Getting back to normal

We've all been there.  You finally get on the airplane, everybody is getting settled, they're almost ready to close the door and then the pilot comes on the intercom.  "I'm sorry folks but we've got a very minor problem with this airplane (that supposedly is serviced regularly by very highly paid union employees).  We'll need to resolve the problem before we can leave but it will only take a few minutes so I'll just ask you all to remain in your seats while we get this sorted out.  It will only take 15 or 20 minutes."  Then maybe 40 minutes or an hour later he'll give you the same bullshit story and after a couple of hours of your life have drifted by they'll finally admit that their highly paid maintenance staff haven't the faintest bloody clue what the problem is so they'll eventually unload you and herd you like cattle into another steel culvert at another gate.

It wouldn't be so bad if they'd just tell you up front - "We dunno WTF is going on or why this is happening, its going to take a long bloody time to figure it out, we don't have another plane to move you to even if we wanted to which we don't, you're just royally screwed so sit down, shut up and suck it up."  Of course they're never even close to that honest.  Well, the local healthcare system is just about that bad.

We spent 3 days getting told "surgery mañana".  In Mexico the literal translation of mañana is tomorrow but what it really means is "not right now".  On rare occasions it may actually mean tomorrow but it could also mean next week, next month or even not in this lifetime.  The big problem with "surgery mañana" is the attendant "nothing to eat today."  After having thrown up all Saturday night Marilyn was getting pretty hungry by Tuesday night.  On Wednesday morning we were assured that mañana meant that very afternoon at 4:00.  They finally got around to doing the surgery at midnight and then they almost tripped over themselves to get her kicked out of the hospital by noon on Thursday.   I did get a chance to thank the surgeon before I explained to him that if this is "normal" for the BC healthcare system then we're really thankful to be SK residents.

Marilyn wasn't very active yesterday (Friday) but she's been pretty active today.  Her appetite failed her Thursday night but its coming back now.

I had another big crab harvest today.  I think I've got the meat of 23 crabs in the freezer now.  I should get a couple more hauls so another 10 or maybe 15 to take back to the prairies.  We had hoped to catch some prawns after the season opens on April 1 but I think that is off the agenda now.  Our trap capture system depends heavily on Marilyn catching the line with a boathook while lying on her belly on the foredeck.  That's probably off the table for the immediate future. Her at the helm with me on the foredeck is likely a complete waste of time to say nothing of how frustrating it might be for both of us. So we'll go home with a freezer full of crab instead.

Our slip neighbours are from the Yukon.  They just finished up a year on their boat and left to go back to the Yukon today.  We're not the only ones with boating schedules that don't fit the standard mould.  

We've been watching the weather on the prairies and counting the days until we leave.  10 more sleeps until we leave.  My university summer reunion group is having a spring get together in Saskatoon which - very conveniently - is going to coincide with our passage through Saskatoon so we'll take a couple extra days to get home.  I talked to the Mayor the day Marilyn got out of jail and there was still snow on the ground in the village so there's no immediate rush to get back there yet.

Very bad day

Marilyn woke me up at midnight complaining of chest and back pains.  She didn't think it was serious enough to do anything about but she kept getting worse as the night went on and by morning there was no doubt that she needed to go to emerg. So that's what we did. 

As emergency rooms go this wasn't the worst I've been in.  Not that I have such an extensive experience but I have been through a few of them over the years.  Mind you, on a couple of those occasions I was suffering from severe concussion and actually have no recollection of most of my time there let alone details about the experience. 

This time it was my job to just be there while they attended to Marilyn and they did a pretty good job of it, eventually arriving at the conclusion that she has a swollen pancreas.  They need to call it "Pancreatitis" just so they can use a $54 word and show off their years of medical training but its a swollen pancreas nonetheless.  And as near as I can tell from Dr. Google, when it comes on suddenly like this attack did, the prognosis is likely to be good.  She'll need to spend a couple of nights in the hospital while they poke and prod her and draw blood mainly so that they can pad the bill they send to Sask Mediscare but also so they can watch to see if its just going to go away on its own or if they need to actually do something to make it go away.

So for the first night in a very long time we'll be sleeping apart and it feels very lonely on the boat. 

Other than our big adventure this morning there's not much happening in The Bay.  I've been pulling my crab traps every other day and harvesting a decent crop of crabs which promptly go through my processing line and into the freezer in preparation for transport back to the prairies.  Prawns are closed in our favourite spot until the 1st of April but we're planning to be anchored in the bay on the morning of the 1st.  With any luck we'll catch a few gallons of prawns, freeze them and take them home as well.

Oh dear, not again

Its been a long winter of computer problems.  Shortly after we got back on the boat I lost all network connectivity on my prime laptop.  I think I can do a non-destructive re-install of Windows so I wasn't overly worried about that.  That of course has to wait until we get back to Buchanan.  Both Marilyn and I use the same model of Dell and we carry several identical backup laptops so I just pulled one out of storage and fired it up.  That's when the "issues" started appearing.

