Travels with George

World’s first googolionaire

2012-02-02T08:48:00.001-08:00

Wouldn’t that be a strange twist of fate if Zuckerberg ends up being the world’s first googolionaire? There’s such an impossibly long string of zeroes in a googol that it seems unlikely but it would be fun if it happened. Not to mention a LOT of fun for Zuckerberg.

Yesterday was a lumpy day. We left the dock at Burrard around noon and went directly to the Chevron fuel barge in Coal Harbour. I didn’t want to buy fuel and we likely could have put it off until we get to the US but I just hate running on the bottom half of the tank, even when the tank(s) hold over 750 gallons. So far we’ve managed to buy all our fuel in the US so I guess it didn’t hurt us to pay a little federal excise tax. And we didn’t fill the tanks completely so there will still be room for US fuel whenever we finally get down there.

After fueling we headed out through 1st Narrows and immediately started getting bounced around by long Pacific rollers coming up English Bay. I expected they would get better as we got into deeper water but instead as we got out past Point Atkinson they turned to come from a little west of north and kept getting bigger. We finally turned out of them when we got north of Bowen Island but along the way they bounced us around pretty good. We had the stabilizers on but they can’t do anything about fore and aft (pitching) motion. They’re really good for side to side (rolling) stability so when we finally turned beam to the rollers things settled down quickly. Georgie wasn’t very happy about the sea state but he didn’t puke.

YVR

2012-01-30T20:12:00.001-08:00

We untied from the SNSYC reciprocal dock in the dark and crept our way out of Tsehum Harbour through the crabpot minefield at the entrance. It was so dark that we only saw 2 crabpots – there’s more out there but if they were more than a couple of yards either side of the boat we simply couldn’t see them. We got to Active Pass a bit after slack but before it got running too hard. Then we headed out across the Strait of Georgia toward the mouth of the Fraser River.

It was a glorious day for the trip. Its January, so it wasn’t particularly warm but it wasn’t cold either. The Strait was pretty calm – by the time we got across it was kicking up a bit but barely calling for the stabilizers. There was hardly another soul out there with us – a few commercial guys and a couple of sailboats in the distance once we got into English Bay but no other recreating fools such as ourselves. Somewhere in the middle of the strait a couple of dolphins showed up and played with us for a while.

I couldn’t figure why there were so many radar signatures and so few boats on the water until I realized that we were passing just west of the Vancouver International Airport (YVR). Once I clued in to what was going on I could see the jets that the radar was tracking. Some of them would get too high and go off the chart so to speak but it was surprising how high I was tracking them.

We didn’t get tipped on our side going under the Lions Gate this year. Last year about the time we were going under the bridge with Doug and Jo onboard a great honking big tug went roaring by us sucking half the ocean up behind him. Doug thought I was joking when I told him to hang on but he wasn’t laughing when the captain’s chair he was sitting on dumped him as the tug’s wake hit us.

We got settled into Burrard Yacht Club although not without a bit of adventure. The dock they had us at last year was occupied and we couldn’t see an obvious place for reciprocals to tie up at. What we did see all had “no berth here” signs hanging on it. We kept nosing our way further into the marina and eventually spied an open stretch of bullrail long enough for us to tie up at. By the time we got edged up to it a couple of locals had showed up to help hold our lines. They thought we’d be OK here for the night and in the morning the guy at the office can sort out where he’d like us to be. Wherever we end up we’re only about 2 blocks from Popeye’s Marine Consignment which is the real reason we’re here. It will be a serious adventure getting out of here because the fairway is about only about 30 feet wide – not a prayer of a chance that we will get turned around in it and there’s a wicked dogleg turn to get back out but that’s a problem for another day.

Worth a read

2012-01-29T18:24:00.001-08:00

A couple of things caught my attention this week:

First some suit from the RCMP in BC finally got around to apologizing to the families of Pigman Picton’s victims. About bloody time. It wasn’t much of an apology as apologies go – there were a lot of weasel words about hindsight and he never actually came out and said “we didn’t take this too seriously because it was just Indian whores that were going missing”. But it was a start on apologizing. Maybe the rest of the RCMP brass can take some lessons – between tripping over their dicks on the Picton investigation, tasering that poor immigrant Pole to death and harassing women it seems to me like maybe the RCMP will be doing a lot of apologizing over the next few years.

Today the jury convicted the Shafia family members of murder. Good call but its about time we had a discussion in this country about what it means to be a Canadian. We stumble around the edges of the discussion whenever we deport someone or when we have to deal with a Khadr or a Shafia but its high time we started having the conversation when new citizens take the oath of citizenship. And then we need to follow up by taking the discussion seriously. We don’t need to pretend that its OK to speak some foreign gibberish in public. We don’t need to make allowance for cultural diversity as regards clothing or treatment of women or religious practices. If we want our country to continue in its Judeo Christian WASP heritage of tolerance and (small “L”) liberal values then we need to stand up and tell every citizen that they actually matter. And for the ones that don’t toe the line we need to chuck them out of the country or into jail PDQ.

On the move again

2012-01-29T17:57:00.001-08:00

Last night Marilyn and I met at the yacht club for their annual lobster dinner. It wasn’t that great a dinner but we hadn’t really expected it to be very good because we were going for the companionship rather than the meal so that was OK.

Marilyn flew in from Kelowna and I brought Gray Hawk over from Cow Bay. I had a bunch of clean up to do in the morning because I have been busy removing and mounting new electrical gadgetry. I had made a serious mess but I’m really happy with the results. We now have a Xantrex/Heart Interface remote control panel to operate our inverter and a Balmar regulator to control our alternators. The only thing missing from the complete project is replacing the monitor functions of the old Link system with a Trimetric 2025. When I’m all done we’ll have three separate devices replacing the Link 2000-R system. In the process I’m removing a lot of surplus wiring. The Link may have combined everything into one visible panel but there were two additional hidden panels plus a very complicated shunt that appears to actually combine three shunts into one device in order to presumably monitor dual battery banks. All of that stuff was connected by a maze of wiring that is now stored away for future use.

After I got everything squared away I had a pleasant trip over to the yacht club which was followed by an equally pleasant wait in the bar until Marilyn’s flight arrived. The friends that we were meeting for supper arrived shortly after Marilyn did and then we drank our way to 7:00 when our seating was scheduled for. The lobster was OK but I’ve had better – the club kitchen isn’t really equipped to prepare 60 lobsters in under 2 hours. Everyone else at our table had the surf and turf so they also got a very small piece of New York strip that didn’t look like a good swap for the extra half a lobster that I got. But we had a great visit with Gerry and Shirley. They just got back from a cruise through the Panama Canal so they had lots of stories to tell. They are also ready for a haulout so we’re thinking that we may be able to coordinate both our haulouts and make a joint trip to Seattle at the same time.

This morning we had intended to cross the strait to Vancouver but we didn’t get up early enough. It’s a fairly long trip that could take us up to 10 hours or maybe even a bit longer, depending on how the currents work out. There’s no abundance of daylight at this time of year so tomorrow we’ll get up in the dark and be outside the harbour when the sun gets up. I’m not wild about navigating into the North Van in the dark – I’m also not wild about navigating out of Tsehum Harbour in the dark – the entrance is a minefield of floats where idiots have dropped their crabpots. We’ll likely spend a couple of nights in Vancouver, work in a trip to Popeye’s salvage and then head up the coast. We might just hang out at Gibson’s or we might go all the way up to Pender Harbour.

Killer cat

2012-01-25T19:44:00.001-08:00

Marilyn flew to Kelowna this afternoon on a mercy mission. This morning before she left she took the furball to the vet. She wanted to have his papers up to date because we plan to take off on an extended adventure as soon as she gets back from tending to her brother. Our adventure will start out with the yacht club lobsterfest and will likely include a trip to Port Angeles where we have a haulout scheduled for early March. Evidently the furball wasn’t keen on visiting the vet.

When the two of them arrived back at noon Marilyn’s lip was bleeding. Apparently when she attempted to extract Bonehead from under the backseat of the Exploder he came out swinging. She said the vet had to attend to her dripping lip before he could deal with the cat. She was a lot more understanding and sympathetic towards Nimrod than I would have been. I’ve generally found that if you grab them by the scruff of the neck and control the back end with the tail they are pretty willing to accompany you but her methods are more “humane”.

After getting Marilyn to the ferry I tracked down a welding shop. Ever since we installed the davits on the swim grid last year I have wanted to extend them higher. We can carry the dinghy clear of the water with no problem but I’d like it to be higher off the water. I also have a vision of mounting solar panels on top of the davits but that too requires that they be higher off the water. Its also been a long term goal of mine to learn to use some kind of CAD software. I’ve gone through several flavours of software – nothing on the calibre of Autocad but some pretty good stuff nevertheless. And every one of them has been a frustrating disaster.

About 18 months ago I downloaded Google Sketchup and went through the same head-banging series of attempts to learn to use it that I had suffered on each of the preceding attempts. My pattern was that I would try to use the software, get frustrated, quit and leave it for several months and then after I had forgotten how frustrated I had been I’d start the cycle all over again. After we got back on the boat I took another run at Sketchup and ran into that old familiar wall. The difference this time was that I had watched Marilyn use Youtube to learn how to paint and we have a pretty decent wifi connection here this winter. So I did a few searches and eventually came up with a 5 minute lesson on Youtube. That gave me enough initial confidence to bootstrap my way into further learning. My first attempt turned into the following drawing:

That’s not my first pass at the drawing by any stretch but it was remarkably easy to get to a reasonable representation of what I had in mind. Bolstered by the confidence that I could master the damn software I carried on:

The vertical wall represents Gray Hawk’s transom. We currently have two St. Croix davits mounted to the swim grid which corresponds to the bottom of the drawing. My intent is to raise the davits as depicted in the drawing. In the 2nd drawing the base from the first drawing appears toward the top of the support frame. The davits will rest on that new base rather than on the swim grid where they currently rest. They will be supported at the top by some ties back to the top of the rail around the rear deck. I haven’t drawn that portion yet because it is still fermenting in my mind but I’m confident that I can draw it. What you can’t tell from these flat pictures is that all those surfaces are 3-D and I can rotate the drawings in 3 planes to look at them and work on it from any angle. For anyone who uses CAD software regularly what I am doing is no doubt trivial but for me it has been a major breakthrough. A MAJOR breakthrough.

Today I took the drawing of the base to a kid who runs a nearby welding shop. He seemed to think he could build me a couple but he needed some time figure out what the stainless steel was going to cost him before he gave me a price. That’s OK by me because I’ve got a lot of drawing ahead of me before I’ll be ready to start bolting things together.

Tonight I finished up installing the new regulator on the engine alternators. When we bought Gray Hawk she came with a Link 2000-R control system on her Freedom 25 inverter. That’s the same inverter that we have on the frenchy-bus but on the bus we have a Freedom control panel to run the inverter, a Trimetric 2025 monitor to tell us how the batteries are doing and the alternator looks after its own voltage regulation. The Link 2000-R claims to combine all those functions into one bit of plastic. Leaving aside how needlessly complex that makes the display panel, I didn’t like the thought of having all those functions dependent on one piece of plastic. And sure enough, when we got back onboard, the system started charging at too high a voltage. It still goes back to a 13.65 volt float but along the way it takes the batteries up to 17 volts which will eventually boil them dry. The problem of course is that it does that on the charger as well as when we’re underway because both systems are tied together.

So I got busy and started ordering parts to convert the system back to exactly what we have on the bus. I think we have a really good system on the bus and duplicating it on Gray Hawk will make it easier to switch back and forth between our two homes. The Freedom inverter is an exceptionally rugged piece of equipment – its just the control system that George had set up that I object to. Today I disconnected the engine regulator from the Link system and hooked up a Balmar 614 regulator to control the alternators. I hope that the Freedom control panel will arrive in our UPS shipment on Friday but I may wait until I have the Trimetric in hand before I tear into the balance of the system.

In addition to using Google Sketchup I have been using something called “Dia” to draw electrical and plumbing schematics. Its Freeware but really powerful stuff which makes it dead simple to draw flowcharts or schematics. I’ve found that drawing the schematics forces me to understand the systems completely in a way that I didn’t before. Today I finished up a drawing for the fuel plumbing. Eventually I will diagram the entire electrical system but that will take a long time. I expect when I’m done that I will be able to pull about 50 pounds of surplus copper wire out of Gray Hawk because over the years successive owners have just added new wiring whenever they added some equipment. Even though they were likely concurrently removing old equipment the old wire stayed in place. Only by doing a detailed schematic will I be able to tell what I need and what can go.

Boats that don’t float

2012-01-21T07:49:00.001-08:00

Amid all the media circus around the sinking of the Costa Concordia I have maintained that the whole story is yet to be told. Its hard to explain the actions of the hapless Captain Schettino but probably even harder to find out from this distance what really happened and what he really did. If you’re up for close to 15 minutes of maritime narration, this video makes it all a lot clearer.

Final hour of the Costa Concordia

Reconstruction of the Costa Concordia Tragedy, Narration by John Konrad from gCaptain.com on Vimeo.

The cruise line is clearly hanging the captain out to dry. What is less clear is how much of the blame should fall on the captain and how much on the cruise line itself. While the media initially presented the situation as black and white my instinct was that there were likely many shades of gray involved. Clearly the captain was grandstanding and he got too close to the island - - - THIS TIME. Somewhere I read another account of an earlier close pass by the same island, maybe in August if memory serves so this activity was not completely unusual and may very well have been routine and therefore known to his employer. Known to or perhaps even tacitly condoned by his employer.

The video refers to Schettino’s claim that he was navigating by sight. That was likely the initiating error in this incident, if you discount the grandstanding that likely was the overarching problem. Accidents at sea tend to result from an early error of judgment that compounds and eventually leaves the protagonist with no options, or in this case on the rocks. When you look at the chart in the video you will see that a path slightly further to the east – probably as little as 50 feet further to the east – would have allowed the boat to continue untouched. Initiating the turn seconds earlier would have accomplished that but judging that exact distance by eye at night would have been extremely difficult.

What is also evident in the video is that immediately after the incident the captain took exactly the correct actions to mitigate further damage and to protect the lives of his passengers. The boat did not end up grounded in shallow water by accident – that was a very deliberate action that likely saved hundreds of lives. These cruise boats are a floating abomination. They are about as seaworthy as a can of tomato soup. With close to a 200 foot hole ripped in the side of the floating apartment it would have laid over on its side, trapped most of its passengers inside and promptly gone to the bottom. Lifeboats are unlikely to be any use when one of these behemoths tips over – the boats on the downward side will get crushed and the boats on the high side can’t be launched because they are lying against the floating apartment.

The only question about the captain remaining in my mind is what the hell he did after the grounding. He was in shallow water and obviously his life was in no immediate danger. His actions after the rock strike indicate the ability to think under pressure so the suggestion that he abandoned ship early out of panic doesn’t seem logical to me. People do funny things under pressure but I don’t think we’ve heard the whole story on this one yet.

And now for some late breaking news: Winston Churchill, enjoying his retirement on a Mediterranean cruise operated by an Italian line is reputed to have been asked “Why an Italian cruise line?” To which he is reputed to have responded:

“There are three things I like about an Italian cruise line – first, the service is excellent, second the food is extraordinary and third, in the event of an emergency, there is none of that messy nonsense about women and children first.”

Oh dear!!

2012-01-18T09:19:00.001-08:00

You’ll have to excuse the image quality. All of these were taken through the glass because there’s no way I’m going out there just to take a few pictures. There’s a big winter storm buffeting the Island today. The radio keeps going on about how cold it is but its really not that cold – maybe –6 or so for a low and up to close to zero during the day.

The forecast says we’ll have this crap until Saturday and then it will be back to lows above zero and highs in the 8 to 10 range. Yesterday I offered our diver a ride to the airport. I hope he doesn’t claim it. If he does it will be because the Malahat is too awful to drive over. We would take the boat to the customs dock at Van Isle and he would then take a 5 minute cab ride from there to the airport. I’m sure once we got away from the dock we’d be just fine but it really isn’t a very nice day to go anywhere. As we discovered on the weekend, we will need to bring our lines inside while we are travelling because if they are left outside its like trying to tie knots in tree twigs.

Mayday

2012-01-17T17:15:00.001-08:00

There’s a sad collection of derelict vessels anchored in pretty well every harbour. Some are worse than others – Brentwood Bay for instance has a particularly bad reputation as a last resting place of uncared for boats. Saturday night when we pulled into the yacht club in Tsehum Harbour I recognized some of the derelicts that were there last year but this one in particular looked worse than I remembered it looking.

Sunday morning I said to Marilyn “I think that boat is sinking – it looks even worse than it did last night.” Then I snapped a couple of pictures of it, we talked about hulks in general for a few minutes and both of us promptly forgot the conversation. Until about an hour later.

We could hear the Victoria Coast Guard trying to raise “Gypsy Wind”. She sounded a little frustrated, like they often do when a vessel repeatedly hails them but doesn’t respond when they answer. A while later we could hear Gypsy Wind hailing the Coast Guard and just about at the point where I thought maybe I should relay for them, they finally heard the Coast Guard response. As soon as they said they wanted to report a vessel sinking in Tsehum Harbour I made sure I followed them up the dial when they moved off channel 16. Sure enough they were reporting the same boat I had taken pictures of that morning.

The woman at the Coast Guard was a little annoyed with Gypsy Wind for not responding to her so she first had to chastise him for his radio use. Then she was clearly reluctant to accept his claim that the boat was actually sinking. At one point she asked him “have you observed this vessel in the past?” To which he responded “only a couple of times a day for the last 3 years.” At that point she seemed to accept his assessment of the situation and moved on to the rote questions “GPS location?” “Any environmental contamination?” Etc. Maybe we should have reported it but in hindsight my 2 observations in 24 hours likely wouldn’t have convinced her that it actually was going down.

We’ll be back at the club next Saturday – I’m curious to see if the boat is gone.

You can frame this

2012-01-17T10:58:00.001-08:00

On the northern pipeline, our Prime Minister being interviewed by Peter Mansbridge:

It's one thing in terms of whether Canadians, you know, want jobs, to what degree Canadians want environmental protection. These are all valid questions.

But just because certain people in the United States would like to see Canada be one giant national park for the northern half of North America, I don't think that's part of what our review process is all about.

Amen.

Italian night at the yacht club

2012-01-14T16:24:00.001-08:00

We need to get back in the social whirl of the “club” so we bought tickets to their Italian night and tonight we’re tied up at the reciprocal dock at SNSYC. Its actually a lot more convenient for us to come to the club by boat than it is by car. It takes about the same length of time – maybe 2 hours on the water and at least 1-1/2 hours by road. More importantly, if we come by boat we can stumble back to the boat and go to sleep. If we come by car one of us has to be the designated driver and we have that hour and a half trip to look forward to after the evening is over.

I’d forgotten how pretty Gray Hawk is until I was coming back from my dock-walk this afternoon and she just took my breath away. There isn’t another boat on this dock that I’d even consider trading her for. And there’s plenty of them to choose from with some of them no doubt insured for 3-5 times what Gray Hawk is insured for.

This isn’t the famous barge that sank at our dock but it likely is the pile driver that ripped Gary’s bull rail off after replacing the finger pier. We missed that big adventure because we were on a Costco run that day but there’s not that many pile setting cranes on the water here. There was a surprising amount of traffic on the water today considering that it is the middle of January and not all that warm out. We saw several recreational boats, one great honking big RCMP boat and a couple of commercial fishing boats in addition to the usual ferries.

When we first got up this morning it was pretty choppy at the dock and the cloud cover was socked in low overhead. We had pretty well talked ourselves out of taking the boat out but then the sun came out and the waves calmed down and all of a sudden it seemed like a good idea again. Sitting here in the late afternoon sun at the yacht club reciprocal dock it seems like a good decision. Tomorrow we have to get an early start for home because our diver is coming at 1:00 boat time. If we don’t catch him now he is going away for a month and that will be too long so we need to make sure we get home in time tomorrow.

Ran out of volts

2012-01-08T17:34:00.000-08:00

We decided that today was as good a time as any so we packed up the stuff that was scattered all over the cabin, untied all the extra lines we had put on in July and about 2:30 we set out for a brief cruise of the bay. Getting away from the dock means that everything has to be shipshape, or sort of of shipshape anyway and it forces us to get that done now rather than putting it off for yet another day. When we got back the sun was still trying to peek out so we pressure washed some more of the green slime away. Our boat is starting to look like someone loves it again.

