coosbayandvicinity

We moved to Coos Bay in July of 1998. Janet had decided some time ago that this is where she wanted to retire. California is just too expensive. She found Coos Bay while looking for a place that her mom could afford. The two of them actually took a trip that encompassed the entire Oregon coast and this is the place they came back to. Unfortunately, her mom passed away in 1996. The first time I saw Coos Bay was when we came up here to take care of her mom's belongings and check on the little house she had lived in.

Coos Bay is a small city and one of three communities that is adjacent to the actual Bay, the Coos River and a variety of other waterways called sloughs. The bay is the deepest natural harbor between San Francisco and Seattle. It was once a major shipping port, but with the decline in lumbering, very few ships go in and out of here now. Most that do are here picking up wood chips for processing in Japan.

Coos Bay has a unique smell sometimes, due to the huge piles of woodchips waiting to be loaded for shipment. To me, it smells like a gin and tonic. I think that is because some of the wood is juniper and juniper berries are what they use to make gin.

The other communities that share part of the Bay are North Bend and Charleston. If you look at the whole area, there are probably around 30,000 people here. I guess Charleston is already considered part of Coos Bay since it shares the exact same zip code. About every 20 years someone suggests that Coos Bay and North Bend should merge into one city. Each time, Coos Bay has passed the vote and North Bend has voted it down for a variety of reasons. The last vote was May 2004 and it happened just that way again so I guess these will continue to be two unique communities for another 20 years or so.

Bandon is a small community about 25 miles south of Coos Bay. Bandon has a very cute downtown area called Old Town and that is the tourist center for that community. There are some lovely shops there and some wonderful restaurants that we enjoyed when we spent the weekend of my birthday there in 2001. Cranberries are a major agricultural crop in the area and they have a Cranberry festival near the end of the summer.

Bandon also has three championship golf courses that opened there in the late 90's and early 2000's. They are in the process of starting another which will be in the same caliber as the first three - way too difficult. They are all supposed to be highly rated in the golfing world and we hope it will only be a matter of time before a PGA event is hosted there. (So we can go watch ya know) We don't see ourselves playing there though - we get in quite enough trouble on the little 9-hole course that we frequent. Suffice it to say we buy used golf balls by the dozen. We'd need to buy them by the gross to play these other courses.

Charleston is a small community near where the ocean and bay meet. Most of the local fishing fleet is anchored in Charleston. They have a crab festival in August where a good time is had by all. Dungeness crabs are caught in this area. Amateurs can go crabbing just about any time, but you have to know how to tell the sexes apart and the crabs have to be a certain size to keep. I'm pretty sure you can only keep the males - who said being a woman wasn't a good idea?

The commercial fisherman start crabbing in December, and I guess the saying is the crab are best in months that contain an "R" in them. The same is true for clams I guess. I see people digging for clams and have no desire to follow suit. If I dug one up, I wouldn't know what to do with it, so it's better for both of us to leave well enough alone.

South of Bandon, about 10 miles, is a really neat animal park. We go there at least once a year. They have many exotic animals they breed there and the babies are hand-raised and shown to the visitors in a petting area. We've had the opportunity to pet a baby tiger, snow leopard, black bear cubs, panther cub, possum, white fox and apricot skunk.