Life Well Lived
- skagitjack
- Nov 15
- 8 min read
A dear friend passed away a few days ago. He was a force for good wherever he went.
He grew up near Oregon’s ocean beaches, and salt water was in his blood.
I guess that’s true of us all, literally. Our blood still carries the memory of primordial waters, whispering ancient knowledge that connects us to the depths of the sea and our earliest origins.
“The water in our cells is the same as the water at the bottom of the ocean. I love the kinship that chemistry implies.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer
Local tribes emphasized the connection between the two. The story pole at Rosario Beach tells of KoKwalAlWoot, the maiden who gave up her human life to become a life-giving partner with the sea, ensuring eternal sustenance to her people.
Kath, Murphy, and I visited Bowman Bay and Lighthouse Point a few days ago, reflecting on memories of our departed friend while enjoying a warm November day. We huffed and puffed over the ridge leading to Lottie Bay, then onto the sandy tombolo. In the summer, this beach is a wide sandbox, inviting play and sandcastles and drawing pictures to be erased with the next tide. But in November, it was buried in sea lettuce and draped with piles of bull kelp, washed ashore by recent storms.
It’s hard to grasp how fast bull kelp grows. These are annual plants, mostly. Last fall’s plants released spores that attached to an underwater rock and eventually started growing a holdfast, which develops a long, hollow stem (the stipe) with a bulb at the top. This bulb then grows fronds to better gather sunlight. And it grows, and grows, and grows, reaching for the surface to float on top. Depending on how deep the rock was where it started, the bull kelp might be twenty, forty, or even sixty feet long by late spring.
It grows that much in just a few months!
Bull kelp creates a rich, underwater ecosystem where hundreds of species thrive. These ocean forests are as diverse and abundant, and as important for life on earth, as any of our terrestrial forests. These nearshore forests create habitats for countless other organisms, from tiny isopods and the larval stages of sea stars, crabs, sea urchins, and other animals to mature urchins, abalone, anemones, fish populations of all sorts, seals, juvenile salmon, sea otters, and almost 900 species of other seaweeds.
After releasing spores to seed the next generation, kelp eventually begins to deteriorate in late summer, eventually breaking off and feeding its nutrients back into the sea or onto the shoreline, such as at the beach where we now played.
Above: the holdfast, the interior of the stipe, and the remaining fronds lying on the beach
I picked up a kelp bulb and twirled the stipe around, first like a helicopter, then a beach whip, then a piece of rope. Then I cut the stipe open and began playing a trumpet solo. Check out the ten-second video!
We walked around Lighthouse Point, watching two sea lions cavorting in the Pass, a liquid dance of love and future life; chatted with kids and adults soaking up the sea and sun; envied a kayaker rounding the point on the ebbing tide; and soon saw a seal fishing in the thinning kelp forest that remains. Or is it the hair of KoKwalAlWoot floating on the surface?
Southside of Lighthouse Point; families gather to watch marine life; two sea lions cavorting
Kayaker paddling out of kelp; West Point and the Olympics beyond; kelp still hanging on
Back to the sandy beach we went, where we discovered that kids had just made a heart shape out of a kelp body, and filled it in with the remains of sea lettuce.
The love goes on. These lives have been well lived.
As we walked back to Bowman Bay, I gave a salute in love to our friend’s life, remembering his love of this planet and the people he cared about and served.
A life well lived.
In memoriam, Dick.
jack
RICHARD “DICK” KENT
November 29, 1940~November 2, 2025
ANACORTES, WA —
A child of the sea, Dick Kent was raised in Coos Bay, Oregon. He grew up exploring the coastal waterways, fishing, sailing, clamming, and finding his life-long love and passion for that small white mollusk, the Oyster. That child of the sea became a man of the sea, working for its care and conservation. As his life partner Glenda notes, his stomach rose and fell with the tides.
Dick was a man of many talents, full of ideas with an inventive mind, constantly thinking of new ways to fix and make things, many of them centered around his passion for energy efficiency, solar energy, and treading lightly on our environment. Among his many endeavors, he bought and operated an airport, built small, efficient homes, helped start and run a solar business, and invented a way to look at nuclear reactions by bending light. He was always aware of the positions and phases of the sun and moon. He never lost his curiosity and enthusiasm.
A lifelong and early evangelist of solar, Dick would say solar is free, democratic, and shines on rich and poor.
Dick Kent touched so many lives. He was there if you needed help with a project, a fix, or help working through problems or addiction. Not so good at idle chit chat, he would dig into life issues, what was going on, good or bad, and lend a hand.
A long-time resident of Bay View, Anacortes, and the PNW, Dick is survived by his partner in love and adventure, Glenda Alm, his sister Betty Lorsung, and a loving, extended family and many dear friends.