When we got ready to leave I discovered that we didn’t have a bow thruster. That’s bad but not a deal breaker so we went anyway. After all, that was the purpose of the trip, to see what worked and what didn’t. After we got done pressure washing I traced the problem to a lack of volts emerging from the 48 volt charger. I hope it hasn’t killed the batteries that power the thruster but I assume it will have. Tomorrow we’ll find a new charger and then likely the next day I’ll find some new batteries.

I already mentioned that we had put the dinghy on the foredeck to keep British Mike from ploughing into it during his random-navigation departures and arrivals in the marina. Having it on the foredeck was making it really hard to get around on deck and it meant we couldn’t let the cat outside for fear he would put little holes in the dinghy. We couldn’t unload it in the slip though because we are too close to our new neighbour so we pumped all the water out of it and as soon as we got out in the bay we chucked it overboard. Its not hanging on the davits exactly the same as it did before but I still haven’t decided whether I like the way it hangs now better than the old way so it can hang like that until I do decide. Long term my goal is to extend the davits so that it hangs a lot higher than it does now but I’m not sure whether I’m going to hire that done or use it as an excuse to buy a little MIG welder.

Gary (our landlord) has installed wifi in the marina but like most amateur wifi installations it doesn’t work very well. I bought something called a range extender at London Drugs the other day. I didn’t even know they existed but when I went looking for an external USB wifi antenna I came home with the range extender instead. The theory is that it picks up weak wifi signals and rebroadcasts them, both directions. So if your computer is too weak to reach the router it will amplify that signal and if the router is too weak to reach your computer that signal gets amplified. It was a bit of a PITA to get it set up, mainly because they ship it with idiot software that is supposed to do everything automatically – and of course it doesn’t. Then it puts a stupid message on your screen that tells you to call support. I can just imagine how that call would go “is your extender turned on?”, “is your computer turned on?” – life is too short but fortunately Google was acquainted with both the range extender and how to configure it manually. So now we have functioning wifi onboard. Its by no means ripping fast and in fact it becomes snail slow late in the day but its more than we had last year. And did I mention – its free.

(later – Thursday the 12th)

I never got around to posting this so I’ll just add to it rather than start another one. Our wifi access comes and goes with the tide. I’ve got the extender on the top of about 8 feet of PVC conduit with the conduit stuck on the top of the mast but it needs to be just a little higher. We have a connection pretty well all the time but there are a few times during the day when its really flaky. I think another few feet will likely make a huge difference.

Finding a charger for the bow thruster batteries turned out to be more of a challenge than I had expected. My first stop was Philbrooks in Sidney because they were so helpful during the Webasto furnace adventure last winter. And they tried to be helpful again although it was clear that they don’t install 48 volt systems and had never actually seen one either. That’s really strange because my understanding is that higher voltages are preferred for thruster installations and Philbrooks definitely claims to be a high end yard. I wasted quite a bit of time there and then went to my favorite chandler, Waypoint Marine who is just down the street from Philbrooks. We came up blank there too but he suggested I try some of the power wheelchair places around here. Given the number of senior citizens on the Island the only business better than coffin sales is wheelchairs. I struck out on the wheelchair stores though because they seemed to be staffed by fools who knew that their wheelchairs came with a charger and couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to buy just a charger. And they seemed also uniformly clueless about the voltage of their chairs. So I tried a couple of battery stores and hit the jackpot on the 2nd call. The guy actually had one in stock and didn’t want to argue with me about what I was doing or why or how – he was just happy to tell me he had a 48 volt charger and how much it was worth. Gotta love that attitude.

The 48 volt battery charger worked a charm but before I figured that out I had bought another one identical to the original online. The one I bought first is intended for a power scooter. It charged the batteries just fine but it didn’t seem to want to go into float. When a multi-stage battery charger starts out it pumps a huge amount of amps into the batteries but over time the charge should decline and eventually the charger should stop trying to put anything into the batteries. Cheapo chargers like you buy for $25 at Canadian Tire don’t do that which is why, if you leave them attached for long periods of time, they will eventually boil your batteries dry. I thought that was what this one was trying to do but it turns out that the batteries were just so badly drained that it took longer to bring them back up than I thought it would. I’ve spent most of my time the past two days in the engine room and this morning I noticed that the new charger had gone into float mode. That’s a relief but I had already bought another OEM charger online so ultimately we’ll have a spare, which isn’t all bad anyway. We’ve got spares for pretty well everything else onboard so why not that too.

Everybody else in Cow Bay appears to be heading south to Melacque for a winter vacation. I don’t think their departure time is related to our arrival but it certainly seems like it might be. While its warmer here than it would be on the prairies its none too warm nonetheless. Today I’m trying to refill our water tanks but may end up stymied by the fact that the dock water connections are frozen up. Right now (4:00 boat time; 2:00 local) there is water running about 200 feet away from our spigot but I’m afraid the thaw won’t make it to our slip before it starts getting colder again. There was even a hint of ice floating around the marina earlier this afternoon. There must be enough fresh water dumps into the bay to allow the surface to freeze.

29 degrees of separation

2012-01-07T18:07:00.001-08:00

So it was –17 Monday morning when we left Regina. I know this because I checked the thermometer in the truck after I froze the shit out of my fingers getting the satellite dish strapped back on the truck. We had removed it the day before while we took the truck through a carwash. We were bringing so much stuff to the boat that the only place left for the dish to travel was strapped on the back deck which left me out in the dark cold Monday morning.

Wednesday night as we drove off the ferry in Nanaimo we happened to notice that the thermometer read +12. Now +12 isn’t all that great either but its one hell of a lot better than –17. It was raining, of course, its BC after all. But it felt wonderfully warm.

Gray Hawk was still here although many of her slip mates have moved on. Gary sounded a bit worried about that – its obviously better for him if people come and stay so he doesn’t always have to be finding new tenants. I went for coffee Thursday morning to get caught up on all the local gossip and activities. The most exciting thing that we missed was the sinking of the barge.

It sounds like it was a major adventure. The barge complete with crane showed up sometime about the end of May. A couple of young guys owned it and used it to transport the docks and ramps that they build locally out to wherever they were to be installed. The barge wasn’t very big and the crane was pretty small as cranes go, one of those old yellow cab affairs that would have originally been on tracks or maybe on the back of a small tandem truck. When the barge started to sink it pulled the dock partway under with it. At some point the boom on the crane swung madly around and got entangled in Joe’s rigging. Then it sounds like they tried to pull the barge free and eventually succeeded in sinking the barge and dismasting Joe’s boat. I’m sorry I missed it. Barry said that when they hooked onto the barge with the tug many in the crowd watching agreed that the fun was just beginning. And it sounds like that was absolutely the case. Gary is still missing the end pier on that side because both of the pilings snapped off underwater during the adventure.

So now we’re back onboard and the boat seems to have survived our absence with remarkably few ill effects. We left some butter in the butter dish and while it still looked OK we didn’t want to risk it. Otherwise everything seems exactly as we left it. Of course it has been raining ever since we arrived but we have lots of time so I am avoiding outdoor jobs. We’ve grown a serious coating of green slime but I got the starboard side pressure washed during a brief period of sunshine and I’m holding out for more sun before I tacked the port side and the decks. We loaded our dinghy on the foredeck before we left because I had seen British Mike maneuvering too many times. With the dinghy hanging on the davits I was pretty well certain he’d either wipe it out or get hung up in the davits if we left it there. It was a big job getting it winched up onto the foredeck and I have a feeling getting it back in the water will be even harder. It is however still in one piece and the davits are undamaged so perhaps my efforts were worthwhile.

Today we have to go bottle wine that we started in early July. Its been resting in an oak cask since September. It was ready to bottle in November but Pat said she could keep it in the cask for a while so she did. If there’s any benefit to the oak then it should be really good stuff.

2011 in pictures

2011-12-31T09:54:00.001-08:00

Heading north

2011-12-28T20:13:00.001-08:00

(Monday) Tonight we’re in one of our regular campgrounds, Wallymart in Hillsboro, Texas. We had planned to get on the road tomorrow morning but decided that we could save one night’s rent and get an earlier start on the day tomorrow if we got hooked up today. I’d have kept going a little farther north but the post-Christmas traffic kept getting worse the closer we got to Dallas-Fort Worth so Hillsboro seemed like far enough.

We’re all stocked up with Cherry Coke now. Not that anyone in this household drinks the crap. I can’t imagine what it might taste like and I’m damn sure not going to find out. However a friend in Regina appears to live on the stuff and his stock is running low. So tonight I bought all that the Hillsboro Walmart had which was three cases. I expect their computer will lock up tonight trying to figure out how any single fool could buy three cases of the crap.

(Wednesday) Dunno what happened to Tuesday. We just mainly drove until we got to Lamar, Colorado. By then it was damn cold out and there was way too much snow on the ground. They got a blast about a week ago now and a lot of it is still hanging around.

Today we met up with Jim in the parking lot of the Hobby Lobby in Parker, Colorado. I gave him the Growsafe tools plus a big pile of miscellaneous parts, some defective and some surplus. Meanwhile Marilyn was in her new favorite store stocking up on paint and special brushes that she doesn’t think she can get at home. Then we headed north up I-25 again.

When we got close to Fort Collins I started noticing wind warnings on the overhead digital signs and sure enough almost immediately the wind started picking up gusting out of the west. The signs said that the highway was closed to “high profile vehicles” between Cheyenne and the Colorado border so my expectation was that when we got to the border there would be a trooper with one of those cute Smoky the Bear hats on turning us and the semi’s off the highway. I tucked in behind a Werner Transport van and told Marilyn I’d do what he did. As we got closer to the border we started seeing lines of semis sitting on the on-ramps but my guide (and a few other hardy souls) kept on going north so we did too.

All of a sudden I realized that the mile markers had started over and therefore we were in Wyoming. Somewhere about that point I tried to listen to the highway information channel on the radio but it was so faint as to be useless. Next thing we knew we were passing Cheyenne and still no trooper had appeared to tell me I couldn’t keep on keeping on. So I did. It was definitely windy and the wind would occasionally try to boss the bus around. But the bus is pretty heavy and it tracks like its on rails so most of the time I just drove, albeit a little slower than I might have otherwise. Going around Cheyenne we were able to hear the radio warnings and it sounded like the worst of it was behind us but that we would see some wind for the next hour as we headed north. And that’s about how it worked out.

Two truckers did violate the cardinal rule of trucking - “keep the greasy side down.” We saw one semi trailer lying on its side south of Cheyenne and a UPS trailer on its side north of Cheyenne but I’ve seen worse wind in Lethbridge and nobody thought anything of it.

Tonight we’re in the Walmart lot in Gillette, Wyoming where I got to do some troubleshooting on the Onan genset. Its been so good up to this point but tonight it absolutely wouldn’t fire. After a bit of cursing I figured out that the run solenoid isn’t retracting. For tonight I’ve got it unscrewed from its bracket so when it comes time to shutdown the generator I’ll have to go outside and push the governor down. I expect its either a dirty connection or a loose wire somewhere. I tried briefly to jumper it but mainly I was interested in getting power for long enough so the electric blanket would warm up the bed so I opted for the simple solution tonight.

Three degrees of separation

2011-12-25T10:22:00.001-08:00

Yesterday we toured the George H.W. Bush presidential library on the Texas A & M campus. I’m not sure it was worth the $14 it cost us but it was informative nonetheless. George the first certainly had a busy time of it on the federal scene. I thought going in that he had served two terms as president but learned that he did all his stuff in just 4 years.

On the way out of the library I happened to read some of the names on the donor list. They were arranged as they always are with the most generous donors in the most prominent location, their names displayed in larger font, with a fancy name – I believe “President’s Cabinet” in this case. And midway down the most important list, there was Jimmy Pattison’s name. That’s pretty high class company for a car salesman from western Canada, alongside the likes of the government of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Now I don’t know Jimmy but as I read the list I was struck by the fact that if I ever needed an introduction to George H.W. then Jimmy would be the connection. You see the father-in-law of one of Marilyn’s nieces is fond of dropping Jimmy’s name in conversation so I figure that, should I ever need an introduction to the 41st President, then Peter would be the starting point and Jimmy the intermediary. I’m not sure whether that’s 2 or 3 degrees of separation but its pretty damn close as far as I’m concerned.

Today we’re watching the wet weather outside the window in the Navasota campground. At 10 bux a night for 50 amp full hookups it will be hard to leave this place but that’s what we plan to do tomorrow. I’ll make one last checkup on the two installations here and then, assuming they check out OK, we’ll start heading north. The prairies are having an unbelievably warm winter so it won’t be any big hardship to go back. I’ve seen winters where it never got above minus 30 the whole week ahead of Christmas which makes the thawing weather this past week pretty amazing.

This time last year we were still waiting for the doofus “Captain” we had contracted to teach us to run Gray Hawk to show up for even one of the many appointments he made with us. Our first ever venture away from the dock came on 1/1/11 when we very bravely cast off and headed up the coast to Shilshole Marina. We went that way because that was the way we had gone on our haulout so it seemed like familiar water. Looking back now it seems silly that we thought it was such a big achievement but it was a major accomplishment getting out and back without damaging the boat or the dock. Like I told R.J. afterward, the secret to docking a boat is to get the dock and the boat travelling at the same speed. And somedays that’s easier said than done.

Hell of a deal on a campground

2011-12-18T14:48:00.001-08:00

For the next week or so we’re paying $10 per night for 50 amp full hookup. That’s an incredible deal on a transient rate. It’s a pretty good deal even if we were paying a monthly rate. For a single night rate, power included, its pretty well unheard of. Our lifetime average per night is just north of $18. For the last year we have averaged just under $9 per night but that includes many nights sitting for free on our Buchanan property.

This place isn’t fancy but we’ve stayed in a lot worse spots (and paid 2 or 3 times as much for the privilege of doing so). Marilyn found it online. Its run by the town of Navasota and I expected it to be full up but there were only 3 rigs here which left 7 sites open for us to pick from. It might be a little windy if the Texas winds pick up but otherwise it’s a hard place to find fault with at any price.

On Friday the 2nd client down here got around to doing their second concrete pour. That’s a great relief because I couldn’t do anything until it was complete. I’m expecting that tomorrow they will either have already stripped the concrete forms or at the very least they will have them stripped during the day.

The new facility at Sexing Technology is huge. The open front shelter is 600 feet long, divided into 10 pens. Their initial pour was the apron where the cattle will stand to feed. The pour on Friday was the feed alley. Eventually there will be another twin facility further to the east which will house more conventional feedlot systems. The facility that they are working on right now is specifically designed to house the Growsafe feed intake monitoring equipment.

It looks now as though we’ll be here through Christmas and then leave for western Canada early the week between Christmas and New Years. We’re still flexible on that though. If the weather in the west goes completely to hell we’ll go up the left coast of the US instead. There’s some really nice Thousand Trails parks all along that coast so we can work our way north at very little cost but if we do that we’ll have to figure out where to store the bus on the coast. And we’ll have to fly back to Regina to see father and do a variety of tasks that we just can’t do remotely so our preference is to go back to the prairies unless the weather is absolutely impossible.

And now for something completely different:

I’m a regular reader of SmallDeadAnimals. The owner of that website is a well known Saskatchewan conservative writer who has a knack for regularly poking a stick in puffery. One of the tags on her website says she is just the voice of an ordinary Canadian yelling back at the radio “You don’t speak for me.” A couple of days ago she posted a link to a Facebook page for Chiquita bananas whereon they were promoting Christmas recipes involving, naturally, bananas. However the comments under one of those recipes were decided unrelated to baking.

Until SDA exposed it, I was unaware that Chiquita has publicly admitted supporting terrorism in Latin America. They have not only supported terrorists, they have actually taken delivery of weapons and handed them over to terrorists. So it seems just a tad hypocritical that they now are presuming to lecture Canada about our oilsands oil. As I said to Marilyn earlier today, if they hadn’t succumbed to the feel good, eco-terrorist demands of the radical left, I would never have known about this part of their history. And without Kate and her SDA website I still wouldn’t know about it. Now you do too.

Thousand Trails maintenance

2011-12-11T11:45:00.001-08:00

This campground system that we belong to has some maintenance “issues”. Its not unusual for their hot tubs to be working but you sure don’t want to count on them. Their streets and access roads are uniformly bad – the access road at Colorado River has been reverted to gravel from the nearly impassable pavement that was there two years ago. Two days ago we realized that we didn’t have any water here at Lake Conroe.

No water in an RV shouldn’t be a big problem if the residents were halfway prepared but in this case we weren’t. For whatever reason we had let our main tank get down to nearly empty so that it only lasted a couple hours with no incoming water and then we were out. Along with a lot of the other neighbours because apparently they weren’t prepared either. And the management hadn’t bothered to give us any warning which they clearly could have. As it turned out they had the water back on briefly yesterday morning and we happened to notice that it was on so we were able to get the main tank substantially full which left us relatively impervious to the painfully slow progress of the repairs.

The water lines here are only buried about 2 feet. I guess that’s about 22 inches deeper than a lot of Rick Wensley’s lines were buried at Noble’s Point but it seems a little shallow to me. As I already mentioned, they’ve had a record setting drought here and they have some pretty heavy clay in this area so likely the clay shrank enough to pull a connection apart. Whatever the cause it took them the best part of 4 hours to locate the break and then a couple hours of dewatering before they could glue everything back together again.

We like to go out for dinner about once a week so yesterday we found a local Mexican restaurant and ate dinner there with another couple from the campground. We met Dan and Patsy at Lake Medina and have been stalking them ever since. They left Medina on Friday for Colorado River and we followed them two days later. Then they left Colorado River for Lake Conroe one day ahead of us so by the time we got here we felt like old friends. That’s a skill you need to pick up with our nomadic lifestyle – how to meet people quickly. Too often we end up meeting someone the day before one or the other of us leaves for parts unknown but this time we’ve had 4 weeks to get to know each other. Today they left and we don’t plan to follow them this time but we got to know each other well enough that we’ll likely stay in touch.

I talked to my buddies at Navasota on Friday afternoon to confirm that they had actually finished with the concrete pour. Based on my reconnoiter in the morning I didn’t think there was a chance in hell that they’d be done and sure enough they wouldn’t have been but the contractor evidently convinced them to bring in reinforcements and that got them finished up. My guess is that their batch plant never did start working after I left and all the additional concrete came from somewhere else.

It was really good news that they were done because it means the concrete will have the whole weekend to cure. I need to drive on it while I’m placing the nodes and then I need to put rock bolts into it so I really didn’t want to be doing that on green concrete. Two and a half days isn’t overly long for a cure but it should be adequate to keep the rock bolts from pulling out when I tighten them.

Dried up and rained out

2011-12-09T11:28:00.001-08:00

We got moved over to Lake Conroe earlier this week. The Growsafe client wasn’t ready – they actually got rained out last week. They should have had their concrete poured a long time ago but they didn’t so they are now in the bizarre situation of being in the midst of a historic drought and unable to pour because its too wet.

It’s the driest they have been here since they started keeping records sometime in the 1800’s. All the lakes are low. When we were at Lake Medina we could barely see the water in the distance from the boat launch. This morning I stopped and took a couple of pictures of Lake Conroe.

This Growsafe client has some really neat technology. They produce sexed semen. And they do it for many more species than just cattle. Apparently its really popular with hunt farms where they want to raise bucks – nobody wants to fly down from Chicago to shoot a big doe but they’ll pay big bucks for a big buck. And in dairy they are exporting bred heifers as “two-fers” – you buy a bred heifer and they guarantee that there’s another heifer inside. That’s pretty cool.

The other client down here is Texas A & M. That’s like Mecca for us Agro types so I’m looking forward to that part of the project. They’re ready for the equipment but it hasn’t arrived yet so I’m in “hurry up and wait” mode this week.

The evil they do lives on after them

2011-12-07T11:01:00.001-08:00

The evil that men do lives on after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. Julius Caeser, Act 3, Scene 2.

Thirty years later western Canada is just starting to recover from the vindictive evil done to us by the three stooges – Jean Chretien, Marc Lalonde and Pierre Elliott Himself when they imposed the National Energy Plan on us. Our courts are still controlled from beyond the grave by Pierre Trudeau working through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. So it is worthwhile for our American neighbours to consider seriously what may be the legacy and reach of the current occupant of the White House if the country is foolish enough to re-elect him. Eight years of this man will fundamentally change the US and his impact will continue far into the future in ways we cannot even imagine now.

