Whatever you do don't fall asleep.

We got back last night from a short family jaunt to the Oregon Coast where we stayed at a rental house. The weather was perfect and we had a terrific time.

We had a bunch of relatives from around the country staying with us so I did my favorite thing to do when we've got land-lubbers with us; take them out on the bay crabbing. I've been going to the Wheeler Marina in Wheeler on the Nehalem Bay since I was eighteen. Really inexpensive boat rentals and you always fill up a cooler with Dungeoness crab.

It's about a half-hour boat ride out to the inlet of the bay where the crabbing is good. The area is beautiful. Lots of wildlife. We saw several types of firds including stork. I haven't been out where we weren't checked out by seal or two.

Crabbing is pretty easy. You wire a frozen fish head to the bottom of a ring and then toss it off the boat just about where you think the crab might congregate. Then you just go from ring to ring quickly pulling the rings to the boat so the crab can't jump off. In practice this means you have lots of little crabs running around your boat. This is the part I love because it usually means people who've never picked up a live crab are screaming in terror.

Back at the house we had a crab feast capped by watching the sunset on the beach and hot-tubbing under the stars. It's times like this I love being an Oregonian.

He's a dreadful magician.

I'll be out of the pocket this weekend (dontcha just love business speak?) and at the coast enjoying crab, the fresh air off the Pacific ocean, the company of my t.v. killin' missus and an enormous storm that just seems to have swept through the state. 50 foot surfing waves.

Yee haw!

In the meantime - could someone explain to me why magician David Blaine is such a jerk?

I think that I am familiar with the fact that you are going to ignore this particular problem until it swims up and bites you on the ass.

Sometimes an escape from reality via vacation can bring you face to face with reality.

The family and I spend the bulk of the week camping at Nehalem Bay State Park on the Oregon coast. Mrs. Wormer (when she sees herself called that- I die) have heading to the same area for about fifteen years, long before we were married and well before kids. It's a beautiful area with tons of stuff to do and one of the best places to partake in one of my favorite camping activities at the coast: crabbing.

This year I took the kids out with me for the first time on the crabbing run. Stuffed into lifejackets like bacon-wrapped hors d'oeuvres we climbed into the rental boat and sang old sea shanties ("Gilligan's Island") on the long trip out to the mouth of the bay to drop our rings and seek our crustaceany fortune. We had devised a strategic plan for placement of the rings; with the rings distributed in more-or-less a triangular pattern that the kids dubbed the "Crabmuda Triangle." No crabs would survive the triangle.

Alas, the sea gods weren't with us at the start and it looked like we weren't going to pull up any keepers. Nevertheless, we were determined to have a good time and other critters that inhabit the area were obliging. A huge flock of gulls came by appearing to be attacking a pair of seals until we saw the dark mass of fish they were following. Here's a pic-

(Likes fish - hates gulls)

Then our crabbing luck turned. Usually, when we're crabbing the crabs we keep measure barely big enough to be legal. Not this time. The kids pulled up a lunker. This was the kind of crab you buy at the supermarket that's been caught by professional deep-sea crabbers. This was a frickin' sea monster. This was MEGA CRAB.

(Prefers COLD water baths)

To say me and my three little Gilligans were excited would be an understatement. We nearly tipped the boat over we were so excited. In my fifteen years of recreational crabbing I had never caught anything near this big. The kids couldn't wait to show mom what they'd caught. The Wormers would feast tonight!

After dinner we went to an open-air presentation put on by the park rangers entitled "What does anything have to do with the price of shrimp?" It covered pollution, touched on global warming (the ranger called it "controversial" obviously in deference to the slope-brows in the audience) and the so-called "dead zones" off the Louisiana coast in which no wildlife can live in the oxygen-depreciated environment. Thus - the price of shrimp goes up as shrimpers have to go further out to sea to catch the little buggers.

Here's where reality pimp-slapped me out of my vacation reverie. Yesterday's paper had this article on, appropriately enough, dead zones off the Oregon and Washington coast.

'Dead zones' spread, thicken off NW coast

Oceanic wastelands may be becoming more severe, researchers say

A vast pool of oxygen-starved seawater is killing fish and crabs along the Oregon and Washington coasts, creating an offshore "dead zone" that is poised to spread its lethal fallout even wider.

The eerie phenomenon, which suffocates marine life that cannot move fast enough to escape, has emerged as an unsettling coastal presence in recent years. Dead zones also struck the Oregon coast with varying severity in 2002 and each year since, sometimes leaving fish scattered lifeless across the ocean floor.

Oregon State University researchers suspect the episodes have been more common and severe in the past few years, signaling increasingly unpredictable ocean behavior tied to winds and currents. That matches predictions that global warming trends may cause wilder swings in Earth's climate.

The linked article doesn't show the map highlighting the dead zone but it's spreading North towards Tillamook and Nehalem.

It is not "controversial" that human activity contributes to global warming. I know this. I also believe very strongly that governmental action needs to be taken to slow global warming. I support political leaders that share this view. That's the macro.

The micro is that something I've loved an appreciated for almost half my life and just began to share with my children might be going away soon, perhaps forever. This makes me very, very sad.