I took a weekday off and enjoyed a Wednesday morning sketch at China Camp State Park in eastern Marin County.

I headed to the old shrimp fishing village and walked down the pier to look for a good sketching perspective.

It looked like the beach to the southeast looked best. I walked down the beach and found a picnic bench and started my sketch.

Along San Pablo Bay there were many Chinese shrimping camps that fished for glass shrimp in the tidal waters of the bay. The camp at China Camp was founded in the 1880s and at one time contained 500 residents from Canton, China. The shrimp were brought ashore and dried at China Camp and then exported to China.

In the early 1900s, laws were passed limiting the amount of shrimp fishing in the bay, thus reducing the population of China Camp. By 1914 only the Quan family remained and they continued to fish for shrimp.

The Quan family continued to live at China Camp into the new millennium. They built a cafe and rented out boats to sports fishermen. Frank Quan lived in his cabin at China Camp until his death in 2016 at age 90.

The site eventually became a state park in the 1970s and one of the conditions of the site becoming a state park was that Frank Quan was permitted to remain living in the village.

While the Quan family is gone and China Camp village is a ghost of itself, fishing still continues on in San Pablo Bay in the form of the ultimate king fisher: Pandion haliaetus, the osprey.

A few stops up the road from the village is Buckeye Point. Jutting out from the point are pylons of a former pier. On one of these piers is an active osprey nest looking like a long legged bunch of sticks. Amid the bunches of sticks I could see the white head of an osprey.