Clearly Obama is no brilliant intellect on the scale that Trudeau was. Many of Obama’s impacts on the US economy could be argued to be incidental or accidental. That doesn’t change the fact that if he runs the country into an economic disaster that it takes 50 or more years to recover from his impact on individual American lives will be fundamental and long lasting.

The artist is in

2011-12-02T18:31:00.001-08:00

On one of our trips to San Antonio I discovered a cute little artist’s easel that folds up into a carrying box. So on the way out of Lake Medina we stopped at Hobby Lobby and I bought Marilyn an early Christmas present. She got it set up after we moved here to Colorado River and then spent the last couple of days varnishing it. It’s a very complex little piece of equipment and it took a long time to coat all its various surfaces but today she pronounced it ready to use. It wasn’t a really nice day out today so she is painting indoors tonight. She needs one of those big floopy hats like artists wear and probably a sloppy shirt about 17 sizes too big but otherwise she is a artist.

We met a couple at Lake Medina who were planning to move here and then on to Lake Conroe. Typically when we meet someone at a campground they move on or we move on and we don’t see each other again. In this case they moved here the day before we did and today they moved on to Lake Conroe; we’ll follow them there on Sunday. So we’re getting to know each other a bit and last night they dragged us along to a party night in the local town. They called it Lady’s Night Out but there were lots of guys out too. It was pretty hokey but we got a glass of wine and some bad hors d’oeuvres for $5 each so it wasn’t a completely wasted evening. Its coming up to Christmas so every local crafting fool had a booth set up to sell whatever crap they think people should buy in the name of Christmas. Its mind boggling what some people will spend their money on. One guy had actually twisted barb wire in the shape of Christmas trees and then strung lights on them. I think I heard him say he wanted $15 for the monstrosities but I didn’t get close enough that he might think I was interested.

Yesterday I got confirmation that my equipment should be in Navasota by Tuesday at the latest. That means there’s a chance we’ll be out of here and maybe even back to the boat by Christmas. For a while there I thought we might still be here for New Years so its good to be able to almost see the end of this project. Not that I’m excited to get back to the prairie cold – this Texas winter is pretty easy to get used to.

Really good food science

2011-12-02T06:39:00.001-08:00

It seems that pretty well every enviro-fool thinks they have some advice to offer about food production. Here’s a news flash – just because you can find your cake hole to feed yourself doesn’t make you an authority on food production. If you don’t understand why Haber-Bosch is fundamental to our lifestyle then you aren’t competent to comment on food production.

Here’s an excellent video that talks about the importance of plant breeding. When the seed goes in the ground the potential yield is limited only by the genetic potential of the seed. After seeding there are a host of factors that influence yield – nutrition, moisture, parasites, disease and others – but at the time the seed goes in the ground the only limit on it’s potential yield is genetic. You can think of genetic potential as an ultimate yield that is determined by the seed’s genetic makeup and then gets picked away at by all those other factors. Without good breeding programs tailored to the local climate and management you can never have high yields. And without high yields we all pay more and go to bed hungrier.

We have a plan

Hallelujah

2011-11-28T20:09:00.001-08:00

Its about bloody time. We’ve been party to the Kyoto charade ever since Gene-the-cretin bound us to it. Finally someone has the balls to say the emperor has no clothes. Nobody adheres to the targets, nobody believes they would make any difference if they did adhere to the targets and the biggest carbon emitters in the world don’t even pretend that they will be party to the whole stupid mess.

Of course ElizabethIdiotMay is predictably apoplectic. And I’m sure there’s a parade of greenies lined up alongside her being equally outraged. I say it’s a breath of fresh air. Finally somebody is calling it like it is.

I don’t honestly know whether the world needs carbon emission reductions. Maybe it does – maybe it doesn’t. One thing I know for damn sure – the Kyoto agreement never had hope one of changing the world’s carbon emissions. If it really matters then maybe now our leaders can sit down and talk honestly about emission reductions. That for sure couldn’t happen under the Kyoto framework so if our government has the balls to say enough, I say good for them. Hallelujah for them in fact.

Time off

2011-11-25T15:06:00.001-08:00

Our life has been remarkably unremarkable for the last couple of weeks. We’ve been hunkered down here west of San Antonio just relaxing. SWMBO has discovered that she is an artist. Who’d a thunk it? She’s been snapping pictures of everything, everywhere on the trip down and now she’s painting those pictures. And she’s pretty good. Her hills suck but she’s good at trees, lakes and skies, particularly sunset skies. I’m sure the hills will improve – they couldn’t hardly get worse.

Next summer some of those eco-freek, tree-hugging, granola crunching, do-gooders who invade Cow Bay are going to go home with some art by a new local talent. I’ve seen the glazed “gotta buy something before we leave” look in their eyes and I know just exactly how to cure that problem for them. But she’s gotta either get the hills mastered or paint really flat landscapes – REALLY REALLY flat ones.

While we were downtown we found the River Walk and had lunch. That was also a floor covering shopping trip. We no longer have carpet in the back half of the bus. Marilyn ripped all that out immediately after we arrived and she has been varnishing the walls while the floor is messed up anyway. Eventually we need to put something back on the floor but it sure as hell won’t be more carpet. I have never understand why RV builders think that people want carpet in a residence that is going to be used at the beach or in National Parks. Its just so incredibly stupid. Tile or hardwood is the only way to go. If you want something warmer you can always throw an area rug on the hard surface but at least that way you can clean it occasionally.

As it stands now it looks like our new floor covering will be ceramic but only once we find someone willing and competent to lay it which likely means a trip back to Nipawin. We talked to a dealer in San Antonio but his “expert” owned a conventional motorhome so he “knew” that you can’t lay ceramic tiles in a motorhome. And he’s right - you can’t do it in a production motorhome because they flex like a cheap ladder and would crack the tile immediately if not sooner. I don’t think we’ll tackle laying the tile ourselves but its been done plenty of times in bus conversions so that isn’t a concern. We’ve got our favorite tile layer, Phil-the-flooring-guy in Nipawin and he’s looking increasingly like our best bet to get the new flooring done. In the meantime we’ll live with floorpaint over the plywood.

Goddam ditch rats

2011-11-14T19:30:00.001-08:00

This place is over-run with long legged ditch rats. There were at least three things that I hated about Candle Lake – it rained constantly, the wind blew pretty well non-stop and the effing bloody ditch rats were thicker than flies. I don’t know how we managed to drive to the lake as often as we did and never hit one. I’ve killed more of those miserable creatures with a vehicle than most hunters kill with a rifle.

When Ross and Sandy McKnight visited us at Candle Lake he was so sympathetic to my hatred of the ditch rats that he sent me a high powered sling shot when they got back home. I was all excited about the carnage I was going to wreak with my new ec0-friendly weapon the next time we were at the lake. Of course I was doomed to disappointment because even the marble sized steel balls that Ross had shipped along with the slingshot made no impact on the rats. They continued to make our site their home and happily munched any plants that we or the neighbours tried to grow.

The rats here are smaller than their Candle Lake cousins but there are more of them. And some fools must feed them pretty regularly because they don’t realize that I am a predator. I’m working on educating them in that regard, aided by the fact that our site is covered in pea gravel. I’m not that great an aim as my sons will attest but the shotgun approach with pea gravel at close range is pretty effective. And there’s a couple of ex-ducks at Candle Lake that can attest to the fact that occasionally my aim is OK. Of course SWMBO won’t let me launch an all-out assault on the local ditch rats because she thinks it might impact our ability to return to this location in the future. Everything in this world is a compromise.

Today we travelled from some little widespot on I-10 – I think it was called Sonora. We arrived there in the dark last night and then I stupidly got us headed north out of town on a single lane road with no way to turn around. The GPS said we could take some country trail to get turned around but it has lied in the past so I was reluctant to trust it last night. Finally in desperation we did turn off the highway onto a dirt trail that led us along a couple of goat paths to a closed gate. Fortunately there was a Texas gate leading in the wrong direction next to the closed gate so we gave that a whirl and it finally dumped us out in someone’s backyard which turned out to be large enough to turn around in. Evidently there weren’t home – at least there were no lights on and they didn’t shoot at us. When we got back to Sonora I parked us in front of a Mexican restaurant that claimed to be open for breakfast, thinking that we could get up early and thereby avoid inconveniencing the breakfast crowd. Their sign lied but we left early anyway. There was no sign of a cook or a customer at 7:30 when we left.

After we turned off I-10 I made another navigatory error in Kerrville. That lead to us travelling a paved goat trail through the west Texas hills between Kerrville and Medina. I quickly learned to trust their speed limit signs after one of them said 15 MPH and I assumed that “15 MPH” really meant “slow down”. One 30 MPH switchback and a quick 100 feet of elevation later put us in 1st gear for the rest of the climb. Some poor SOB in a minivan met us in the middle of another series of switchbacks. I didn’t really have time to keep an eye on him but I think I left him more or less half of his lane. He was stopped the last time I noticed and I didn’t feel us touch him so I think that was OK.

We’ll be here for 2 weeks because that is how long Thousand Trails will let us stay without paying. Then we’ll go east to another one of their preserves this side of Houston. With any luck by the time our 2 weeks runs out there we’ll be able to go to the project at Navasota that I rushed home from Brazil for.

Nanoo nanoo

2011-11-12T18:42:00.001-08:00

Many times we have come close to Roswell and many times we have drove on by but today we fulfilled one of Marilyn’s bucket list items.

Tonight we’re sitting on the parking lot of the Roswell Walmart. It’s a lot cheaper here than where we were the last two nights – the KOA on the east side of Albuquerque. We generally avoid KOA like the plague. I can’t remember when we last stayed in one but it was likely with the 5th wheel. However we made an exception this time because a couple of friends are living there while they do some home renovation. Marilyn bought a bunch of books online and had them shipped to Albuquerque so the trip was a combination of picking up books and visiting. It’s a major saving to have stuff shipped to a US address – often the shipping is free or at least very inexpensive. Shipping to Canada on the other hand usually starts at $25 and goes way up from there.

The Walmart is right next door to a Sam’s Club which happens to be serving up free wi-fi so that’s pretty convenient for us tonight. Tomorrow we’ll point the bus east toward San Antonio and Houston but I’m sure we won’t get all the way to our Thousand Trails destination at Lake Medina. We used to routinely do 1200 km days and often many more but lately breaking 500 km in a day is a pretty big day for us and I can’t say I mind that. One time we did the trip from Nipawin to Las Vegas in 2 days and change. I did all the driving and we ran over 1800 km in one day. Its hard to believe that I was ever capable of that. Now after I get the first pot of tea into me I’m looking for a rest area so I can have a nap.

It’s good to have a plan

2011-11-10T14:08:00.000-08:00

We’ve lived the last month with no certainty about where we were going the next week. We’ve literally had one day (or less) notice on some of our destinations so it was a great relief yesterday morning to get final confirmation that we were going to Texas. We might actually have preferred confirmation that we were NOT going to Texas because that would have meant we were going back to the boat sooner but either way it was nice to finally have some certainty back in our schedule.

In theory at least, the client in Texas will be ready for me on Dec. 5th. We have agreed to take 3 weeks off and we’re going to use that time to visit some friends in Albuquerque and then relax in one of our Thousand Trails preserves west of Austin. There may actually be another project at Texas A & M but that won’t likely happen until after the Navasota project. College Station (Texas A & M) is just down the road from Navasota so it works out well.

Right now we’re in the upper left hand corner of the top of Texas. We cut across the Oklahoma panhandle this morning, now we’ve got a bit of Texas to get across and then we’ll be in New Mexico. It could just as easily be southwest Saskatchewan or southeast Alberta, definitely cow-calf country.

Now that Texas is firmly in our future we can start seriously planning our flooring renovation in the bedroom. Only a fool would put carpet in an RV and this one was built by a pair of fools. Eventually we’ll get rid of all the carpet but the highest priority right now is the bedroom and hallway because that is where condensation has raised hell with the underlay. The winter we spent in the Pacific Northwet was hard on the bedroom area and we’ve been procrastinating fixing it ever since.

Right now we’ve got the carpet on my side of the bed ripped out to the subfloor and the rest of it will come out as soon as we’re somewhere where we know that we can get everything dried out thoroughly. Then it will get several coats of Kilz paint and finally it will get something other than carpet for flooring. We’ve gone around and around on what we will actually put down and we won’t likely know for sure what we’re going to do until we are driving home from Lowes or Home Depot. One thing is for sure though – it won’t be carpet.

Stupid is as stupid does

2011-11-05T09:17:00.001-07:00

I’ve long maintained that electing morons isn’t necessarily an impediment to good governance. I can cite numerous examples in rural Saskatchewan where drunken fools populate the municipal council yet the local governance is superior to what we get on a national scale. Sometimes morons are really practical. They’re used to getting by in a complicated world and they understand that the job of government is to get things done expeditiously at a low cost. That’s a good attitude for politicians, smart ones or stupid ones.

I was therefore not immediately concerned when Herman Cain appeared on the US political scene and appeared to be sweeping the Republican campaign. The man is obviously an ill-educated fool. But to keep it all in perspective you need to remember that there is a well-educated fool in the White House right now so clearly stupidity is no barrier to success. My bigger concern was that the American public could be so easily duped, twice. So it has been something of a relief this week to see Cain brought low by his apparent inability to keep his hands off his help. He appears to have a kind of “me first, I’m entitled” attitude which is exactly the kind of personality that likes to abuse other members of society. I’m still disappointed that the public couldn’t see through Cain’s façade but I’m relieved that he isn’t going to waltz unchallenged all the way to Washington.

On the negative side of the ledger Cain’s campaign contributions appear to be continuing unabated and his polling numbers appear to be holding up. A good friend of mine once told me “people get the government they deserve.”

It sure is flat here

2011-11-02T08:06:00.001-07:00

We’re in a very flat part of the world. Last night at about 7:00 we arrived in Colby, Kansas which proclaims itself an “oasis in the prairies”. The oasis part seems a bit of a stretch, particularly so this morning in the midst of a prairie blizzard. It was a very well forecast blizzard and if it lives up to its forecast it will be gone tomorrow but today it is thoroughly miserable outside. Which would be why we are not alone here on the parking lot at Colby’s Walmart.

I had an early morning orientation with the Growsafe client, Colby Community College, at their farm east of town but I have no intention of freezing my ass off in this shit. Sitting here now with the Proheat rumbling in the background and watching the blizzard outside the window its pretty pleasant. SWMBO hasn’t broken her beauty sleep yet so I haven’t started the Onan noisemaker either. Eventually I’ll have to though because the diesel furnace eats away at the batteries pretty steadily.

Getting out of Nebraska means we got back into data coverage on our cell phones. When we’re permanently anchored we have the Hughes dish for internet access but when we’re on the move we depend on our Blackberries for data access. We can tether them to our computers to get online but as often as not I just use the Blackberry to read email or for light web browsing activity. For some reason however we were almost always unable to get online in Nebraska. It wasn’t that we didn’t have coverage – our phones worked just fine. It was the data coverage that was missing. Sasktel must not like Nebraska for some reason. We’re really getting pretty spoiled when we expect data coverage anywhere we go. Its not that long ago that finding cellular coverage in out of the way places was still a surprise.

Yesterday I got an email from one of our slip neighbours in Cow Bay. He was worried about Gray Hawk because she is riding a bit low in the bow and apparently is listing to one side. I wasn’t too worried but I phoned Barry anyway last night. We’re at about 1/3 of a fuel load and light on water so that will make her high in the stern which makes the bow look low. We’ve got the dinghy loaded on the foredeck because I didn’t trust British Mike to get in and out of his slip without bashing our dinghy. Barry says the dinghy is pretty well full of rain water now which could easily put a thousand pounds of additional weight on the bow.

Barry had been onboard and assured me we weren’t filling up with seawater. The listing thing is a “feature” of the boat. With dual fuel and water tanks located at the extreme outsides of the boat it is pretty easy to create an imbalance. The tanks are crossover connected and I never thought to close the crossovers before we left. If one side of the boat ends up a little low for some reason (like the dinghy filling up with rainwater) eventually the fuel and water will drain to that side which only makes the list worse. When we’re onboard we manage that by shutting off one side of the water until we get back to level. Now we mainly just need to get back to the boat because she is clearly missing us.

Movin’ on

2011-10-31T19:45:00.001-07:00

There’s not much to report for the last week. Its not all that exciting in North Platte, Nebraska. We did manage to take ourselves out for dinner yesterday. We had such a good meal at Skeeter Barnes in Kearney that we thought we’d try to find some Nebraska prime rib here as well. That didn’t work out because the place that was recommended didn’t open until late in the day and we really like to eat our big meal at noon. Instead we ended up eating at a wonderful Mexican restaurant. I don’t see how any other place could have been better than what we found so it worked out well.

The installation had several hiccups which necessitated us staying longer than I originally thought we might but our plan now is to leave in the morning. I’m going to make one more trip out to the farm so anything is possible but we’ll likely be on the road to Colby by noon. Kansas is just over the next hill so it won’t take us more than a couple of hours to move and the next job is a really small one. That means we’ll likely be ready to move on again by the end of the week but our next destination is still a mystery. The client in Texas that I rushed back from Brazil to service at the start of August still hasn’t got his concrete poured and now doesn’t expect to be ready until early December. It’s a good thing we’re pretty flexible.

I’ve started drawing up plans for the electrical upgrade on Gray Hawk. I find it helpful to make drawings ahead of time, not so much as a template for construction but more as a way to focus my thinking on the project. Already I’ve thought of a couple of items that hadn’t occurred to me before I started drawing. The goal of the upgrade is to increase the electrical capacity of the boat and to bring it into compliance with current ABYC (American Boat and Yacht Council) standards. Gray Hawk was doubtless built to ABYC standards in 1980 but the codes have evolved and changed over the years and I’d like to bring her into compliance with today’s standards. She’s also a bit of a power hog particularly because of the electric range. The way she is currently wired we can’t make use of the entire capacity of her generator. As soon as we get done with the Growsafe trip we intend to move Gray Hawk first to Port Angeles for her haulout and then back to Cow Bay where I will tackle the electrical upgrade.

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH !!!!

2011-10-26T09:17:00.001-07:00

I’m much younger than the old woman I travel with. So much younger in fact that I refer to myself as her boy-toy.

So it was extremely distressing earlier this week when I received an unsolicited senior’s discount at a local department store here in North Platte. The citizens of North Platte seem outwardly intelligent so it is difficult to understand why the clerk would have made such an obvious mistake, particularly since SWMBO went through the line immediately ahead of me (and didn’t receive any discount). SWMBO says I should dye my hair and beard but, difficult to accept as the characterization may be, 15% is 15% after all.

Clearly she needed glasses.

America’s Lifeline

2011-10-24T18:44:00.001-07:00

I can’t quickly find any sources to tell me what percentage of US goods move across I-80 but it has to be a significant share. I-80 is apparently the second longest interstate in the system and from what we’ve seen the past couple of days the truck traffic has to be at least equal to the passenger traffic.

Last week we left Yerington a day later than I had originally intended due to a problem with one of the data panels on the installation. As it turned out the panel that I replaced failed as well but it failed in a less problematic manner than the original panel so we ended up leaving with the job not 100% functional. That’s an ongoing problem with bleeding edge technology although I think there are also some QC problems that need to be dealt with in this particular situation.

We left Yerington around noon on Thursday and then made a detour into Sparks, Nevada when we hit I-80. I had ordered some vibration cushions (rubber bushings) for our new generator while we were in Salt Lake City. They were waiting for us in Sparks so we picked them up and then ran a few more errands. Since we were in the trucking district at Cummins-Onan I picked up some 40 weight oil for the noisy part of the bus. Its getting increasingly difficult to find single weight 40W oil which is the spec for 2-stroke Detroit diesels. I’ve had pretty good luck in Cenex farm supply stores but so far haven’t seen any on this trip. The Cummins-Onan shop was next door to a Detroit Diesel shop so I figured it would be a safe bet that Detroit would have oil for their engines and I was right. I’ve got single weight oil in the boat as well but so far have been able to buy it at the Walmart in Duncan. The spec for the boat however is 30W and that seems to be a little easier to find than 40W. The bus goes through 40W fast enough – I’d hate to see how fast 30W would run through it.