As Rumi wisely said, “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
If you wish to learn more about Bull Kelp, read on:
Nereocystis luetkeana
The name derives from Greek, combining "nereo-" (from Nereus, a sea god) and "-cystis" (meaning bladder), translating to "mermaid's bladder.” The species name "luetkeana" honors the German naturalist and explorer Eduard Lütke, who collected specimens during his expeditions in the North Pacific.
Kelp have the most differentiated bodies of all the seaweeds and bull kelp has, perhaps, the most extraordinary form of all the kelps. The bull kelp stipe is a long rope of tough, cortical material that can stretch up to 38% to give and take with the ocean current. It emerges from a small holdfast anchored to a rocky substrate and ends in a single bulb, or bladder, shaped like an oversized avocado. The blades, streaming out from the bladder—or pneumatocyst—multiply at four source points into as many as sixty ribbons of thin golden fronds. The entire kelp body is called the thallus. In springtime, baby kelps, in various stages of development, reach for the surface, their golden bladders no bigger than your thumbnail, their four golden blades, catching the sunlight, radiating its wonder in their molten translucence. These young Nereocystis use the power of sunlight and the nutrients of the ocean to perform one of the greatest feats of metabolic growth on our planet; they will become a massive and majestic bull kelp in only a matter of months.
Nereocystis luetkeana is, generally speaking, an annual. The entire organism grows anew each season, typically starting in late winter or early spring, and for six months that growth is astounding. The long, singular stipe (or stalk) grows in a reverse taper, from thin at the bottom to thick towards the top. It can grow 6–10 inches a day and reach heights of 60–100 feet in a matter of months, slowing once the bladder senses proximity to the surface. This stupendous growth is all in the service of efficient photosynthesis—getting the blades closer to sunlight to catch as many photons as possible. After about two hundred days, or with the onset of winter storms, the entire organism dislodges from the ocean floor, holdfast and all, and washes away, sinking as it breaks up, or tumbling onto sandy beaches. This bull kelp wrack, in turn, fuels other food webs. Some individuals, produced late in the season, may successfully overwinter and survive a second year, up to 18 months. These can be recognized as old growth, grandmother bull kelps, usually with plenty of other algae (epiphytes) and bryozoans growing on them.
The molecules in cold water are packed more tightly together than in warm water, so cold ocean water holds a greater density of nutrients than warmer, tropical water. This is why kelp grows in temperate regions around the globe; they need the nutrient-dense, cold waters that fuel their prodigious growth.
Kelp forests temporarily store a staggering amount of carbon—approximately 20 times more per acre than forests on land—which helps temper ocean acidification in coastal waters.
A mysterious disease had broken out in our neck of the Pacific, annihilating sea stars, including one critically important species, the sunflower sea star. A voracious predator, the sunflower sea star is one of the world’s largest and fastest sea stars. “Fastest” is a relative term, of course. These unlikely hunters once ruled the reefs from Baja California to the Aleutian Archipelago, feasting on just about anything, with a preference for urchins, mussels, and other shellfish.
As billions of sunflower sea stars have wasted away, native purple sea urchin populations have exploded in nearshore waters. These ravenous kelp consumers have sustained more than a 10,000% increase in population along the North Coast since 2014. And without a top predator to keep them in check, they do what any animal would: They eat until there’s nothing left. Hordes of native purple urchins are devouring kelp faster than it can reproduce. They eat the blades. They eat the stems. They even gnaw right through the plant’s base, causing it to detach from the sea floor, float away, and die. And if any newly sprouting spores should appear, urchins will chomp them before they have a chance to grow. Many of our kelp forests look more like clearcuts now than forests.
For even further information:
Studies show that between the years of 1912 and 1978, canopy-forming Bull Kelp increased substantially, with the largest relative increases in South and Central Puget Sound, Washington.
However, from 1978 to 2013, there were conspicuous declines in the abundance of floating kelp beds throughout the area. Research by Helen Berry, Washington DNR's Manager of the Nearshore Habitat Program, suggests a continued decline in bull kelp through 2013 to 2016 in central and south Puget Sound, Washington.
As floating kelp beds continue to diminish in the Salish Sea, concerns for the decline and overall disappearance of pristine spawning and nursery habitats of pacific herring, juvenile rockfish, and other marine wildlife grow ever so quickly.
https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/kelp-forest/ : The Nature Conservancy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTNlias7AWI included in The Nature Conservancy story above
Hakai Magazine, The Importance of Kelp:
The Power of Kelp:
Researching kelp in the Salish Sea: Tribal production/PS Restoration Fund:
https://bullkelp.info/ incredible image
https://bullkelp.info/characters/bull-kelp great website
DNR studies of PS kelp:
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