The dogs and I reached the beach just before sunset.  At fifteen minutes before sunset, the sky and water were solid gray with just a couple of light patches in the sky.  I saw a black Labrador retriever swimming about 300 feet from shore.  Anyway, it looked like a black Labrador retriever, but given that it dove down to the sea bed looking for dinner, it must have been some other seagoing mammal.  I couldn't get a sense of the size from that distance, but it might have been a river otter or a harbor seal.  An otter can weigh up to 30 pounds and a harbor seal can weigh up to 300 pounds, so my guess is that this was a river otter.  At one point, I imagined that he was floating on his back, resting something on his chest, and manipulating it with his hands.  I took a video of him with my cell phone, but he ended up being about three dark pixels undulating in a field of solid grey. 

In the woods, it was so quiet that the faint gurgling of my hungry stomach was the loudest sound.  Down at the beach, it would have been just as quiet, but freighters sent breaking waves onto the beach.  It hadn't occurred to me before, but this is noise pollution. You think of waves as being natural sounds.  This evening, nature would have been perfectly silent.  It was unnatural commerce that created those waves.  I wish I had the inclination and habit of coming to the beach at dawn, so I could enjoy the silence as if all other humans had vanished.