Friday afternoon found us in southern Salt Lake City parked on our favorite RV site, a Walmart lot. It wasn’t the easiest Wally World to get to but once we were there we were very comfortable for two nights. We did unhook though and parked the bus in two head to head stalls. On Saturday we took the trucklet downtown to the Mormon library and spent the whole day there.

Marilyn continued her search for her long-lost aunt, to no avail as it turned out. I had compiled a list of data that I wanted to find source confirmation for and I was very successful in that regard. To my surprise however I also found a huge number of begats that I didn’t expect to. (you know – Ed begat Earl who begat Frank, etc.) I expected that the begats that we have put together would likely exceed whatever the Mormons were aware of and that their usefulness would be more with regard to sourcing birth certificates or church records to confirm (or disprove) information in our files. That turned out to not be the case. Part of the benefit of searching from the Mormon library is the huge number of private databases that they have access to and some of those were very helpful in identifying people that we previously didn’t know about.

I was also able to verify and in some cases correct information that we have collected over the years. I wish I had done a better job of annotating my genealogical data so that I would know where the erroneous information originated. In some cases I found what I would call contradictory information so I simply noted that in my files. In other cases though the contradictory information was clearly correct. When the priest records in the church register that near the end of December he baptized an infant while we record the birth as early January I think its safe to trust the priest.

Ultimately I simply ran out of time. I think I could spend another 3 days before I would get to the end of what they have available online and from there I would then move to the microfiche and paper records which they have available. It turns out however that they have electronic access available to us from Duncan, BC which is about 20 minutes away from where Gray Hawk is tied up so I will for sure spend some time there this winter. If I can get caught up with what they have available online then I would be better prepared to make use of my time in the main library.

Yesterday (Sunday) we hit the road again and got as far as Laramie Walmart last night. We were pretty late getting in and left early again this morning so that we could be here in North Platte, Nebraska before the guys at the research station went home for the day. After we arrived I had time to get us set up and then to meet with the guys at the station. It looks like I will actually have help tomorrow so things could progress rapidly. Its rare enough that I get help that it is worth mentioning.

Gross National Happiness

2011-10-16T20:20:00.001-07:00

There probably are few people in North America who don’t generally understand the concept of Gross National Product. Even if they couldn’t calculate the GNP or GDP of their country they conceptually understand that it is the sum of the economic activity in their country and they would likely agree that an increasing GNP is a sign of a healthy country.

Today the news lead off with stories about the King of Bhutan who apparently just married a 21 year old cutie and then set out on an 80 km walk to meet many of his country’s 700,000 citizens. Evidently in Bhutan, progress is measured by something called Gross National Happiness. I like this idea.

There’s some serious problems with GDP/GNP. Simply adding up the economic activity in a country is not necessarily a good indicator of the well being in that country. Take the US where we are right now. There’s lots of economic activity in this country but a lot of it is defense and security related. Does activity related to putting people in prison really contribute to the overall well being of the country? Some would argue “yes” because clearly having bad guys running around is not good so putting them away should be good. But it should also be obvious that a dollar spent on home renovations and a dollar spent on policing have different levels of social impact and may contribute differently to how satisfied the citizens in a country feel. I’m not sure how Bhutan calculates is National Happiness index but the king sure looked happy walking his 80 km honeymoon and his subjects all looked pretty happy to see him. That’s in sharp contrast to the news we’ve heard about some other notable solitary rulers like Ghadaffi or Mubarek.

Right now we’re parked in “Weed Heights” just outside Yerington, Nevada. The name apparently derives from Mr. Weed rather than some noxious species that grows here. This is evidently the remains of a company town once owned by Anaconda Mines. Apparently what remains of the mine was recently purchased by Quaterra Resources out of Vancouver. I’m not sure exactly who owns what though because the manager of the RV Park claimed that “his boss” bought the whole works many years ago, including the RV Park and company housing.

It’s a pretty spot in a rugged sort of way. The scars of copper mining are obvious but they blend well into the desolate surrounding country.

We’ve got a few more days left here to finish up a Growsafe project at Snyder Livestock. After this we’ll head back east and likely stop in Salt Lake City for one night. We both have some genealogy research to do and we’re not in any huge rush to get to the next job. One day in the library is all either of us can likely handle. Then we’ll continue east back to Nebraska and from there probably will turn right and head for Texas.

Hangin’ out with the Mormons

2011-10-07T18:54:00.001-07:00

We arrived in Salt Lake City yesterday afternoon. I think the last time we were here may very well have been whatever year the winter Olympics were here. We used to travel through here regularly on our way south and often ended up stopping for a night on either the south or northbound trip. The last couple of years we’ve been travelling along the coast so its been a while since we made a run down I-15.

We always stayed in Cherry Hill RV park when we did stay here so that’s where we are again. Its pretty conveniently located for a trip into SLC but its not cheap at $38 per night. Our lifetime average for paid sites is $18.23 per night so $38 is significantly outside our comfort zone. For the past year it has cost us $6.28 for every night we have actually spent in the bus. We achieve those numbers by using our membership campgrounds and by simply staying at places where we don’t have to pay. That $18 lifetime number includes the initial capital cost of the membership and whatever transfer fees were associated with it plus of course the annual fees. I suppose we should have added the capital cost of the Buchanan house into that total but it wasn’t enough to make much difference in the lifetime numbers.

The equipment isn’t in place for the next Growsafe client so we’re taking our time getting across to Reno. Today we had a leisurely morning and then set out in search of the Mormon family history library. I was in it once many years ago – probably 30 years ago actually. I didn’t have any material with me at the time but I was overwhelmed by the quantity of information they have and by the helpfulness of the staff. Today was no different.

Marilyn is searching for a mysterious aunt who disappeared in Saskatoon 80 years ago. She doesn’t have much to work with and Marcella likely wanted to disappear. At that time changing your name was more or less a matter of moving to a new town and introducing yourself as someone else so the odds are that she won’t ever be found. And she’s pretty obviously dead by now but there’s a good story attached to her disappearance so Marilyn keeps plugging away at the search. The Mormons weren’t able to offer a whole lot of assistance today other than the suggestion that Marilyn should check prison records. Marcella was into some activities that could very well have landed her as a guest of the state at least once in her life so that was likely good advice.

I’m inclined to believe that all religions were founded by lunatics and are maintained by the feeble-minded. Mormonism is no different but they certainly do genealogy a huge service. The volume and quality of information that they have accumulated is impressive despite the nonsensical reasons that drive them to do it.

Looking forward to being somewhere else

2011-10-04T19:20:00.001-07:00

A good friend just told me that if you owned a farm in Nebraska and a home in Hell then you’d be well advised to sell the farm and just stay home. I’ve seen nothing in the last week that would make me disagree with that assessment. Nebraska may not actually be the arsehole of the world but you can definitely smell it from here.

I took my last two years of high school in Regina and thought that was the worst place on earth. The incessant wind blew me out of Regina as soon as high school was done and I have only gone back to visit since. But the Regina wind has nothing on this place. This wind will suck the life out of you and blow sand in it’s place. You can constantly taste the grit in your teeth and no matter how often you shower you can always feel the dust in your hair. Tomorrow we’ll put this dump in the rearview mirror and none too soon as far as I am concerned.

Its too bad – the park we’re in is nice enough. Its got a pretty little lake that spends most of its life whipped into a frenzy but its still a pretty spot. We’re kind of sheltered here with big old trees all around us but even so the bus is rocking and not from any activity inside it.

(later)

I just get a little crazed when I’m in a big wind. Now that it’s dark outside and the bus isn’t rocking and shaking it doesn’t seem so bad but I’ll still be glad to have this place behind us. It turns out that the equipment isn’t ready at the next location – surprise surprise – so we’ll take our time heading over to Reno. We’ll probably end up spending a few nights in Salt Lake City on the way.

When the wind finally settled down to a mere gale force I finally went outside and changed the fan drive belts. We’ve been running on 2 out of 3 belts for a long time now. For some reason the last set of belts that I put on gave me a lot of trouble. One belt in particular insisted on running inside out or on it’s side for most of it’s life. Eventually it ate itself up and one day I found it draped over the hitch when we stopped somewhere. I don’t think the fan really needs three belts to drive it but evidently somebody at Prevost thought it did so who am I to argue with them? I just kept forgetting to get a new set of belt but yesterday I finally remembered and today I got them installed.

I also checked the oil bath level on the tag and steering tires as well as tire pressures. The inside dual on the curb side has a habit of running low and sure enough its low again so I think tomorrow before we leave I’ll take off the valve stem extension. I’ve changed the tires and changed the valve stems and still the same tire keeps losing air so the only thing left to change is the valve stem extension. I don’t really like valve stem extensions anyway but they make checking the tire pressure and adding air a whole lot easier. However in this case I think my extension is causing more trouble than it is preventing so its going to have to go.

The weekend crowd is rolling in

2011-09-30T18:14:00.001-07:00

We’ve been 4 nights now at a lovely little state recreation area in SE Nebraska. Up until today we pretty much had the place to ourselves but tonight the weekenders are rolling in fast and furious.

We left Buchanan last Friday, stopped in Regina for a meeting and a visit with father and then parked on the prairie just west of the Regway border crossing. I had a meeting with one of my Palliser clients on Saturday morning and then we once again braved the perils of US Homeland Insecurity. Once again they let us in, perhaps even with a trifle less attitude than we have come to expect. We then wandered our way down into northern Wyoming before stopping in a roadside truck rest area for the night.

Sunday found us retracing the interstate that we must have travelled down on our way to Fort Collins 45 years ago. In the fall of 1965 father packed mother and us kids into a 1964 Meteor, hooked a trailer behind it loaded with some basic furniture and household items and set out for Colorado. He had been accepted to do a Masters in Continuing Education at Fort Collins. Mother hung in like a trooper but later in life she told us that when father told her he had been accepted she went to the bathroom to wash her hair so she could cry in the sink.

I can actually remember the border crossing at Regway from that trip – I don’t claim to remember much else about the trip but I do remember the crossing shack. Its still standing at the crossing but no longer in use. Homeland Security now operates out of a multi-million dollar steel and glass monstrosity. The Canadian side likely still works out of the same facility they had in 1965. It certainly looks like it is 50+ years old. I haven’t noticed that Saskatchewan has been overrun by illegal aliens entering through Regway so I suspect our facility is adequate for the task. Nor have I heard about any plague of illegals that has been apprehended by the glass and steel edifice on the south side of the line.

On that crossing so many years ago I remember that just inside the door of the crossing station there was a display case with a very elaborate model of an ox cart. It was probably something like 1/5 scale – big in other words. I pulled at mother’s hand and asked her if the crossing guards had taken that away from somebody. That was probably what we had been told might happen at the crossing – something might get taken away – so it seemed like a logical question to me. On the return trip 10 months later I clearly recall receiving strict instructions that neither of us kids was to utter a single word while we were inside the crossing office.

We spent Sunday night on the parking lot of an abandoned auto plaza east of Fort Collins. Its not hard to see the effects of the recession down here, even this far from ground zero. Many of the small towns have main streets that are almost deserted now. I’m sure Florida and California are much worse but there’s more than enough hurt to go round.

On Tuesday we found Medicine Creek State Recreation area. There were a few other rigs here when we arrived but by the 2nd night we had this loop entirely to ourselves. Tonight the weekend crowd is rolling in and I can’t blame them. If we lived close to this place we’d weekend here too. I’m about halfway through a Growsafe installation at Arapahoe, Nebraska. After we get done here it looks like we’ll be heading west to Reno. Ultimately we still expect to end up in Texas, somewhere close to Houston. But our plans are – as ever – fluid.

Leadership

2011-09-22T16:32:00.001-07:00

Our neighbour Michael has a variety of things in his yard – old equipment, lumber, derelict vehicles and a great many apple trees. He told us to help ourselves to any of the apples that we could use so a few nights ago Marilyn picked way too many. I had previously picked enough green cooking apples for a couple of pies but the ones she picked resemble a Macintosh – some up the the size of a store bought Mac but mostly about halfway between that and a large crabapple.

Since we’re going to be braving the perils of US Homeland Insecurity this weekend I needed to get the remaining apples cooked. Which is why I was standing over the sink this afternoon listening to CBC while I cut up apples. And it just happened that today was the day that Prime Minister David Cameron spoke to a joint session of parliament.

Cameron and Harper inherited vastly different political legacies but appear to be moving forward in lockstep and they are clearly setting out a path forward for the G20. Time will tell whether some other notable world leaders have the insight and balls to follow their lead but we should all hope they do.

Cameron came to power with a deficit that in percentage terms was worse than the one that presently is sinking Greece. Harper inherited the wisdom of Paul Martin. Both leaders are firmly committed to driving down sovereign debt and to that end they have engineered a joint letter with several other G20 members setting out their recommendations for a path forward for G20 members.

Notably absent from the list of signatories to that letter are the president of the US and the German chancellor. It may just have been my cynicism but I thought I detected a couple of missiles fired toward Washington in Cameron’s address to parliament. Clearly he believes that the path forward for government is to reduce debt – we can’t spend our way out of this crisis. In the subsequent press conference Cameron wasn’t shy about stating that the EU – Germany & France in other words - needs to step up and deal with their debt crisis that is threatening the world economy.

We can only hope other world “leaders” are listening.

Getting rid of Japanese Junk

2011-09-19T19:08:00.001-07:00

When we bought the bus I was happy to learn that it had a Kubota generator. I had never had anything but good luck with Kubota equipment and I assumed that would be the case with the bus gennie. Oh boy was I wrong!

It should have been a clue when we arrived to look at the bus and the previous owner had difficulty getting it started on a warm April morning. He said something about it having always been a cold-blooded SOB and I really didn’t pay much attention to it.

We had a variety of problems with that miserable orange whore over the years. It never started easily but we eventually learned how to deal with that through overuse of the preheat switch. It also quit unpredictably, usually from overheating for no apparent reason. It was also unbelievably noisy. Eventually it was puking so much oil that it no longer would run so I – foolishly – decided to rebuild it. I’m not sure why I did that – I probably still harboured some notion that Kubota paint meant superior quality.

So I pulled it out and took it to the Super Uke, north of White Fox. The Uke is a local legend when it comes to repairing Chevies and John Deeres so he seemed the logical choice. I’m sure he did good work but the rebuilt engine didn’t run noticeably better than it had when we first bought the bus. Obviously it was better than when I took it to Byron because it wouldn’t run when I took it and it was running when I got it back.

Things quickly got worse. We spent the first winter with the rebuilt generator on the desert at Quartzsite. We got about a week’s use out of the genset and then the power head failed. Of course it failed completely and of course I didn’t have the brains to abandon the whole issue at that point. Instead I dumped another $2,000 into the miserable orange crap pile, comforting myself that we would have a completely “new” generator – new engine and new generator head. By this point of course I was well past the cost of a really good brand new genset so I had to tell myself some kind of story but all we really had was our same old pile of junk.

It continued to be less and less reliable until after a trip last fall I had finally had enough. At that point I ripped it out, threw it in the bush and for the past year we have run with no genset. That wasn’t as bad as it might sound because even when we nominally had a genset we rarely had one that actually worked so being without one was really not all that different. At least with the genset pulled out we could use the space for storage.

When we bought the boat it came with a very old Onan genset. And we were EXTREMELY nervous about using it at first. Every time it hiccuped we were sure it was about to die or cost us $2,000. But it never did and we slowly came to trust it and even to depend on it. The only real trouble we ever had with it was a sticky solenoid on the starter which I have since learned to blast with weasel piss as part of my regular maintenance. So when we got back to the bus it seemed like we really should have a genset.

On Saturday we drove to Selkirk, MB and picked up another old Onan. This one is air-cooled but other than that apparently more or less the same gennie that we have in the boat. We bought this one from a guy who used to be an Onan dealer. He’s 74 years old and trying to retire but judging from the work on the floor of his shop he’s not trying very hard. I’ve never heard anything but good about old Onan gensets – I hope I’m not about to learn differently.

Today I got the new generator more or less ready to stuff into the hole where the orange pile of crap once lived. The big challenge for the day was organizing enough cube relays to enable us to remote start it from the inside panel. We’ve also got an external auxiliary fuel pump that I needed to drive. The genset might be able to draw fuel from the tank but the auxiliary pump guarantees that it has fuel and incorporates some additional filtration so I wanted to preserve that feature. Its pretty noisy but so far I’ve only run it without a muffler so I expect it to be much quieter when it isn’t barking out through a straight pipe.

Stay tuned. I hope we haven’t traded orange grief for blue grief.

Stopping power

2011-09-10T19:54:00.001-07:00

We spent the last few nights in Darrel Ozmun’s shop east of Nipawin. That’s where we go for annual maintenance on the frenchy-bus. Last year I left a pallet of brake parts in storage because we didn’t really need them. When we got the safety done in BC the goofball who did it claimed that my rear brakes were pretty well worn out across the board. Fortunately I didn’t let him do any further work on the bus. But based on his claim, before we showed up at Ozmun’s last summer, I ordered enough parts to rebuild both the tag and drive axles completely. And by completely I mean completely. If it unbolted or unpinned from the axle I ordered it.

When we got to Nipawin last summer Darrel’s head mechanic Bob did a DOT inspection on the brakes and his determination was that the tag axles could possibly be worked on although they were still well within spec. Remember that was a full year and several thousand miles after the clown in BC told me they were marginal. The drive axle on the other hand, according to Bob had minimal wear. Can you say “lying BC SOB trying to pad his work order?” So we changed all the parts on the tag axle and left the drive axle parts on the pallet in Darrel’s store room.

I didn’t want to leave the parts in storage forever so when we got a chance to go back to Nipawin we headed there to hang my last year’s parts. Of course we arrived in Nipawin in the middle of a record setting heat wave so it was way past unpleasant pulling off tires and lifting brake drums. Even with the incredible complement of tools in Darrel’s shop it’s still just bloody hard work at times.

Last night we got all wrapped up and rolled out of the shop right around 5:00. I checked the brakes one last time and then took the bus to an approach so I could tip it each way. That’s important to do after you have had the hubs off so that some oil can run from the pumpkin into the now dry hubs. Then we moved out to Grace & Al’s for a night of eating and drinking. Which was followed by a morning of more drinking (only coffee this time) and more eating.

Tonight we’re on the street in Muenster, SK which to the extent that it is famous is famous for being the home of St. Peter’s Abbey. Tomorrow I have a quick meeting with one of Assiniboia’s tenants and then we’ll head back to Buchanan to see if our Ukrainian painter got the hovel painted. Sometime in the near future we plan to head way south, possibly into Texas for some Growsafe projects – I sure hope it rains and cools off down there before we get that far south.

Back at Waskesiu

2011-09-06T09:32:00.001-07:00

All the years we were rained out at Candle Lake we always wished we had stayed at Waskesiu. Last summer stopped in at Candle Lake for a visit, had a rainout and came over here. This year we bypassed the rainout and came straight to Waskesiu. In fairness we would have gone to Candle Lake but Doug and Jo were out fishing when we phoned so we came here instead. It feels weird being here without the boat but its pretty nice to be back even if we are boatless.

I guess some genius in Parks Canada decided that “The Trailer Park” was too descriptive a name so we are now in “Red Deer”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. Monday morning the place cleared out as the holiday weekend crew left and then a few newcomers arrived but its still pretty empty. We had planned to move to Nipawin on Tuesday but the day dawned so nice that we decided to stay an extra night.

We’ve got a lot of happy memories of summers at Waskesiu. When the kids were young we spent a lot of summer time either at Waskesiu or at Mara Lake. When we were here with the kids we always stayed in Beaver Glen because we could have fires over there but that campground is really better suited to tents or at least much smaller rigs than what we have now. We used to shoehorn the fifth wheel into the sites over there and then the kids would pack fresh water in pails to keep the tank full but we really prefer the open tree cover in ~~the trailer park~~ Red Deer. From here we can walk into the village for tea in front of the store. Our rule has always been that we will sit and sip our tea until somebody we know comes along for a visit. Occasionally we get skunked but usually somebody comes along and so far on this trip we have been able to visit with somebody each time we have gone for tea. Marilyn still has some high school friends up here so she has been reconnecting with them too.

We’ll see ………….

