Beach camping on the Homer Spit

We're camping right on the beach of the Homer Spit surrounded by snow covered mountains. The spit is a long sandy/rocky causeway reaching out into the Kachemak Bay (saltwater). 

After we set up camp we saw the strangest thing. A guy with a windrider trimaran (without the mast/sail) was using it with a kite surfing setup. It was quite windy and he seemed to be doing pretty good with the setup, but it looked like a physically demanding chore to maneuver it. When he beached it, I went out and talked with him and concluded he's partially crazy. He knew a lot about kite surfing but using the boat with the kite was fairly new to him. However on this trip he forgot his paddle and also told me if the kite goes into the water while sailing the boat, it's almost impossible to relaunch the kite unless he gets in the water and abandons the boat and then sail back to the boat and somehow sail into the seat which is not really a good idea in high seas if you want to keep all your bones intact. But he said he did it once even though it about killed him. 

When he pulled the boat in, the surf was slamming the rudder into the sand and I couldn't bear looking at it being abused like that so I mentioned something about his rudder getting beat up. He said “oh yeah … that rudder is bent and I'm going to have to get it fixed somewhere”.

The first day here was sunny and cool during the day but later on the rain began and it poured through the night. The next morning we decided to drive around the Homer area to explore because the rain looked like it wasn't going to let up. Homer has a big artist community so we found a good place to see some of the local art and then visited the Pratt Historical and Science museum which was fascinating. Many interesting exhibits with stories of homesteaders and stories of the sea and the storms they experienced over the years. We highly recommend this museum if you're going to be in Homer.

When we left the museum, the rain had stopped and it turned into a nice sunny day so we got our chairs out and sat on the sunny beach behind our 5'er. We got to know the family next to us from Anchorage and we built a campfire on the beach together even though it stays sunny until around 11pm. It felt a bit strange wearing sunglasses while sitting around a campfire. Yvonne and I were all bundled up with winter coats and it felt cold to us with the wind blowing. It was around 47 degrees. The Alaskans with us were barefoot and the teenagers only wore short sleeved shirts.  Utter insanity to us. However they were nice like minded people and we enjoyed talking with them around the fire. They told us to be thankful for the wind because mosquito season is upon us and they said the mosquitoes will completely engulf your body. The last time we were in Alaska they weren't bad and so far we've only seen a couple big lumbering slow mosquitoes. A lot easier to dodge than the fast sneaky Florida mosquitoes. We brought headnets and a lot of deet just in case.

Even though Homer is the Halibut fishing capital of the world, we decided to not go on a fishing charter and spend $500.00 to crank a heavy fish into the boat. Then we would have to pay to have the fish processed and shipped home since there's no way we could fit it into our tiny freezer. I'm not at all a fan of charter boat fishing so we instead bought a nice piece of Halibut and cooked it on the beach with a cold beer.

Next we'll head north and inland stopping along the way to get an oil change for the truck if we're lucky.