white-caps. But after we launched the boat in Brookings and headed toward the mouth of the harbor, it was a different story. The sailboat in front of us did a 360 and headed back in. We put the boat in idle and looked at the swells breaking at the entrance, took in the flashing lights on the Coast Guard station warning about a dangerous bar, and watched the small-craft-warning flag flutter next to the flashing lights. Then we did a conference to see if we wanted to risk our lives for monster crabs. Jake did, his two younger brothers were undecided, but Erik and I decided to nix the trip.

On the way back to the dock a pelican hopped onto the main motor for a ride. I think he was expecting a handout, but we had nothing to give him. He didn’t leave until we docked and Sam tried to pet him.

After we got back to the dock and unlaunched the boat, I bought six crabs at the launch-side market that sold only crabs caught in local waters. They measured seven inches across, which is huge! You seldom find these crabs in the market.

I’ll check the bar and ocean conditions before venturing out tomorrow.

Robby and Erik and pelican

Sam got too close and the pelican finally left.

Jake holds a Dungeness crab that measured seven inches across.


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