2011-09-05T09:35:00.001-07:00

I love the story of Charlie Wilson’s war. Those of you who haven’t heard/read the story should at least see the movie and if you want the whole story then you need to read the book. There’s a wonderful story buried in the movie about the boy and the zen master. I’ll paraphrase it here:

A young boy in the community goes out for a walk and a pony follows him home. The boy tames the pony and raises it. The whole village says “What wonderful luck and good fortune this boy possesses!” The zen master says “We’ll see”.

After a while the boy starts to ride the pony and one day while he is out riding the pony falls on the boy, breaking his leg and hip in several places. The whole village bemoans his fate saying “What terrible fortune has befallen this boy!” but the zen master says “We’ll see”.

Shortly after the accident the village declares war on the neighbouring village and all the young men go off to fight but the boy with the pony is still recovering from his fall so he stays home. The whole village says “What wonderful luck for you” but the zen master says …………

So when I hear what glorious things are happening in Libya and how the good times are about to roll for Libyans all I can think is “we’ll see ………….”

International bacon day and other assorted weirdness

2011-09-03T07:32:00.001-07:00

Apparently today – Saturday – is International Bacon Day. As a long time fan of bacon consumption I am strongly supportive of the concept. I try to eat bacon for breakfast at least 5 times a week. Some fools might tell you that is an unhealthy choice given our family history of high blood pressure and heart disease but ……………

Last week I went to see Dr. Dan to get my prescriptions renewed. I take something called Vaseretic which is supposed to lower my blood pressure and Lipitor which is supposed to lower my cholesterol level. Many years ago Dr. Steve told me my cholesterol levels were “slightly elevated”. He followed that up by saying that I shouldn’t worry because “we can control that with diet.” “Like hell we can” sez I cuz I knew damn sure he wouldn’t be anywhere to be seen at breakfast time. “Bring on the drugs”. So he did and we did and here we are many years later with me visiting Dr. Dan to replenish my drug supply. I like to carry at least 6 months supply so I never have to be in a panic to get a prescription filled so there was no big urgency but we were in Saskatoon and had some time so I went to see the Dr.

He checked my blood pressure and it came out something like 100 over 65 which is really good. When we got all done he told me he was cutting my meds in half which seemed like a good outcome. I like to think of it as me getting healthier and it definitely is not the result of cutting back my meat intake. I’m at the top of the food chain and damn proud of it. And of all the meats bacon is likely my fav. So I’m a big fan of International Bacon day, even though I never heard of it until about 10 minutes ago.

Continuing our walk on the weird side, how about that Lonechild guy? For those of you who don’t follow Saskatchewan Indian politics closely (or at all) first off, my hat’s off to you but to quickly bring you up to speed Guy Lonechild is the (former) chief of the FSIN (Federation of Sask Indian Nations). He got to be former chief when his board unceremoniously and illegally dumped him. We know it was illegal because he took them to court and the judge said it was illegal. The day the judgement came down he showed up at the FSIN office only to discover that his key didn’t work. Apparently he made a lot of Indian enemies by insisting on things like due process in FSIN business deals and by appointing people with educational experience to the board of the First Nations University. Associations that run on business procedures and universities that are run by educators – OMIGOD no wonder he got canned.

Most of the other chiefs evidently prefer the old arrangement where they get paid non-stop mileage charges for driving those bright red Dodge pickups we keep buying for them and get paid per diems to sit on boards that they are unqualified for. For one whole day the media was filled with praise for Lonechild’s brave stand against generations of corrupt Indian governance.

Fortunately the story had a happy ending. It turns out that the price of Lonechild’s principles was exactly $250,000. Everybody is buddy-buddy again, the FSIN bank account is $250k lighter and Lonechild has enough money to buy 5 new pickups. Life is good with the small niggling concern that the Province of Saskatchewan would like some assurance that the million dollars they just recently gave FSIN didn’t help buy off Lonechild.

The past couple of weeks we have been on the move regularly. We’ll slow down a bit for a few days now. We spent most of this week in Regina so we were able to have several good visits with father. His brain continues to wander but his body is in really good condition. Physically he is probably in better condition than he was when he went into the black hole called Dove House. He seems to have finally lost the urge to walk so he is no longer covered with bruises from crawling out of bed. That has to be a huge relief for the Wascana staff – it certainly is for us.

My ain’t that purty?

2011-08-26T19:10:00.001-07:00

We’re settling into site 43 in Dogpatch section of Sask. Landing Provincial park. I don’t think it’s actually called Dogpatch section but it’s some other stupid name like that. It was a little challenging getting into the site but we made it and we got Clifford’s awning rolled out so I can sit under it with a cold beer. SWMBO is doing her favorite camping thing – making a great big fire.

It’s hard to believe that this campground is pretty well smack dab in the middle of the famous Palliser Triangle. Somebody planted a lot of PFRA trees down here in the river bottom many years ago. You can see the bald prairie hills around the edge of the campground but it’s pretty pleasant in the shelter of the trees. I guess the “lake” outside the campground is what’s left of the south Saskatchewan river backed up behind Gardiner Dam which is probably 90 miles away from here.

We left Buchanan about a week ago, stopped close to Weldon for a few nights, moved out west of Saskatoon for a couple more nights and spent the last two nights south of Biggar. I’m on my annual Saskatchewan circuit looking at farmland and interviewing tenants for Assiniboia Capital/Palliser Farmland. They’re an investment group that buys farmland and packages it for investors who don’t want to mess with the dirty business of holding the physical farmland. Along the way we’ve been mooching parking spaces from friends with large yards, always being careful to move on before they ask us to so that we can come back next year.

We’ll likely spend at least another week on my round the province road trip and then end up in Nipawin. I’ve got a few thousand dollars worth of brake parts stored in Ozmun’s shop. I asked him today if he had sold them yet but apparently he hasn’t had any takers so I’ll likely get to hang them on the bus after all. I bought them last year thinking that I would need to redo the brakes on the drive axle when we did the brakes on the tags but it turned out that the drives were actually still in really good shape. Darrel said he could store the parts for as long as I wanted so we ground another year’s wear out of the drive brakes and now we’ll have new brakes pretty well all around. The fronts were in like new condition last year. My rebuild on the tag axle is still hanging in there but I’m paranoid about it so we stop way too often to check it.

Harvest is just getting rolling in Saskatchewan. Marlan and Michael crossed back into Canada earlier this week so that must mean that things are ready to roll in southern Alberta too. RJ has already posted harvest pictures on his Facebook page so they have started. There’s not a lot of combines rolling yet in eastern or northern Sask. but there’s lots of swathing going on and it’s not unusual to see a combine going either. All that means that fall isn’t far away – we haven’t seen any flocks of geese yet but I suppose it won’t be long before we do.

Saint Jack & Romanow Road

2011-08-23T15:12:00.001-07:00

It’s not nice to speak ill of the dead so I’ll be careful but I’m more than a little tired of the platitudes that are raining down on Jack’s corpse. Just in case you didn’t realize it, the man could NOT actually walk on water. As far as his spectacular electoral prowess is concerned it seemed to me that on election night he failed miserably outside Quebec and rode a wave of separatist disconnect in that peculiar jurisdiction. Here in Saskatchewan, supposedly the socialist heartland, he was shut out completely. And that’s all I’m going to say about that except to note that it was a pretty class act on Harper’s part to offer up a state funeral.

Now back to Saskatchewan where we are reminded about our years of NDP mismanagement every time we drive anywhere. Which is why I am proposing that we start naming stretches of provincial “highways” for those shining stars out of NDP history who are directly responsible for the catastrophic state of our provincial highway system. How about “Blakeney Boulevard” for #25 highway between Birch Hills and St. Louis? Its not that long since this highway was decent pavement but you’d never know it now – its barely up to main farm access standard gravel. I’m thinking it wouldn’t be hard to come up with a Romanow Road, Calvert Crescent and Lingenfelter Lane to commemorate those other provincial socialists who put safe injection sites for crack whore mothers ahead of maintaining the provincial infrastructure.

What a difference a year makes

2011-08-18T09:44:00.001-07:00

Back to Buchanan. Last Friday I tracked down John-the-welder and got him to cut off the remains of the dead bearing on the tag axle. John’s eyesight is not so good anymore – I’m pretty sure I could have done a better job cutting the bearing and I KNOW I’m no damn good. But it was his torch and I didn’t have a whole lot of options so I kept my mouth shut. He blew away most of the spacer behind the bearing and nicked the axle in a couple of places but I think everything is still usable. I should have ordered the spacer along with the rest of the parts anyway so its really my own fault that I was stuck for a few more days waiting for that to arrive.

Even after John had cut through the bearing in three places it was still about a 4 hour job to get the 3 pieces beat off the axle. Actually I damn near gave up and gave the whole mess to Lecuyers in Nipawin. I had visions of them having to cut off the spindle, build a new one and weld it back on. I saw them build a new stub for the end of the axle on one of our floaters one night so I know they could have done it. In that case we lost a bearing and the weight of the unit ground the axle completely away on one side. Kevin showed up at the shop with a micrometer, measured the axle on the good side and headed back to their shop. We got busy and pulled the axle out from under the truck overnight and delivered it to Lecuyers’ shop in the morning. By then they had built a new stub about 18” long. I still don’t know how they kept it straight while they welded it back on but they had the axle assembly back to us by mid-morning and we had the truck back together and in the field that same afternoon. In that case it was the drive axle so the piece they added had to be hollow. So I’m certain that sticking one little solid spindle back onto my tag axle would have been child’s play.

Marilyn has been busy painting the hovel. Just having the primer coat on it has made a huge difference in it’s appearance. Its still a miserable little hovel but at least it is no longer a bohunk yellow hovel.

We’ve been hooked up to town water since we bought the place but all we had was a connection for the bus. While I was waiting for the axle spacer to arrive I got us cold water hooked up in the house so we can use the bathroom there now. That’s no great advantage except for Marilyn’s cleanup while she is painting. Now the paint mess doesn’t have to come into the bus.

We figure we’ll probably hire a pro to put the top coat on the hovel. Not because we think it needs such a level of expertise – we just won’t be here to get it done. That won’t be as easy as it sounds though. Yesterday I had a long phone conversation with a Ukrainian fool (is “ukrainian” redundant in that situation?). Getting a painter lined up may take longer than actually doing the work ourselves. Marilyn talked to someone with a functioning brain last night so perhaps we have that problem solved.

Heading home

2011-08-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I checked in one last time at CRV Lagoa then left Sertaozinho and drove back to Uberaba. I had a couple of adventures when I arrived in Uberaba – first I needed to find a flight from here to Sao Paulo. They don’t get many Canadians at the TRIP counter in Uberaba. In fact they could only remember ever having one other foreigner check in there – he was from Iraq. It took a long time but they got me a ticket and then got me checked in this morning.

After I got the ticket the next order of business was to find a hotel. The flight out of Uberaba was supposed to leave at 8:00 AM but what with fueling the car and then returning it prior to the flight I didn’t want to subtract the drive in from the ranch from my get out of bed time. I’ve been getting up at 3:30 AM because these silly buggers work on a time that is three hours removed from real time. This morning I set the alarm for 2:30. It took a little doing but I found a hotel which serendipitously was located about 1/2 a mile from the airport. I certainly didn’t plan it that way, nor did I realize how close it was until I checked Google maps before going to bed last night.

Some last minute grief at Matinha kept me out at the ranch well into the evening so I ended up driving into Uberaba late at night. The “road” from the ranch out to the highway would be called a goat trail in Canada. I’ve done pasture checks for Assiniboia Land Management on trails that are better than the road to the ranch so I wasn’t wild about driving it at that time of night but you do what you have to do.

This morning I was welcomed back like a long lost friend at the TRIP counter. The guy who spoke no English at all yesterday had practiced how to say good morning and asked his buddy how to say “aisle or window?”. Then I went through security which was considerably different than what Homeland (in)Security would have put me through but I’m inclined to think I’m safer here than I would be in the United States.

After I got through security I watched a grandpa go through. He set the alarm off probably a dozen times, laughing and joking with the attendants the whole while. Once he got through he leaned over the rope barrier to kiss what was probably his daughter goodbye. But no terrorists need try entering here because they know everybody. When I went through they were professional and careful but with the locals they used common sense – a property that is sadly lacking in our airports.

When my flight was called my buddy came over to say “ma fren, yowah flah” - made perfect sense to me. Then again as I passed him on the way to the plane he grabbed my hand to say goodbye. I could have used him at the stop in Uberlandia. At Uberaba there was only one flight leaving so it was pretty clear – when a plane arrived, I needed to get on it. However in Uberlandia there were 6 flights on the board. I usually can’t understand the announcements even when they are nominally in English so there was no hope in Portuguese. Fortunately they seemed to be keeping up with flight status on the arrivals/departures board so I trusted that and it worked out OK.

Now I’m waiting in Sao Paulo for my 10 hour flight to Toronto. I’m still not sure where the Air Canada counter is but I think I was told that it only opens 3 hours prior to flight time. It doesn’t seem to exist so maybe it comes into being 3 hours before flight time as well. I’d be happy to get security behind me if for no other reason than that there’s a host of people in yellow t-shirts singing songs out here and the silly broad next to me thinks its necessary to sing along with them, loudly. She claps loudly too.

(later – much later)

The TAM airlines counter eventually turned into an Air Canada counter – it’s a pretty low budget operation our national airline is running down here. We got herded around like cattle, stood in line forever and finally dealt with some Air Canada stupidity, which I suppose was inevitable but was frustrating nevertheless. My Aeroplan/Passport name difference bit me again and with the language barrier it was more difficult to deal with. The difference between the episode in Regina and the one in Brazil was that the Brazilian attendant was clearly embarrassed that she couldn’t just check me in and did her best to get it sorted out as quickly as possible. In Regina the attendant had received the mandatory injection of Air Canada attitude so she made it clear that the problem was entirely my fault.

We had one last bout of bureaucratic silliness before settling in to wait for the flight. When you enter Brazil you go through a police entry procedure which leaves you carrying around an entry document. To return that we got to stand in line again after we cleared security but before we could go to our gates. As near as I could tell we could just as easily have dropped them in a bucket but that would have put about 20 people out of work so I guess that would be a bad thing.

This is pretty frightening ……..

2011-08-09T15:03:00.001-07:00

……………. but it confirms what some of us have suspected for a long time.

That ain’t the Geiko ghekko

2011-08-07T14:24:00.001-07:00

When you travel you see different stuff. When Marilyn came home from Japan all she could talk about was the damn electronic shitters they apparently have over there. I haven’t seen any electric shitters but the bathroom I have here is different than the ones I’m used to.

Now it wouldn’t seem like a bathroom offers much room for innovation. The functions we perform there are pretty much standard fare whether we’re Chinese, Czekoslovakian or Canadian but you might be surprised. To start with we often see wildlife in bathrooms when we travel in Mexico. Over the years Marilyn has had showers with a bat and with a variety of lizard-type critters. A few nights ago this little guy was living in my bathroom.

Then there’s the whole issue of ass-wipe. Without getting into too much detail I am coming to believe that the notion that ass-wipe should go down the hole with all the rest of the crap is a particularly North American thing. Mexico for sure and my limited sampling in Brazil suggests that these countries don’t like paper with the poo. There’s also a hose thingy beside my shitter that I’m afraid to experiment with. I can only imagine what disasters might befall me if I started playing with it. The image of Paul Hogan washing his boots in the bidet springs to mind.

Moving to the shower, mine comes equipped with an electric heater. Now we’ve seen this technology before. Carlos Juan, C-J as we call him, installed one of these in the bathroom in Guasave while we were visiting one winter. At the time I didn’t give it much thought but now I wish I had paid closer attention. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to use this one. Like - - which tap am I supposed to turn on? They both go through the heater thingy and the water doesn’t seem to get hot at first but then after a while it gets really hot. There’s some switches and controls on the heater but I’m reluctant to play with them for a couple of reasons. First off messing with 110 volt controls while I’m buck naked on a wet floor goes against everything I have been taught all my life. Second the controls have words on them that I haven’t the faintest understanding of.

And while we’re on the topic of not understanding the labels, there’s the taps on the sink. They show “Q” and “F” which I believe stands for Quente and Frio, hot and cold. However no matter how long I run either one of them they consistently deliver the same not quite cold water.

So mainly what I’m learning through travel is how little I really know. Which I guess is the first stage of learning. As learners we move from Unconsciously Incompetent to Consciously Incompetent to Consciously Competent and finally to Unconsciously Competent. Right now I’m firmly stuck in conscious incompetence and I doubt that will change during the course of this visit.

A couple of days ago I moved to Sertãozinho – try saying that three times in quick succession. I can pretty well guarantee you won’t get it right because they manage to extract the most amazing collection of sounds out of the same alphabet we use. Mind you they put all sorts of squiggles, accents and dots on and around the letters. But even leaving the various accent-type things aside they have completely different pronunciations for some of that damndest letters - Walmart for example is “Walmarch”. That makes figuring out the spelling of words that you hear a significant challenge.

Right now I’m waiting for the software geeks to iron out some wrinkles in the system. It seems to be a given that on every installation there will come a time where I sit and wait for the remote geeks to do their thing. This afternoon I drove in to Walmart/ch in Ribeirão Preto. According to my hosts Ribeirão Preto is home to 800,000 people and I believe that today most of them had their cars parked at Walmart. Either parked or going like hell on the highway.

Michael said when he was down here that he didn’t think there were any speed limits. There are definitely posted limits but he is right – they appear to be guidelines rather than directives. Similarly with the “Pare” signs which are octagonal and painted red. I had pretty well concluded that “Pare” must mean “Yield” based on how they were treated but I looked it up last night and it’s meaning is consistent with the shape of the sign. I think Brazilian drivers are like Mexicans in the sense that the only time they are in a hurry is when there is a steering wheel in front of them. Today I was passed by 6 crotch rockets while I was going slightly over 100 km. They literally went by me like I was standing still – now you see them, now you don’t. Every one of them had a woman on the back hanging on for dear life.

Thank God for Skype. Every night Marilyn and I can hear the sound of each other’s voice for the grand total of …… nothing. Last night there were something over 16 million other users online with us but the connection was better than most cell connections. And on her end we’re doing that over a satellite feed that isn’t supposed to be able to support Skype. The only way you could tell it was a satellite connection was a slight delay.

Nelore

2011-07-30T17:17:00.001-07:00

That’s the name of the goofy looking cows. Rancho da Matinha’s cattle are breeding stock and they are obviously handled a lot. Most of them act on the quiet side of “normal” for cows but some of them are like great big dirty white puppies. They come up to the fence to look at us and one even snuggled up to have its head, neck and ears scratched. I had to be careful I didn’t get a big sloppy cow kiss from that one. There is a limit to what I’ll do for any employer, including Growsafe.

This project came together remarkably quickly because these people are so obviously eager to have the system working and because they clearly see it as a step forward for the ranch. Sometimes when I get to a job it is apparent that the working hands resent the new equipment. They may feel threatened but more often I think they view it as just one more thing that they will have to do and one more damn piece of equipment to break down and be repaired. That is so obviously not the case here. I’m sure there will be breakdowns and when they happen there will be a cultural and linguistic divide as wide and deep as the continent that separates us from this place. But for now its all smiles and eager participation to get the project finished.

On the language front I’m finding that I can just about communicate in Portuguese. My Spanglish is getting me through and fortunately I’ve got an eager guide who officially works for the Brazilian government but who is unofficially my host, tour guide and translator this week. Sometimes though there’s still a lot of hand waving (and wringing) on my part. I like people who do real work and who know their stuff and for some reason I always seem to be able to get along with that type of person. They’re in abundance in this group and the novelty of meeting a Canadian doesn’t hurt either.

The cultural/language thing is going to heat up considerably next week though. I’ve been kind of coddled here at Rancho da Matinha with no need to function in the larger Brazilian society outside the bounds of this admittedly large ranch. Once I leave here I’ll be on my own so the story may change. Stay tuned.

We’re a long way from Buchanan Toto

2011-07-29T18:28:00.001-07:00

I landed in Sao Paulo yesterday morning after a red eye from Toronto. Flying in it seemed like the city went on forever. We’re accustomed to North American cities where the high rises are concentrated in one central area and then the city sprawls out from that centre. Sao Paulo doubtless has a core but you sure couldn’t tell from the air. There were high rise buildings clustered in probably 20 or more locations over the space of 10 minutes. Wikipedia says a Boeing 767-300 cruises at 530 MPH so even allowing some slowdown as we got closer to approach we still covered 60 to 80 miles in that time and we didn’t fly over the whole city by any stretch.