Initially I think it was storage in damp conditions.  Of the three backups we had onboard, none would do a clean boot and none were really useable when they did finally boot.  They would beep wildly during the boot and once they finally loaded some or all of the keys were non-functioning.  The keyboard on my prime laptop was still useable so I was able to sort of work through that initial problem and I got a backup laptop running with a partial restore of my data.  I've got something like 140 GB of data (lots of photos) in my main backup so I didn't even think about a complete restore.  That worked really well until about a week ago when something else happened.

This time its a corrupt user profile and I don't know whether that was caused by some kind of malware or whether it "just happened".  It seems really unlikely that I got struck by two random events in such a short period of time but I can't find anything malicious on either machine and I've looked really hard.  The user profile problem is apparently a known problem with Windows 7 and again, the only possible solution is a non-destructive re-install of the operating system.  That of course also has to wait until we get back to Buchanan because we don't carry all our original media with us.

I've managed to get the machine with the corrupt user profile sort of functioning.  It still has network access but anything that requires a temporary user directory won't work.  So I can't send email (but I can receive just fine), can't use Windows Livewriter to make this post (but I can do it online), I've lost my desktop and I get to respond repeatedly to prompts that should have their answers stored in my user profile.

We got up Monday morning in Vancouver to glorious sunshine and calm waters.  We hadn't planned to cross back to the Island until later this week but Monday seemed too good a day to pass up so we got underway before noon, got a good lift from the ebbing tide and were back on the dock in Cowichan Bay for a late supper.   We'll enjoy a few days of socializing on the dock before we go to a yacht club outing at Otter Bay in early April.  We're starting to count the days until we can return to Buchanan.  I've been checking the webcams in the mountain passes and most of them are already free of snow.  Our schedule could still be deranged by a day or two by a spring blizzard but our current plan is to leave here around April 7th. 

Artificial reefs and NIMBY types

The Artificial Reef Society of BC has spent several years getting the old HMCS Annapolis ready to sink to form a reef.  They’ve already done that 7 or 8 times mostly with big boats but once with a jet airplane.  The whole story is here. 

Our old buddy Bruce, the bluenose sailboat builder that I have written about before, somehow landed the security gig to keep an eye on the Annapolis until the liars figure out where the society will be allowed to sink her – or even if they’ll be allowed to sink her anywhere.  We wanted to see what he was guarding so we pulled up beside him a few days ago and had a good visit.  Nobody is allowed onboard but we were able to take some pictures and the website does a good job of documenting the society’s big project. 

The striking feature of the Annapolis is all the rounded edges.  That’s because she was built at the height of the cold war.  The theory was that rounded corners meant that they could wash all the fallout off her if that became necessary.  Evidently she also had some kind of a water sprinkler system that could put up a shield to protect the boat from fallout.  Bruce knew some of the crew when he and the Annapolis were in Halifax.  He said they hated the rounded decks because there was nothing to stop them from sliding overboard which evidently did happen on occasion.  There is a bit of a cable railing but otherwise nothing along the gunwale to keep someone from sliding straight into the ocean.

This morning we untied from Bruce’s boat and headed for Vancouver.  Its pretty crowded in False Creek but we found a spot, got the anchor stuck and settled in for an as yet undetermined length of time. 

Left coast radio

CBC is about the only source of over the air news left in this country.  That’s not saying much but it is what it is.  There’s a few local players in each province but for the most part CBC is it if you don’t want constant “music”.  When we have wifi we can stream other sources but sometimes we have nothing available and mostly CBC is the only signal that is strong enough to be usable.  This morning CBC Vancouver has been positively salivating at the prospect of trashing the Conservatives under the guise of reporting on the Mike Duffy trial.  Despite the fact that the trial won’t start for over a month, its leading the news out here.

Last year, on our way to Alaska, we saw some tree branches that appeared to be deliberately anchored in channels.  Eventually we learned that this is an Indian method of harvesting herring eggs.  Evidently the herring lay their eggs on the tree branches which the Indians then come along and harvest.  We tasted those eggs at a dock party at Baranof and were – to say the least – underwhelmed.  I’ve said that pancakes are usually just an excuse to consume syrup – herring eggs are worse.  I dunno what they put on them for sauce but there’s no discernable flavour to the eggs and the texture is like cream of wheat that hasn’t been cooked quite enough. 

The reason I raise the topic of herring eggs is that Left Coast CBC is up in arms this morning about a “federal” decision to open the herring fishery this spring.  Apparently the Indian chiefs went to court to try to prevent a commercial opening and lost.  According to CBC that’s a clear indication that the judge didn’t know what he was doing because the tribal knowledge is vastly superior to those self serving government scientists.  “Self-serving” is how I’d describe chiefs who want to continue to scoop up herring eggs while pretending that the herring fishery is endangered.  Of course their proposal was that the native fishery continue unabated (and largely unregulated as well).

We’re in Pender Harbour for a few nights, enjoying the unseasonably warm and SUNNY weather.  Its hard to believe we’re in BC.  It gets really cold overnight but the afternoons are in the low teens and the sun has been shining at least every other day.  With all that blue sky its hard to believe those pictures were taken in BC but – as long as it lasts – we’re loving it.  Particularly when we check the Buchanan weather.