Homer Spit harbor
— the harbour at the end of the road.
Not only on a wall.
Homer Spit harbor, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A four-and-a-half-mile gravel bar running out from Homer into Kachemak Bay, with the small-boat harbour at the far end. The Sterling Highway ends here. Charter halibut boats, the Alaska Marine Highway ferry, fishing skiffs, and a row of weathered cabins and chowder houses share the spit. Eagles work the cleaning tables in the evening. Across the water the Kenai Mountains close the bay. People walk the boardwalks at slack tide and watch the boats come back in. From the studio.
The place, in three passes.
Homer Spit is a long, narrow gravel bar reaching roughly 4.5 miles southeast from the town of Homer into Kachemak Bay. The spit holds the small-boat harbour, the Alaska Marine Highway ferry terminal, and a working strip of charter offices, cabins, and seafood shacks. It carries the southern end of the Sterling Highway, often described as the end of the road system in this part of Alaska. The 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake dropped the spit by roughly four to six feet, and the present surface has been built up and armored since to keep the road, the harbour, and the town's commercial fishing fleet in working order.
The spit is open year-round and most active from May through September, when the halibut and salmon charter fleets run daily from the small-boat harbour and the Alaska Marine Highway's ferry to Kodiak and the Aleutian chain calls at the dock. The Salty Dawg Saloon sits near the harbour entrance under its lighthouse-shaped roof, and a strip of seafood shops and chowder houses fills the half mile between the harbour and the parking lots. Walking the boardwalk at slack tide is the standard way to see it; tide swings of twenty-plus feet change the look of the harbour through the day.
Kachemak Bay is a roughly forty-mile arm of lower Cook Inlet, framed on the south side by the Kenai Mountains and the glaciers of Kachemak Bay State Park. Spring tides move more than twenty-five feet through the bay, which keeps the harbour basin flushed and the salmon and halibut runs strong through the summer. The bay supports one of the largest concentrations of bald eagles in the United States outside the Alaska Panhandle, and the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve protects roughly 372,000 acres of the bay and the surrounding watershed.