Air Canada did well on the flight. There was one “customer service” agent in Regina who fully lived up to their current motto – we’re not happy until you’re not happy – but otherwise their staff were pleasant and efficient. Her big concern was that my name on my ticket showed as R Evans while my name in my passport shows as Robert Evans. I pointed out to her that I had typed Robert into her damned website but it had converted that to R because I am Aeroplan member number one. I’m sure my Aeroplan card is the oldest one still in use. Its so old it only has 9 digits in my number and they need 10 now. Her only response was to point out that my ticket said “R” which I already knew. She thought I should change my information in my Aeroplan account which doubtless would have taken her less than 10 seconds while she had it up on her screen and equally doubtless will take me half an hour if I care to go through the agony on their website. Since my goal in life is to avoid flying as much as possible and to fly Air Canada only as a last resort it seems like a low return effort to change my name on their webform.

We’re just outside of Uberaba, Minas Gerais, Brazil. I had to look on a map to see where Brazil was when Growsafe said they were sending me down here. Maybe its just me but I think us northern hemisphere types tend to forget that there’s actually half of the world where the sun sets in the north. If you follow that hyperlink you’ll see that Uberaba is fairly centrally located in a BIG freaking country. They’re three time zones different from real time which makes for some strange mealtimes but they seem to eat a lot so its not that bad. And they have these awesome cheese buns where the cheese is right inside a tiny little bun with the most wonderful crunchy crust. And they seem to eat them pretty well non-stop all day, always fresh out of the oven. And the coffee – oh man do they know how to make coffee.

Its winter here now but winter at 20 degrees of latitude isn’t all that bad for a kid from Saskatchewan. I’ll post again with some pictures of the goofy looking bulls they raise here. They’re not Zebu but that’s the only goofy cow name I can think of right now. Its some name I had never heard of but one thing this trip is hammering into me is that there is a huge big world out there that has nothing to do with North America and is doing just fine anyway thank you very much.

We’re not completely disconnected from North America however. The doberman – the very heavy set, muscular, vicious doberman – that guards the property at night is named Obama. I think he has a better chance of getting elected the next president of the US than his more famous namesake but that’s a subject for another post too.

The circus to the south of us

2011-07-26T11:04:00.001-07:00

If you or I keep going deeper and deeper into debt every year we’re eventually insolvent. You might argue about when that becomes evident to the world but constantly increasing debt defines insolvency.

The U.S. is insolvent. Until they figure out how to turn that around they are a worse credit risk than they used to be. Maybe they’ll inflate their way out of the problem. It seems impossible that they will actually default but maybe they will on some portion of the debt. Some of the debt is owed within the country to entitlement programs so if they cut the entitlements and don’t pay everything back that’s a de facto default in my opinion. The bottom line is that they’re not as good a credit risk as they used to be. They might still be a good bet compared with most countries in the world but they’re also clearly not as good as they used to be.

So it astounds me when I hear people say “we have to make a deal by Tuesday or risk a decline in our credit rating”. It seems to me that ship has sailed and its already got a lot of miles under its keel.

The sad part of the whole mess is watching Obama being unpresidential. He seems to think the election campaign is still on. Rather than using the power and prestige of the office to advance compromise he seems intent on ramping up the rhetoric.

On the other hand maybe its working for him. I’ve got a good friend who keeps referring to the radical tea-party members who are being so “unreasonable”. I guess that’s because they’re saying all sorts of silly things like “the US can’t pay its bills” and “you can’t tax your way to prosperity”.

Here’s a little tidbit I included in an email to that aforementioned friend last night:

US Total Debt by Year

Sept 30, 1997	5,413,146,011,397.34
Sept 30, 1998	5,526,193,008,897.62
Sept 30, 1999	5,656,270,901,633.43
Sept 30, 2000	5,674,178,209,886.86
Sept 30, 2001	5,807,463,412,200.06

One of the common songsheets that the left likes to sing from is to blame Bush for the US debt and claim that he turned Clinton era surpluses into massive deficits. Strangely enough those Clinton era “surpluses” still resulted in steadily increasing total federal debt. As my father used to say, figures don’t lie but liars can figure. Personally I think Bush was also responsible for the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Broke bus

2011-07-26T10:38:00.001-07:00

It doesn’t matter which mode of transport we’re living in, there’s fixing to do. Coming out of Alberta last Sunday we had a brake lockup. Initially I blamed it on Prevost’s needlessly complicated system of relays which control the air to the tag axle but it turned out to be much simpler.

The initial symptom was a vibration so we stopped to have a look, thinking that we had another wheel failure on the micro-truck. The truck was still intact and we couldn’t see any problem with the bus. I left my infrared thermometer on the boat so I was using my palm to gauge temperatures but nothing seemed out of line. Maybe the thermometer would have detected what turned out to the be the problem. There was a roadside rest area just ahead of where we were and I was already tired so it was easy to convince myself that we should stop for the night. In the morning I had a good look at everything and couldn’t see any problems so we set out again.

All seemed well for about 50 miles and then the curbside tag locked up solid. I was pretty quick to flip the switch that lifts the tags but not before we had scrubbed a hole in the bottom of the tag tire. That’s only one of the many reasons why you don’t run good tires on the tag axle. We ran with the tag lifted to Regina and then back to Swift Current before I could get a good look at the situation. After initially blaming Prevost I eventually figured out that the inner bearing had piled up. I have no idea why. The bearings were all replaced not that long ago and there was oil in the cap when I took it off – maybe not as much oil as I would have expected but some of that likely ran out when the bearing piled up. Whatever the cause it wasn’t something that I was going to be able to fix on the road so we sat in the campground in Swift Current with the bus looking very forlorn and then ran all the way to Buchanan yesterday with the tags raised.

Our little shack on the prairies didn’t look as bad as we remembered it – its no prize but its not as bad as it might be. Last night I got the hub pried off so I could fully survey the damage and today I got the frenchmen working to send me the necessary parts. They have a bad habit of sending parts to the wrong address so Marilyn is going to hound them while I’m away to try to ensure the parts are actually here when I get back. I also have to wait until “John” gets back to the local machine shop to get the old bearing cut off the axle. With a really good collar and a puller I might be able to pull the bearing but it would be a battle. I’m not a sufficiently skilled torch-surgeon to cut the bearing off but I’ve seen it done enough times to know that such people exist. Another nice thing about boats --- no tires, brakes or wheel bearings to give problems.

Yesterday I picked up a set of Brazilian Portuguese lessons. I won’t be fluent or even functional but I would like to be able to say “Hi”, “Bye”, “Thank you” and “Bugger off” before I get on the plane. Counting would be handy too. It appears that the language is close enough to Spanish to confuse me and different enough to make my feeble Spanglish largely useless.

Yesterday I had a huge fight with our Hughesnet dish. It had been offline for about 7 months which shouldn’t matter but clearly does. Hughes is experiencing a steady loss of satellite internet customers due to the proliferation of 3G/4G cellular based internet services. In order to keep their satellites loaded they are dropping transponders and moving the remaining customers to new transponders. If that happens while the customer is online it is supposed to be invisible from the customer’s standpoint. When it happens while the customer is offline it can create problems and I believe that is what happened to us. Whatever the cause it took two calls to Galaxy support to get it all straightened out. That’s not as bad an experience as some calls to support – Galaxy actually answers their phones and they are a small enough outfit that I got the same guy both times so I didn’t have to go through all the bullshit about mother’s maiden name and first cat’s favorite food in order to verify who I was.

Today its down to the wire packing for Brazil and teaching SWMBO how to do all the nasty stuff that I normally do to keep our lives livable.

Grounded

2011-07-16T09:01:00.001-07:00

We’ve been busy entertaining nieces and nephews so I haven’t been a very reliable poster. It seems like a lifetime ago now but it was just Thursday morning when we woke up on Gray Hawk and then headed north to catch the early ferry out of Nanaimo. I had some Growsafe business to do at the Brazilian consulate in downtown Vancouver and then we pointed the trucklet east. All went relatively well except for one interminable parking lot around Abbotsford. I don’t know how people live with that as a part of their daily lives but I certainly can understand how road rage happens.

When we arrived at the storage lot in Chilliwack Leonard wanted to visit. I’ll miss him so I’ll have to make the effort to get back for the occasional visit. I found him two years ago when we moved out to Chilliwack and I was looking for a place to store the cube van. He had a little sign at the edge of his yard on the road up to Cultus Lake. When I walked into his shop he was modifying a very tired New Holland forage harvester in order to power it with a Ford 240 cu in 6 cylinder engine. He eventually took the power harvester to Mexico where his winter landlord uses it to chop palm leaves into silage. He calls it “feeding the dragon” and apparently two men with forks can’t keep up to the dragon’s appetite for palm leaves.

When I heard what his plan for the machine was my first question was “how the hell do you plan to get it across the Mexican border?” and apparently I was correct in thinking it would be a challenge. He gave up on hauling it across himself, hired somebody to haul it across and then they lost it. It sounds like it took many weeks and threats of legal action to eventually locate what would be worthless scrap iron to pretty well anybody anywhere in North America.

On Friday Leonard was in a visiting mood so Marilyn got to sit in the truck while he and I went over his and our winters. He did confirm something that has been bothering me since we started trying to fish in the ocean. When we fish walleye in northern Saskatchewan we use something called a bottom bouncer which is just a piece of heavy wire with a 90 degree bend roughly in the middle of it. The line to your fishing rod attaches to the bend, your hook attaches on a long leader to one of the “legs” of the L shape and the other leg is weighted so that it will bounce on the bottom. You lower it down until it touches bottom which leaves your lure streaming 10 or 12 inches above the bottom either in flowing water or while you are drifting. Then you bounce it – hence the name. I’ve asked several so-called salt water fishermen about bottom bouncers and so far nobody has heard of them but Leonard likes to fish in both Mexico and on the northern end of the Island and he uses bottom bouncers. So now at least I’ve got a plan for whenever we get back out there this fall.

We spent the first part of this week entertaining Marilyn’s sister’s kids on the boat. They came with us for a day of prawning, spent the night on the boat by Butchart Gardens and then we went crabbing. They didn’t have licenses so we couldn’t fish but that didn’t much matter because we can’t really catch fish anyway. The fireworks at Butchart were excellent and free. We had no idea what to expect but had been told they were worthwhile. We also had no idea where to tie up but as it turned out I don’t think we could have picked a better spot. It was tricky anchoring though – the channel was rocky on the bottom so really hard to get a bite on and fairly deep. By the time we got stern tied we were already closer to the shore than I wanted to be and then the asshole next to us arrived back on his derelict boat and informed me that we were blocking his view. We had a few words during the course of which I refrained from telling him exactly what he should do with his attitude and eventually I pulled us back even closer to shore until the fireworks were over. Since the fireworks were in the air (surprisingly!) I don’t think our position made a damn bit of difference which simply confirms my initial impression that he was just a drunken asshole. But it seemed that advising him of that might not be immediately productive. After the fireworks finished I slacked the stern lines and took in some anchor chain to move us back forward. By morning we still ended up closer to the shoreline than I liked but no harm came of it.

Now we’re parked in Alison and Camiel’s yard west of Airdrie. The frenchy-bus fired right up first try and all the systems appear to be working. The biggest issue so far was one sticky padlock. I have Master locks all keyed alike for the bay doors. They get full of road salt in the winter and they just aren’t meant for that kind of service. Its OK if you use them regularly and keep them lubed but when they sit for as long as they did this time its always a problem. I might have been able to free this one up eventually with enough patience and PB50 but it was preventing access to the electrical bay and that meant I couldn’t switch the main power disconnect back on so eventually I resorted to bolt cutters to get into the bay.

As is often the case, we’ve got some busy days ahead of us. Growsafe wants me to go to Brazil to do some initial installations for their systems in that country. I’ve got my normal summer stack of Palliser files to pick up in Regina and Marilyn has several Sask. projects on the go. The Brazil departure date is a moving target based on whenever the Brazilian consulate gets around to issuing a visa so its hard to plan at all. Fortunately we consider 7 day plans “long term planning”.

Every so often you get REALLY REALLY lucky

2011-07-07T11:48:00.001-07:00

When I’m tackling a project that is peripherally or directly related to electricity the good elf on my shoulder often whispers “you need to disconnect that wire/shut off the breaker”. Pesky bastard that he is, invariably I ignore him. And about 75% of the time the project completes without incident. Once in a while I get a shot of 110 volts up my arm or across a knuckle that reminds me why I need to be more careful about where I put a screwdriver. And I’ve got a few wrenches with brands on them from inadvertent contact with a high DC current.

About a month ago now I replaced an alternator on the port engine. When I was installing the new alternator it didn’t seem like it was properly aligned but I couldn’t see what I had done wrong. I keep checking on it and it was working but I still wasn’t happy with the way the belt was running and last week I figured out why. When I changed the diapers under that engine I found a little bit of pipe cut to act as a spacer and immediately realized that it had fallen when I took off the old alternator and was in fact the reason that the new one wasn’t perfectly aligned. So today I got busy and removed the alternator so I could install this little bit of pipe on the mounting bracket. Clearly not a project where a real man would need to disconnect the batteries.

Once I got the alternator free and checked the bracket I decided that it needed some 32 oz. adjustments. (for those of you not familiar with that particular fine tuning method it is a very precise technique involving a 32 oz. or heavier hammer) In the course of the adjustments the alternator fell from where I had carefully perched it so that I wouldn’t have to disconnect any of its wires. On its way into the bilge I saw one teensy tiny little spark as the output touched ground and the field wire pulled out of its connector. No biggie – I would have been happier if it hadn’t happened but no apparent damage.

Then SWMBO started screeching from upstairs “THERE’S SMOKE COMING OUT OF THE VOLTAGE THING”. I learned early in my amateur electronics career that smoke coming out of electrical things is never a good sign. In fact my experience has been that it is universally terminal for the device in question. By the time I got upstairs there was still a thread of smoke coming out of the panel so it smoked for a significant length of time. I unplugged the ribbon connector, cursed my stupidity and returned to the dungeon to finish the alternator install all the while wondering how I was going to figure out exactly which bit of electronics in our extremely complex charging system I might have fried.

When I came back upstairs I reconnected the ribbon connector and everything seems to be working. I still don’t believe that it is OK but so far I haven’t been able to find a real problem. I’ve been obsessing about the display voltage – currently it appears to be floating the batteries at between 13.6 and 13.7 volts – but I don’t have a real baseline to compare that with. The manual says it should float at 13.5 so its not a whole bunch different from that and it may in fact have been this way ever since December – I’ve just never watched it every five minutes. Time will tell and the next time I have an option to disconnect something electrical I likely will. The time after that ----- who knows?

We arrived back in Cow Bay the night before last around midnight. We had dawdled on the dock in front of Anne’s house in Pender Harbour until around noon. That got us to Nanaimo about 6:00 but slack at Dodd Narrows wasn’t until 8:00. We ended up going through Dodd against about a 4 knot current around 7:00 and after that there weren’t a whole lot of good anchorages until we got so close to home that it didn’t make any sense to stop.

We were getting so much entertainment off the VHF radio I didn’t really want to stop anyway. In mid afternoon a woman called in a MAYDAY from inside a marina. The coasties must get thoroughly fed up with the crap they have to listen to. In this case they calmly asked her if maybe she had an anchor or dinghy that she could use to help herself and less than 10 minutes later she called back to say she was tied up at the dock. They got another one in the early evening from a sailboat just outside of Nanaimo – they were becalmed. There was a long pause before the coasties responded. Then they asked “so there wouldn’t actually be anyone whose life is endangered by your situation would there?”

The best entertainment was a guy who called Comox Coast Guard in mid afternoon. To his credit he didn’t call his problem a MAYDAY. He was in something called Buccaneer Bay, which I haven’t bothered to find on the charts but which must be up near Comox. Evidently he went into an anchorage on high tide, went too far up into the mud flats and then didn’t realize what he had done until his sailboat started to tip over on the ebbing tide. He wanted a tow. They chase the non-critical situations off to channel 83A and I didn’t bother following this one so I hadn’t heard any more when about an hour later there came another call to Comox Coast Guard. This call was from another boater in the vicinity who asked the coasties “have you been following the situation here in Buccaneer Bay?” They made some non-committal response and chased him up to 83A.

I thought this one sounded like it had legs so I followed them up to the new channel. The caller must have been anchored close by and evidently had taken his dinghy over to survey the situation. “You can’t get within 100 yards of this guy. If anybody tries to tow him there’s going to be damage damage DAMAGE. The best thing he can do is get busy and clean his bottom and wait for the high tide”. It was pretty obvious the coasties were amused but they kept it professional and advised the new guy to talk to the stuck guy who was supposed to be monitoring 83A. Nothing came of that but about 10 minutes later I heard the coasties on 16 telling stuck-guy that he wouldn’t likely get refloated until well after 8:00. That wasn’t the news he wanted but evidently he had already called Sea-Tow so he was going to wait to see what they had to say. By the sounds of it when they got there a tow truck would have been more useful than a tow boat.

We will be leaving here in about a week and I won’t miss the crap on the radio any more than I will miss the increasingly crowded waters. We used to love being in the Shuswaps until about the time the Calgary Stampede wrapped up. Then all the yahoos moved out to the BC interior and ripped up the peaceful water for the next 4 weeks. It seems like a few of them also move out here to the left coast and create their particular brand of mayhem on these waters as well.

The fleet is out

2011-06-28T15:05:00.001-07:00

It must have been something I said. Everyone except us left this morning and for a few minutes there was just us and one other sailboat anchored in this little cove. Since then a couple more have arrived but its still a far cry from the mob that was here before the SNSYC crew left.

We had intended to leave too but it was another gray BC day this morning complete with a little drizzle and a wind warning for the whole strait. We’d have been fine moving – its sheltered and we generally operate from indoors anyway – but we decided to stay put. If its gray tomorrow morning we might just stay here another night. Its pretty easy to talk ourselves into staying when its as scenic as it is. There’s a bit of commotion involved with a move – untie the stern tie and reel in the line, stow the dinghy, undo the anchor bridle and stow it, pull, wash and stow the anchor – and then of course you have to do it all in reverse when you get to wherever you get to. So staying put is a pretty attractive option at least until we get bored with the current scenery.

Washing the anchor and chain was something that we hadn’t really considered before we started doing it but it is likely the most important part of anchoring. You really need to be well equipped for washdown and from what we’ve seen a lot of people simply aren’t. I’ve often seen people using a bucket to splash water over the chain – that would be like pissing on a house fire – right idea, wrong execution. Good heavy clay is our preferred choice of bottom – not that we get to pick – but when you find that clay it is covered with wet clay on the top – not too surprising since its under at least 25 feet of water. Anybody who has slogged through the Regina gumbo will know that it sticks to everything. When you’ve got 100 feet of anchor chain lying on the bottom that means you are going to have 100 feet of gumbo to wash off the chain as you reel it in.

The system on Gray Hawk when we bought her was a joke. Perhaps it worked at one time although I find that hard to believe but by the time we got her it was worse than useless. I’m still not wildly happy with what we have but its workable. Our seawater pump is adequate but I need a pressure reservoir so that the pump doesn’t cycle off and on while you are washing the chain and I’d like the reservoir to be stainless or plastic because it will be holding salt water. So far I haven’t found what I want so the stream occasionally pulses while Marilyn is aiming it at the chain.

In really good mud we have to stop regularly so the wash process can catch up with the chain retrieval. If you don’t wash it off all that mud ends up in the chain locker. Aside from the mess it will make I expect it would stink because it would be wet mud inside the boat. Eventually after we wash enough chain we get to wash the anchor. The Sarca has brought up some absolutely incredible lumps of mud on occasion. Sometimes we let about 15 feet of chain fly out once or twice just to get rid of the worst mud before Marilyn does the final wash on the anchor.

Gorge Harbour just phoned to say they’ve had enough cancellations to get us on the dock for June 30th/July 1st so we might wait it out here and move directly to Gorge Harbour on the 30th. It will be weird having a dock to tie up to after so long on the anchor.

