Taking in a rugby match for the first time can be quite the experience. Not knowing the rules makes it a little challenging. Having former rugby players as your guides is certainly helpful!
The Seattle Seawolves, one of 13 teams Major League Rugby teams, faced off against the LA Giltinis in front of nearly 4,000 fans at Starfire Sports Complex.
The home team lost 12-31. A late 'try', crossing the goal line with the ball (worth 5 points), made the score somewhat respectable. The subsequent 'conversion goal', a drop kick worth 2 points, was unsuccessful.
Let's see if any of these are right....
Above a 'hooker', supported by a pair of teammates, attempts to receive a ball from a 'thrower' during a lineout. (This is how the ball is returned to play after going out-of-bounds.)
A 'hooker' attempts to throw the ball into a 'scrum'. They'll then attempt to retrieve the ball and pass the ball to the players in the backline (not pictured).
Protection is minimal. Just a couple of players wear soft protective helps to protect their ears during a scrum.
Passing must always be backwards.
Only a ball carrier may be tackled. Once down they must immediately release the ball and roll away allowing play to continue.
Jaume Plensa's "Echo" at the Olympic Sculpture Park. The 46 foot tall statue represents a Mountain Nymph that had offended the goddess Hera. To punish the nymph, Hera took away her ability to speak, except to repeat the last word of others. The statute looks across Elliott Bay and Puget Sound in the direction of Mount Olympus.
The Olympic Sculpture Park opened in January of 2007. Unocal had operated a fuel facility here from 1910 to 1975. The contaminated soil was removed and before the 9 acre sculpture park was opened 200,000 cubic feet of soil and 80,000 plants were put in place.
The parks sit on what was an industrial area that included oil and petroleum operations. Material from the excavation of some portions of Interstate 5 had even been dumped here. The land was purchased in 1972 and work began in 1975 to transform it from a rubble strewn toxic brownfield to the gem of a green space that it now is.
In 1976 "Adjacent, Against, Upon" was installed. The art installation partly in view here, is made of three concrete plinths and three huge granite boulders quarried in the Cascades. One is 28 tons and the other two weigh 45 tons.
The shoreline was restored to provide public access to the water as well and to improve the marine habitat with pocket beaches and kelp beds. Walking and biking trails run through the parks and connect with the rest of the Seattle waterfront.
Across the railroad tracks, is the landmark globe and eagle Seattle Post Intelligencer. The Seattle PI newspaper is longer in paper form, but the globe remains.
In random fenced lots south of downtown Seattle shipping containers are stacked eight high. How long have they been there? How long will they be there? Where are the cranes that stacked them? Why is there a tractor trailer on the top of one stack?
Shipping containers were invented in the 1950s in the US to more efficiently load, unload and transport cargo. However, in the 1970s most cargo in the world was still shipped without containers.
Shipping containers come in standardized sizes - TEU (twenty-foot equivalent) and FEU (forty-foot equivalent). They are designed to stack on top of one another and are locked into place on each of the four corners. (The first locking mechanism, still used today was developed in Spokane, Washington.)
While most container ships carry between a few hundred to a thousand TEUs, the largest container ship in the world can carry 12,413 TEUs - an incredible 29 million cubic feet of cargo space!
There are over 55,000 cargo ships in the world today and some twenty million shipping containers. If they were laid end to end they would stretch halfway around the world.
The larger FEU (forty-foot equivalent) containers have grown in popularity and there was a glut of the TEUs around the world as recently as 2020. That changed with the pandemic as the American consumer continued to buy goods. As the need for imports grew, so did the need for shipping containers. The demand in Asia for empty shipping container grew so much that in March of 2020 some companies were focusing resources in getting empty shipping containers back to Asia as quickly as possible. Today nearly 75% of the shipping containers from west coast ports headed to Asia are empty.
Apparently these shipping containers didn't get the word that they are needed.
Intermodal container trailers stacked four high fill a lot in an industrial area of Seattle.
Looking north, one gets a sense of the working nature of this West Coast port. From the pilings and moored barges, to the dockside gantry cranes located on the man made Harbor Island beyond the closed West Seattle Freeway is the downtown Seattle skyline.
The dredging of the Duwamish River began in 1913. The waterway was straightened and dredged as deep as 50' to allow ocean going vessels up the channel. The 20 million cubic feet of mud and sand from the Duwamish helped form Harbor Island. (Harbor Island was initially formed from some of the 58 regrades of the areas around downtown Seattle in which the tops of hills were removed. It was the largest man made island in the world from 1909 to 1938. In 1967 it regained that title following an expansion.) By the 1930s the Duwamish Waterway and surrounding area was Seattle's industrial and commercial core.
Industrial plants, including Boeing, and commercial facilities still line the waterway. Polluted by decades of industrial waste and sewage it is slowly being cleaned up. The paths to the river have numerous signs that warn against eating any of the resident fish, crab and shellfish (Dungeness Crab, mussels, clams, flounder and sole). It's hard to imagine that any warnings are necessary given the surroundings.
While the salmon that transit the Duwamish aren't considered a resident fish, the explicit warnings and the diagrams demonstrating cleaning and cooking techniques to minimize exposure to the PCBs found in salmon might give one pause to fish here.
