Red is not good

Its a very pleasant shade of red but that doesn’t change the meaning.  Red means either a gale or storm warning.  I have a lot of difficulty getting my head around storm being worse than gale but either one can be nasty if you happen to have a lot of water stretching out in the direction the wind is coming from.  Fetch is the nautical term for the distance the wind has to work on the surface of the water.  The longer the fetch and/or the stronger the wind, the worse the waves.  We’re not getting bumped much today because our fetch is SE and the wind is southwesterly this morning.  We very rarely get much wave action here because we are protected by the government docks behind us.  If we get a sustained wind from the SE though it can get bumpy even this far into the marina.

Yesterday was another matter altogether.  We haven’t had many nicer winter cruising days than we had yesterday.

Some of the best boating advice we have ever received was from Captain Linda, about a month into our boat ownership adventure.  She said that if we wanted to be winter cruisers then we should just assume we would be boating in the rain and only worry about wind.  And her advice was very true for the Pacific North Wet.  It rains pretty well all the time out here – in the winter when it isn’t raining then the wind is blowing.  Yesterday however was a glorious winter day.  It wasn’t real warm and we didn’t see much sunshine but you can see the reflections in the pictures above.  It was dead calm for most of our trip home from Ladysmith.

We moved from Newcastle Island at Nanaimo down to Ladysmith two days ago.  That was a pretty uneventful move too. We slept in way past when we usually sleep in to and just barely had time left to make slack at Dodd Narrows.  We have a reciprocal dock at Ladysmith Yacht Club so the night only cost us $3 (because we wanted to plug in to the 15 amp power).  We always forget about Ladysmith but we need to remember it because it is a really cute spot and very conveniently located to catch the slack at Dodd Narrows.  Chemainus is equally convenient but they’re way too proud of their moorage and its not really great moorage because of the ferry dock next door.

I don’t know what they call these mini-tugs but they are really fun to watch.  I’ve seen even smaller versions that look more like a motorized barrel.  These guys at least look like a boat, albeit a very very small boat.  They zoom around the log booms sorting and pushing the logs into the mill.  They rock and roll so bad that at times it looks like they have to go right over but they never seem to.  Ladysmith is very much a working logging harbour.  I think the mills may all be owned by the same outfit now but there are several locations along the shoreline.  Tugs are coming and going with log booms all the time.

 

Newsflash

25,000 homes in the lower mainland without power this morning after the storms last night (the same ones that put all the red colour around the Island).  I wonder how many of the idjits that oppose smart meters realize that smart meters can report in so that repair crews know exactly which meters are off the grid?