We’re constantly commenting on how similar the scenery is to the Churchill River system. We have loved travelling and fishing on the river and so far there’s nothing out here that is any prettier than what we have in northern Saskatchewan. Obviously we don’t have mountains in the background in Saskatchewan but typically it isn’t pissing rain while you’re looking at the scenery either.

We’re seriously looking forward to getting back on the prairies. Every day out here the anchorages get busier, there gets to be more chatter on the radio and when we travel we increasingly have to contend with someone else’s wake. I can’t imagine what a gong show it must turn into after the July long weekend and I don’t want to find out. We always loved the Shuswaps until after Calgary Stampede and then were glad as hell to get out – I expect this place is exactly the same. Hardly a day goes by now that there isn’t some moron doing something idiotic on the radio or the water or both.

Whenever we do get around to spending a whole summer out here we’ll absolutely be doing it at least in the Queen Charlotte Islands or the Broughtons. To get up there you have to get through Johnstone Narrows which has a couple of tidal bores that act as gates to keep a lot of cruisers trapped down on this side. I expect that even that area may get more crowded than we like but this area definitely will.

Beeeeep–beeeeep–beeeeeep–beeeeeep

2011-06-26T09:11:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we left Squirrel Cove which had become less crowded but was still a pretty busy place and trolled our way around Redonda Island. Once again we failed to deplete the BC fishery at all.

Before starting our unsuccessful fishing expedition we made a brief stop in Refuge Cove. Judging by the age of the buildings around the bay it was an early supply depot for the Desolation Sound area. Its now owned by some kind of a co-operative made up of local property owners but it was pretty quiet yesterday. The store manager was extremely happy to see us there buying his overpriced groceries. Maintaining grocery stock in a place like that would be a thankless job – I expect he throws out 1 part of produce for every 2 or 3 that he sells. His produce was fresh but the selection was limited and it was all bloody expensive so we bought as little as we thought we could get away with. Our goal will be to hit Comox or Pender Harbour with no fresh produce left onboard. Which side of the strait we end up on will be entirely weather dependent. So far the winter (southeast) winds have been relentless. If that continues we’ll likely end up on the mainland side of the strait. There’s a lot of open water to the SE if you leave from Comox; if you leave from Vancouver the crossing is relatively short to Active Pass. Either way we’ll get bounced around a bit but for a much shorter time if we leave from Vancouver.

Refuge Cove is also home to Dave’s garbage barge which is exactly what it sounds like. Up here you can’t just drop off garbage when you tie up to a dock because it costs them money to get rid of garbage in these more isolated places. I suppose if you spent the night on the dock they might (or might not) take your garbage but for sure when you tie up to go grocery shopping you don’t get to leave anything behind. That’s where Dave comes in. He’s pretty ragged looking and likely smells really bad but we didn’t stop long enough for that to matter. We sidled up close to his barge, he flopped his bare feet over close to the edge and when we got close enough he took our bag of garbage. Marilyn handed over 5 bux and we were on our way. We had a “big” bag which should have een $10 but ours wasn’t very full so we got rid of it for $5. As we were leaving I’m sure Dave was sorting through our garbage looking for recyclable cans but he would have been disappointed because those get stomped on and put in a cat litter pail to wait for SNSYC’s recycling bin. They use the funds to support their junior sailing program.

After we gave up on fishing we slogged on through the rain to Elworthy Island. I had scoped out several potential anchorages ahead of time but Elworthy was my first choice. It was also the last one we came to so we checked out a couple before we got there just in case it was full or not to our liking. As it was it turned out to be a delightful little spot. We ended up stern tied to the island in a narrow (maybe 300 yards at its widest spot) channel with 2 sailboats. It was absolutely pissing rain by the time we got anchored but we got a brief respite that let us get a stern tie rigged and it was still pouring this morning. We had decided we wouldn’t move in the rain but in the late morning the clouds broke a bit and we ended up pulling the anchor and having lunch under a bit of sunshine.

We only had about 4 miles to go to get to our current location but the timing of our arrival was critical. The entrance to Roscoe Bay actually dries at chart datum. That means that at “zero” on the charts you can walk across the channel that we came in through today. I’m looking forward to the extreme low tide early tomorrow morning so I can get a good look at the rocks we came over. I’ve got our track saved on the GPS but I think I can go through with the dinghy at extreme low and get a track on the Garmin handheld that I will then be able to export and compare to the one we came in on. The extreme low tomorrow is still 5 or 6 feet above chart datum so the channel shouldn’t be completely dry.

This whole chart/tide thing is part of the learning curve. Charts in Canada are drawn to mean lowest low water levels. In the US they are drawn to mean low water level which has the effect of making US water look deeper than Canadian water which of course it isn’t. From a practical standpoint you just want to avoid hitting the rocks. Intuitively it would seem that always entering on a high tide would be the safest way to accomplish that but that isn’t always true. High tides can hide rocks just below the surface just as easily as low tides can bring you close to other deeper rocks. In a perfect world we would scout out the channels at low tide and traverse them at high tide but that opportunity doesn’t always present itself. We’re going to spend a couple of nights here so I’m going to make a point of doing exactly that and then save the results for the next trip. And I’ll use the results on the way out, all the while listening to the shallow alarm on the depth sounder going beeeeeep, beeeeeep, beeeeeep, beeeeeeep …………….

Boating 101: Part 17

2011-06-21T19:05:00.001-07:00

The more attentive among you may remember that before we left for Desolation Sound I said I was going to make a run to Nanaimo for some stern tie line. Stern tying for you landlubbers is the practice of setting an anchor and then tying the ass end of the boat to a convenient attachment point on the shore, usually a tree. We have a variety of skills that we have had to learn along the way and stern tying was obviously one we hadn’t learned – we didn’t have any stern tie line so stern tying wasn’t an option.

Harbour Chandler in Nanaimo is a wonderful place and they just happened to have 1/2” nylon line in 340 foot spools for $44.95 per spool so I came home with two. Then of course we had to find an excuse to try it out so today when we arrived in Squirrel Cove, more or less at the front door to Desolation Sound, we resolved to do a stern tie.

We first cruised the outside of the anchorage, which is remarkably full for this early in the season. We located a suitable tree on the shoreline and pulled up ahead of it to drop the famous Sarca. It was a little cranky about taking a bite in the bottom but eventually it hauled us up short. To be honest I’m not sure it brought us up in line with the tree that we initially picked but there’s a lot of trees up here so we adapted. Once we were sure we had the anchor firmly set we figured out the next step.

We’ve never actually seen anybody do a stern tie so we had to improvise but its not rocket surgery after all. As usually happens with a new project the damndest things turn out to be problematic. The things you think up front will be difficult are usually no problem but it seems there’s always something comes out of left field. Today it was how to get ashore with the line. We were at extreme low tide and still there weren’t many rocks showing. The shoreline around this cove pretty well drops straight down so it wasn’t going to be easy to get the dinghy somewhere that I could step out with two lines in my hands. I made a reconnaissance trip, found a spot that I thought would work and then Marilyn came along for the real trip.

With the ass end secured we then proceeded to the bow. We’re quite sophisticated in that department now, after I spent $70+ on a little bit of stainless steel in Anacortes.

Its not a good idea to put a bunch of strain on your anchor windlass. The shock load up a chain can be significant in a bad blow. When the chain is slack it actually acts like a cushion so you don’t get much shock loading at all but when it starts to tighten up there’s obviously no give – it’s a chain after all. The way you ensure that there is some cushion even when the chain is tight is by securing the chain to the boat with nylon lines. And not just any old nylon line will do – these lines should be 3 strand twisted line because it has much higher elasticity than the double braided lines that we use for mooring lines.

So tonight we’re tied fore and aft in a cove that probably covers 10 acres with about 25 other boats. According to the cruising guides this place typically holds 100 boats in the high season. I’m glad we’re not going to be here then. We stern tied just for the hell of it today but you put 4x as many boats in here and everybody would have to stern tie just to get everyone to fit.

North

2011-06-20T16:30:00.001-07:00

We’ve been trying to leave for Desolation Sound for a couple of months now but finally we’re on our way. Friday we got up early – well – early for us – in order to catch the slack current at Gabriola Passage. We arrived there just as it was turning so we could have been up a little earlier or hurried a little more on the way. The tide tables aren’t 100% accurate. According to Ports and Passes we should have been ahead of the change but we were actually a little behind it. I don’t trust all the electronic tide predictions mainly because I usually have two or three choices side by side on the screen, each displaying different predictions. I’m not sure why I think the printed version is inherently more accurate but it feels more reassuring to hold a several hundred page book and see the times in black and white.

We had a pretty lumpy crossing although the waves weren’t all that high. According to the automated buoys at Halibut Bank and Sentry Shoal the waves never got past 0.6 meters but their angle and timing were awkward. We were taking them on the transom and that’s always problematic because the boat tends to surf down the face of a wave until it buries its nose which brings it up short and then the stern slides sideways down the face of the next wave. Its an uncomfortable motion, constantly speeding up, slowing down and slewing sideways. Marilyn’s stopped up ears likely make her more susceptible to motion sickness so she had a pretty unpleasant afternoon.

We arrived in Pender Harbour around 6:00 Friday and tied up at Anne’s dock across the channel from Madeira Bay. Finally I got a good daylight look at Kivak, her custom fibreglass sailboat. Kivak is named after a little Russian village on the east coast somewhere north of Japan. The name is in honour of the builder who was a Russian refugee who jumped ship in Vancouver and worked in a shipyard there sometime in the late 60’s. He eventually amassed enough money to start building his own boat but by the time he got the mechanicals installed he had pledged it to a bank in support of a friend’s business. The business failed, the bank took the boat and Anne and her husband bought the boat from the bank. They finished the boat by fitting out the interior and wanted to give her a name that would recognize her Russian heritage. They painted the boat themselves including the name so it had to be easy for Anne to letter. She said she searched the atlas for Russian names from the right region of the country that had only straight sided letters and finally came up with Kivak. She’s a very stout and at the same time attractive vessel – the Russian obviously knew his art.

We spent the weekend with Anne and then moved to anchor in Hospital Bay so we could join the flotilla from SNSYC that is on its way to Desolation Sound. They left this morning (Monday) for Princess Louisa but we decided not to join them. We were just up there a couple of months ago and there’s a lot more to see. We also bumped into (literally) some folks that we met at Trawlerfest this spring. As we were leaving Anne’s dock so she could give us a tour of the harbour we were hailed by Alice J. They were idling in Garden Bay so we idled over to join them and briefly rafted up together. Jim had put Betty on the plane in Victoria and she is due into Pender Harbour this afternoon. In the meantime he has been anchored in Gerrans Bay so that is where we are now too.

Pender Harbour is a tiny little bit of civilization but an incredibly large anchorage at the same time. There are about 6 usable little bays that lead off the main access to the village of Madeira Park which appears to be the prime centre of commerce. Unlike so many of the places we have visited, Pender Harbour’s water isn’t littered with mooring balls so there are actually several places for us to drop our anchor.

It takes quite a bit of room to anchor safely. Right now we’re in just under 30 feet of water with 150 feet of chain out. If you add 6 or so feet of height to the bow that’s a little under 5:1 scope but we’re at low tide. As the tide comes in we’ll add another 11 or 12 feet of depth leaving us in around 40 feet of water for something just over 3:1 scope. So we can’t really have any less chain out and at low tide we swing in excess of a 350’ circle by the time you add our scope plus the length of the boat.

Idiots and maroons

2011-06-14T16:49:00.000-07:00

Not everyone we meet on the water is a fool. Yesterday I noticed somebody eying up the boat and finally opened the door to visit with him. Having previously had extreme difficulty getting rid of Mike from Canora I was reluctant to engage the next dock-walker in conversation. He turned out to be a welcome relief from Mike the Ukrainian.

He lives near Anacortes and takes occasional contracts with local charter companies to help newbie boat drivers get used to a boat. That’s why he’s here now – “here” in this case being the inner harbour at Victoria. He must have a couple of the aforementioned idiots as charter customers though because evidently this is the third time they have hired him. They could just like his company I guess. Our Sarca had caught his attention so we spent a long time talking about anchors. He had evidently never seen a new-gen anchor which seemed strange given his part time occupation.

We pulled into the inner harbour around noon yesterday in order to get Marilyn to her class for wannabee actors. There’s some certificate you need to have in order to work on a film set. She has talked about doing that as long as I can remember. I think the anticipation was better than the reality but for better or worse here we are. The price has gone up – way up – since the last time we were here – we’re into high season moorage rates now. And by “high” they mean HIGH.

Before we left Cow Bay I noticed that we didn’t have a red nav light. Actually when I looked closer all we had was a green nav light – both our forward and rear facing white lights were also out. So I spent yesterday tracking down electrical gremlins and now we not only have nav lights all around we also have spare bulbs for the three – count ‘em – three different bulb types that are used in four nav lights plus two spreader lights. That doesn’t count the anchor light which is a different bulb again. I’ve managed to standardize a lot of the interior lights by going to LEDs but the exterior lighting is still a mishmash of original equipment and various owner modifications/bodges.

Diving classes are over and SWMBO is now certified. Certified and damaged to be completely accurate since the last dive did something to her ears and she now can’t hear properly. (She hasn’t been able to hear properly since I met her but now she admits she can’t hear properly.) Today she went to a local quack who told her that time would fix the problem. That means no fun dive this weekend. The class was over last weekend but some of them are going back for a last dive this weekend. They’ll have to do it without her and that means that we can leave a few days earlier for Desolation Sound.

So tomorrow we’ll ride the tide back up to Cow Bay so she can return her diving gear and I think I’ll run up to Nanaimo to buy a spool of stern tie line. Then we’ll be ready to head out and we’ll likely cross the Strait on Thursday. There’s a huge armada from the yacht club leaving about the same time on roughly the same route so we’ll hook up with them off and on for a couple of weeks. They’re going up to Princess Louisa first and we don’t really want to go back there yet so we’ll likely see them off from Pender Harbour and then head for Lund. We’ve got our oldster friend with the dock in Pender Harbour that we need to stop in on – she’s already invited us for supper. Once we get past Agamemnon Channel it will be new water flowing under the keel again.

The graphic kind of shows our route from the tip of Gabriola Island to the entrance to Desolation Sound. Pender Harbour is about dead centre on the image and Gabriola is about three hours north of our dock at Cow Bay. We’ll leave from there because it lets us get around the south end of the Whiskey Golf (WG) live weapons range that the navy uses between Comox and Nanaimo. Lots of times its inactive and you can transit it freely but we’ve got no way of knowing that ahead of time so its easier to just plan to miss it. That also lets us miss running Dodd Narrows but we’ll have to run Gabriola Passage instead so there won’t be any big gain there. It just happens to be slack about 6:30 PM boat time so that works out well. Considering that its going to run at 6.1 and 7.5 knots that day we really don’t want to be there anytime but slack water.

Now back to the idiots and maroons. Being on a transient dock is absolutely the best place for unscripted entertainment. You can hear them coming. The good operators are almost silent – the first sign you see of them is their hull ghosting quietly by a window but the idiots are another matter altogether. They invariably announce their presence by either drunken yelling or revving engines or on the really good occasions, both. Today there was a Uniflyte arrived – about 40 feet long. It came flying down the slip beside us before I had a chance to get outside to menace it with my boathook. We’ve got a really wicked boathook with this great ugly rusty iron point on it. I like to visibly wave it around so they know that they are going to lose some gelcoat if they get too close but this clown was by us before I could get outside.

Then he drove all the way up to the head of our slip all the while yelling at passersby that he was in a hurry and asking where the harbourmaster was. When he got up to the causeway in front of the Empress he was about 30 feet from the harbourmaster’s kiosk so then he started waving imperiously for her to come out and talk to him. Never heard of a radio I guess because I have been keeping a watch on the harbour channel and it was silent the whole time. He had about a dozen men aboard and they started hopping off whenever he bumped into a finger pier, which was fairly regularly. Once they were on the piers they could keep him fended off by leaning against the boat whenever it got too close. The harbourmaster is long on charm and short on wisdom (she looks to be about 14) so she decided that he needed to go over two fingers. He argued with her for a while but eventually gave in. Then he came charging back out past us and over to the neighbouring pier where he tried to execute a 360 in the slip by bouncing off a very large boat that was already tied up over there. Whenever he bounced off something he would rev the engines all the harder. The owner of the boat he was bouncing off of looked like he would have enjoyed using my boathook. Its getting late in the day – with luck there will be some late arrivals for evening entertainment.

Out and about

2011-06-07T16:48:00.000-07:00

We left Cow Bay on Thursday headed for Montague Harbour which is on Galiano Island. Galiano’s main claim to fame is as a refuge for granola-eating tree-hugging fudge-packers. More on that later.

When we arrived at the marine park in Montague Harbour there was hardly a soul there but it started filling up Thursday night. I estimated about 40 mooring balls in the harbour and by Friday night about 30 of them were occupied. So not full-full but close. I don’t trust the mooring balls so we dropped our Sarca and after a couple of tries got a good set. That seems to be emerging as a pattern. The first drop doesn’t necessarily produce a set but we’ve never had to drop it more than twice and we absolutely know we’re set when we get done. I think I actually pulled it out in Montague by pulling too hard on too short a scope the first time. We were in fairly deep water (around 50 feet) and I think I only had maybe 150 feet of chain out. When you add the freeboard to the water depth we might have been under 3:1 scope and I powered up pretty hard against that so not too surprisingly we moved.

The purpose of the trip to Montague was to meet up with a group from SNSYC who were going on to Chemainus for a night of dinner theatre. We had to bug out of the Saturday flotilla to Chemainus in order to get Marilyn to diving class in Maple Bay. That meant we had to be up before daylight but it was so pretty at that time that it was almost worth the early start just for the scenery.

I dumped Marilyn off at the dock in Cow Bay and after she headed off to diving class I made my way alone up to Maple Bay. I had trouble finding a decent place to anchor when I got there. Mooring at the “public” dock was out of the question as it usually is.

The open water dive consisted of walking in off the beach so I hung out on the anchor and watched the class. Not that there’s much to watch once they go under water.

Marilyn did really well and actually enjoyed the experience, contrary to all expectations on her part. At one point her group went directly under Gray Hawk and I assumed they would at least check the anchor set and ideally the bow thruster zinc at the same time. No such luck.

When the dive class finished we made a high speed run up to Chemainus to rejoin the SNSYC group. They were already having cocktails on the dock when we blew in at a blistering 8 knots. We managed to get tied up in spite of help from the harbourmaster and immediately poured some bagged wine so we could join the party. Later we walked to the dinner theatre which was neither a particularly good dinner nor a memorable theatrical performance. I would have to have strong reasons to go back for either activity but in this case the real purpose was to network with the yacht club members and that was worth the price of admission.

Yesterday we spent a leisurely morning saying goodbyes as the group broke up in Chemainus. There were three of those old fashioned kind of boats with the sticks in the air who wanted to leave early in case the wind happened to work for them on the way home. Their main benefit by leaving early was likely that they could catch a favourable current down Sansum Narrows. By noon pretty well everyone had left so we had dinner and then chugged our way down into Maple Bay. It was so crowded there that we didn’t even try to anchor and instead came across to Burgoyne Bay which is where we are now.

Eclectic doesn’t begin to describe the variety of floating accommodations in this bay. There’s literally everything here. It is however very peaceful and we are having a delightful quiet day at anchor here. Tomorrow we’ll probably start a circumnavigation of Salt Spring Island. There’s several harbours that indent the island and its time we knew what is in each of them.

Now back to the tree hugging fools on Galiano. The highlight of the evening in Montague Harbour was a bus ride to a pub for supper. It was actually a pretty good supper and kind of a cute setup – the pub sends a worn out schoolbus down to the dock, everybody piles on and then this long haired freak driver hauls us up to the pub for the evening. On the way back to the dock he proudly announced that the citizens of Galiano Island had put Elizabeth Dipshit May over the top on election night. He was evidently stupid enough to believe that was something to be proud of.

Sux to be Bob

2011-06-02T10:31:00.001-07:00

Different Bob. It very much does not suck to be me but that’s not the point.

No, it sucks to be Bob Rae. Ya really gotta pity the guy. First he jumped ship from the Ontario NDP to the federal Liberals just about the time that their internal cancer started to become publicly visible. Then he got beat by a known idiot in his first run at the party leadership and stepped aside graciously to allow the coronation of the next wrong leader. Now he had to watch his old party installed as the official opposition and agreed to the thankless task of rebuilding a party that still doesn’t realize how fundamentally flawed its internal workings are. And despite being the only viable candidate for that rebuilding he is still so distrusted by the party apparatchics that he had to swear off all future leadership ambitions in order to be appointed to the futile task of interim leader.

The problem is that, at the root of it all, I think Bob is a pretty decent guy and not just because he has such a good name. He always appeared to have a sense of humour, confirmed by his recent job acceptance. Any politician prepared to show his naked backside with Rick Mercer on national television is either a complete idiot or a pretty decent sort. The Libs already elected one complete idiot as a leader so I suppose we shouldn’t completely rule out that possibility. Bob clearly has a sense of duty to the Libs, gawd only knows why though because they equally clearly don’t show the same loyalty to him.

Sunny day in Cow Bay

2011-05-31T10:37:00.001-07:00

OK …………. it’s not completely blue sky and sunshine but it’s about as close as it gets out here. You can see some blue in the sky and you can tell where the sun is. For the left coast that qualifies as a sunny day.

It’s nice enough that I’m getting serious about getting the flybridge ready so we can operate from “up top”. Over the weekend we opened up the bimini for the first time ever. We had peeked inside the canvas cover, satisfied ourselves that the bimini was in there and agreed that it was likely unusable before we made an offer on the boat. Since that time we had completely ignored its existence but on Saturday I opened it up and wonder of wonders it is actually usable. I took it off and ran it through a wash cycle with a lot of bleach. That reduced the size of most of the mildew spots. Then I reinstalled it wet because we were afraid it would never stretch to fit if I dried it first. Now that it has sat in the (rare) sunshine for a couple of days the mildew spots are fading further to the point where it looks generally white.

There’s still a couple of issues with operating from the flybridge – one major and the rest more in the category of irritants. I doubt that anyone has actually operated the boat from up there since Chuck sold her 13 years ago. The dashboard that holds the instruments is a piece of 1/4’ used-to-be-plywood. It will have to be replaced and I’m not looking forward to that project – many holes to saw and a lot of wires to unhook and re-hook. The show stopper right now is the lack of a depth sounder. There’s one up there but it doesn’t work and I can’t make it work despite my efforts in that regard. Yesterday I phoned Waypoint Marine in Sidney and ordered a cheapo depth-only sounder. Today I’ll drive over there to pick it up and then I’ll have to go through the contortions to run the cable from the engine room to the flybridge in order to hook it up. Then we’ll probably use the flybridge until the instrument panel becomes such an annoyance that I finally get around to fixing it as well.

This week Marilyn has her first open water dive on Saturday, assuming she passes the test Wednesday night. The dive is in Maple Bay and we are also booked to attend a dinner theatre cruise to Chemainus Saturday night. I’ll probably take the boat to pick her up in Maple Bay and then we’ll carry on to Chemainus. The dinner theatre is a yacht club event and they are also planning to anchor out in Montague Harbor on Friday night. We’ll join them there so we’ve got a busy weekend coming up. The rest of the group will convoy from Montague to Chemainus but we’ll have to take a slight detour.

Smilin’ Jack exposed

2011-05-30T16:31:00.001-07:00

I guess its not worthy of note to say that politicians occasionally say one thing and mean something else. Nor in Canada is it noteworthy when a pol says something in Quebec and something else for English consumption. But Smilin’ Jack is starting to slip in his own shit and it could cost us all a lot of money or perhaps the country as we know it.

The federal NDP are used to saying whatever nonsense springs to their feeble minds because it really never mattered. As the official opposition though people are starting to pay attention to the verbal diarrhea that pours out of Jack’s mouth and not surprisingly it doesn’t add up. There’s better minds than mine writing about this subject but in a nutshell Jack’s Quebec lies come down to 2 specific items:

Inside Quebec Jack points to the NDP’s Sherbrooke declaration which states that the Quebec National Assembly has the sole authority to write any secession referendum question and that 50% plus one vote will be sufficient to pass that question.

Outside Quebec Jack tries to profess that the NDP will adhere to the Supreme Court/Parliamentary Clarity Act. Parliament passed the act following the last referendum in Quebec and then referred it directly to the Supreme Court for a judicial opinion. That act will show up on a Google search but effectively it says that parliament needs to sign off on any referendum question and that the question will only pass with something more than 50% plus one – likely 60% but the Supremes left some wiggle room on that too based on the percent of the population that votes in the referendum.

I don’t think the average Quebecois really wants to leave Canada. As long as I can remember Quebec has done pretty well by blackmailing the rest of us with the threat of separation. It’s a dangerous game though when the leader of the official opposition fuels the separation fires with lying rhetoric.

Learning by watching

2011-05-25T14:17:00.001-07:00

I didn’t get to watch all the sailpast boats leave and arrive. We watched a few of the boats leaving and weren’t disappointed by the drama. One in particular was at the end of a finger pier with 2 boats behind him. The boat at the end wasn’t particularly big – maybe 35 feet – the ones behind were significantly bigger (and significantly more impatient). Evidently the guy on the end was clueless about getting away from the dock because eventually it took the crew from both boats behind him to get him cast off. Its not that hard – you untie the lines and leave, ideally with all crew members on the boat but it is surprising how many people have difficulty with the process.

I missed most of the dock-drama because I got invited to crew on “Small Fry”. “Crew” is maybe overstating my duties a little bit because really all I did was watch Ira do all the work. Small Fry is a wooden dory built somewhere on the coast maybe 60 years ago now and lovingly restored by Ira Rote. She is powered by a single cylinder Easthope engine – the kind that goes chukka – chukka – chukka when its running. We were sitting on the steps in front of the Empress watching the drama unfold in front of us when Ira appeared and asked me if I wanted to ride along on the sail past. I’d stopped and watched him working on Small Fry earlier in the weekend so naturally I leaped at the chance to go along and I think – in all modesty – that we were one the highlights of if not the highlight of the show. We sure got waved at by a lot of people, including the pilot of one of the many single otters that fly out of the harbour. He slid open his window to take our picture then closed the window, pushed the throttles home and took off.

Last night three big sailboats arrived in Cow Bay with a bunch of kids onboard. They are part of some kind of sailing school or more likely a glorified teenage daycare system. The kids wouldn’t have learned much from the docking maneuvers last night or from the departure this morning for that matter. Ever since somebody first stuck an internal combustion engine in a boat and hung a prop on its shaft people have been docking and undocking boats under power. Leaving aside for a minute that it is possible to dock a sailboat under sail, these guys didn’t even use the boat’s own power to control it. Instead one of them actually launched his dinghy and used it to push the stern into the dock. I could maybe understand it if the wind was shoving the bow around so badly that they had to use the dinghy to control the bow but the stern? There’s a great big rudder on a sailboat – its not hard to move the ass end around.

The most disturbing aspect of their maneuvers was that they seemed completely ignorant about the wind. Last night when they arrived there was a fairly stiff breeze blowing up the bay. The first boat came in, rounded up into the wind and let the wind stop him neatly against the dock. No problems there but the next two were another matter altogether. The second one chose to dock on the downwind side of the finger but his prop walk was in his favour if he had made any attempt to use it. Instead he used his dinghy. The last one came in on the upwind side of the same finger and then repeatedly tried to back against his prop walk when all he had to do was stop and wait for the wind to blow him down on the dock. After 6 or 7 tries he had finally drifted down on the dock in spite of his efforts. If one of the kids had been at the helm maybe it would have been understandable but it was clearly an adult at each helm. Watch and learn I guess – I only hope the kids were able to learn from seeing it done wrong.

After Victoria we had a nice uneventful trip back to Cow Bay. When we got home I phoned American Diesel and (as usual) Brian Smith answered. I described my coolant leak and fully expected him to tell me I needed to change the head gasket at the very least and likely to plane the head at the same time. Instead he asked me when the last time was that the heads were torqued. I’d forgotten because you never retorque a modern engine but it used to be fairly common to retorque heads after the engine had run for a while. The most impressive element of the call was the fact that it was the second time I’ve called American Diesel and the second time they’ve given me free advice that cuts them out of a multi-hundred or even thousand dollar sale. Ya gotta love people like that.

Retorquing the head meant that I’d also need to reset the valves which I couldn’t do until I bought or borrowed a set of feeler gauges. On Monday I found a neighbour with a set of feeler gauges and tore into retorquing the heads. Once I got the port side put back together it seemed to have gone so well that I decided I might as well do the starboard side as well. Time will tell whether I accomplished anything or not. The engines both started after I got done messing around with them so that’s always a good sign and by no means a guaranteed outcome when I’m doing the wrenching. I did a full throttle runup on the port engine and couldn’t see any sign of a leak but I won’t be 100% confident of that until I can run it up under load. I didn’t want to let it scream in the slip for too long for fear of annoying the neighbours so maybe all I did was get some grease under my fingernails. Like Ken Kotowich told me years ago, experience is what you get when you don’t get what you really want. Maybe all I got was experience.

High tea & dim sum

2011-05-22T08:08:00.001-07:00

We’re not going to do the high tea bullshit but dim sum is another matter altogether. Especially when Victoria’s Chinatown is less than 4 blocks from our doorstep.

We didn’t have anything particular planned for the weekend so Thursday morning we slipped the lines and cruised by a roundabout path to SNSYC. Earlier this spring we agreed to camphost at Beaumont Marine Park on South Pender Island so we thought we’d check out Bedwell Harbour, the location of the park. It was pretty enough and a great spot for lunch but it turned out that organizing for the park hosting is kind of a fustercluck so we won’t be doing that after all. Truth be told that came as a relief because we seem to have been busy busy busy. We’d really like to get up to Desolation Sound before we leave for the prairies in July but it was looking impossible to do that. It still may not happen but now there’s at least a glimmer of a chance that it will.

I attended Bob Smith’s seminar on diesel engine maintenance in Anacortes and came away with some useful information. In the short term that information will probably cost me money but we’ll hope it saves something in the long term. His presentation was full of good common sense advice and one of the tips that stuck with me was to stress test the mechanicals every time we go out. He made the point that a boat engine running at hull speeds isn’t getting any kind of a workout. If you run a truck (or bus) at normal highway speeds most of the time it is making less than its full horsepower but occasionally when you climb a hill it will be called on to produce full horsepower. Those occasions will test the entire drive train and if you have a problem (bad u-joint for instance or compromised cooling system) that is when you would expect those problems to show up. That never happens in a boat unless you push the throttles all the way forward and leave them there for a few minutes. Bob’s point was that it is better to do the stress test regularly and on your schedule. Similar to a heart stress test we would rather have a drive train failure at a time of our choosing – in the doctor’s office as it were – than at a time when the boat chooses – in the middle of a storm for example.

So ever since Anacortes I have been pushing the throttles all the way forward immediately after the engines first come up to operating temperature. I leave them there for 2 or 3 minutes, watching to see that the temps don’t keep rising and noting the maximum RPM that they make each time. Everything seemed good except that recently I have noticed a bit of a coolant leak on the port engine. I didn’t initially connect the two events because I have been suspicious that it was leaking a bit right from the start but never have been able to pin down exactly where it was coming out. On the way down to Sidney I finally put it all together, went down in the engine room during the full power run and sure enough, found where my coolant leak was. It looks to me like it probably never leaks except during high RPM operation so its not serious but its real and it needs to be fixed. The nice thing about having a boat is that you are never short of things to do.

To come to Victoria we happened to get lucky with our timing and were able to ride the tide down Haro Strait. The books and web authors who write about trawler travel make a big deal about how you should time your travels to take advantage of the currents. The logic is that a relatively small absolute value for a current is very significant when compared to our normally slow travel speeds and therefore critical in our planning. And that is true, as far as it goes. We travel at a maximum of 8 knots and more typically at 7 so a 2 knot current is 25% or more of our typical travel speed. That means we can catch a 25% free ride by timing our departure to coincide with the appropriate current.

It’s the “timing our departure” part where things start to come off the rails. We met a couple in Anacortes who have just bought their first boat and it was amusing to listen to them talk about how they were going to get all this free travel thanks to the currents. The reality is somewhat different.

To start with there’s often only two “useable” currents per 24 hours. Right now there’s effectively only one high and one low tide in 24 hours. Sometimes you have 2 distinct highs and two lows per day but right now everything is lined up so that the lower high is just kind of a stepping stone on the way to low tide and vice versa. Since the tides drive the currents that means there’s only two currents per day and one of them will be going the way you don’t want it to go. That only leaves one current that is moving in your favour and for most trips you only have maybe 6 hours flexibility in your departure time so unless that one favourable current happens to land in that 6 hour window it isn’t going to help you. And it may just as easily hinder you. I suppose in theory you could make plans months in advance and time them to hit the right current windows but then you’d also have to contend with the day to day reality of unpredictable weather, particularly wind. The bottom line in it all is that sometimes you get lucky but most of the time you just try to minimize the damage that you current does to you. So we really appreciated the boost that the current gave us on our trip to Victoria. It probably clipped at least an hour off the passage from Sidney.

Coming into the inner harbour in Victoria was all new to us. I’d read about it and of course we have seen the harbour from in front of the Empress but its different when there’s vessels in front and vessels behind and seaplanes taking off and landing beside you. The woman at the harbour authority was first rate – she talked me into the right slip and fortunately we fit in the first one she assigned us. This morning I learned by watching a later arrival that she doesn’t necessarily know how big the slips she is assigning are relative to the vessels she is trying to fit into them. Some poor saps in a sailboat were out in the rain trying futilely to fit into various slips that the harbour authority had assigned to them. Finally they gave up in our little basin and the last I saw they were rounding the outside wharf headed for a new assignment further south of us.

Today there’s a sailpast for the three yacht clubs that have taken over most of the moorage in the harbour. The sailpast won’t likely amount to much but there’s about 80 boats involved and I think they plan to dock them all again after the sailpast. If I’m right that should be about the best entertainment within 100 miles while it is going on. They’re rafted up solid in front of the Empress right now – getting them jammed back in should involve a lot of yelling and at least one outright wreck. There’s not much wind today which is unfortunate but you can’t have everything.

And of course today is dimsum day too.

Boarded!

2011-05-17T20:51:00.001-07:00

I didn’t take many pictures at Trawlerfest, which is where we’ve been for most of the last week. We went last year in San Diego but the Anacortes version is a lot bigger event. They’re not shy about charging for the privilege of attending but we’re glad we went and we’ll go back another year. A good measure of how much fun we had is the fact that I hardly took a picture and never wrote a word. We were just having way too much fun.

There’s a lot of crossover between the converted bus community and the trawler world. Not that bus owners necessarily end up as boat owners, let alone trawler types but the attitudes and approach to life are similar. Delfin, the converted steel Romsdahl trawler in the picture above is a good example of a labour of love that far exceeds both the finish and the seaworthiness of any production boat anywhere. She holds 2500 gallons of fuel, is finished in several exotic hardwoods that I had never even heard of much less seen and is one of the hardiest ocean crossers I have ever seen.

We renewed acquaintances with some of the same people that we saw in San Diego last winter and made some new contacts. Of course we spent time with Chuck and Gail, former Gray Hawk owners. And we took a new Krogen owner out for a boat ride to La Conner on a miserably rainy Sunday. He and his wife are working on their boat on the hard in Anacortes. They were onboard Saturday night and we agreed that if it was raining on Sunday then we would take them to La Conner (if the sun had been shining they would have been working on their boat). On Sunday it was absolutely pissing rain all day but unfortunately only George could join us because Sue was nursing a sick dog.

Yesterday, Monday, we left Anacortes around noon headed for Reid Harbor which is the little marine park just north of the entrance to Roche Harbor. As we approached Wasp Passage we were passed by one of the U.S. Coast Guard’s fast RIBs. It went buzzing off into the distance and disappeared up a channel. Then a few minutes later it came zooming back out of that channel and passed us at high speed on the starboard but immediately rounded our stern and came up alongside to port. We had been warned by many people that we would certainly be boarded by USCG at some point and we were.

We talked out the open cabin door and they told me that they wanted me to stay in gear but pull back to idle. When I did that they eased up alongside until they were touching the side of Gray Hawk. Marilyn opened the rail for them and they boarded while we were still underway. Three of them came aboard – a coastie and coastie-trainee and a border guard- they call them Homeland Security but they’re border guards. It was all very polite and civilized although I’m sure that could have changed in a heartbeat if they thought it was necessary. From our standpoint it was just another boating adventure so we went along with the program and enjoyed the interaction. When we were all done apparently one of them thanked Marilyn for our “cooperativeness and pleasant nature”. I didn’t know we had a choice.

Last night we anchored in Reid Harbor. It felt like home because we’ve been there or on the other side in Prevost Harbor every time we have passed by on Gray Hawk.

We had to take two runs at it to get our new anchor to set. I don’t know what happened the first time but it just wouldn’t set. The roll bar is supposed to flop it over and prevent that from happening but it wasn’t working yesterday so we pulled it up, moved over a bit and took another pull. That time it set solidly and I was able to power up to be sure that it had dug in. Not long after we got it set we had some vicious winds blow in and I think one of the gusts actually rolled the anchor out but it must have reset almost immediately because we didn’t move from that spot all night. This morning when it came time to pull it the winch wouldn’t spring the anchor out of the bottom. We pulled up over the anchor and the winch stalled with the chain straight down. I waited a minute or so, tried the winch again and it pulled maybe another 8 inches of chain and then stalled again. A couple of tries like that still hadn’t freed the anchor so I put the engines in gear alternately and it popped out immediately. When we got it to the surface it was still full of really heavy mud. In fact we had so much mud on it that we brought two live clams to the surface.

I sat through an anchoring seminar at Trawlerfest that was presented by the US Power Squadron. It was pretty light duty but the questions at the end of it prompted some discussion that was useful and after the seminar I walked back to lunch with Dennis Umstot. He and his wife have cruised extensively in the Pacific Northwest as well as the Baltic and have crossed the Atlantic under their own power so I have a lot of respect for his opinion. His advice on anchors was that if your windlass will lift it then its not too big.

One of the questions at the end of the seminar was about setting the anchor and how hard you should pull on it to check whether or not it was set. The Power Squadron guy clearly didn’t do much (any??) anchoring and he was really fudging his answers to the point where Dennis finally stepped in. His answer was that unless you could power up the engines after you set the anchor then you weren’t anchored. He went on to say that in his opinion well over half the boats in Cap Sante marina were under-equipped in the anchor department. I don’t think we’re in that category anymore and I sure slept good last night.

Marilyn on the other hand didn’t sleep so well. At some point during the night she heard some splashing at her head and then became aware that someone or some thing had boarded the boat. I dunno why the hell she didn’t wake me at that point but she didn’t. Instead she and the 4-legged idiot went out on-deck – with a flashlight - to investigate the boarding. By the time they got there the swim grid was empty but she said it had a big wet spot on one side so likely we were boarded by an otter or maybe a seal.

We went way out of the way on the trip to Anacortes in the hope that a passage down the west side of San Juan island would let us view some of the elusive whales. No luck. I’m beginning to think that whales are like sunshine in BC – much talked about but seldom seen.

I’m from the government. I’m here to help you.

2011-05-10T13:21:00.001-07:00

So this morning I had coffee with the guys, hung around for a while, went to the Post Office where the Canada Post guy had the door open before 9:30 but seemed decidedly pissed off that I had dared to venture into his lair before that magic hour, picked up Marilyn’s dive course that I should have picked up on Saturday and finally got underway just before noon. I had an uneventful passage but as I came through the channel from Swartz Bay it got pretty lumpy and I realized that the wind had got up. It was bumpy enough coming into Van Isle that I turned on the stabilizers and the cat puked before we even got that far. So I was more than a little nervous about single-handing the dock at SNSYC.

Initially I thought I’d back in and tie on the SE side of the pier which would have had the SE wind pushing me squarely onto the dock. That’s a pretty easy docking even alone but as I rounded the breakwater I remembered that I couldn’t do that today. Until 4:00 every day and on Thursday evenings that section of dock is reserved for the junior sailors, of which there are none today but that’s beside the point, its reserved. So I had to adjust on the fly and when I realized that there wasn’t another soul on the dock I decided to pull as far forward as possible to try to get a bit of wind shelter from the breakwater and point of land that it juts out from. That didn’t really work and just as I made the turn at the breakwater the wind got serious and really started bossing me around.

I came down the pier at an angle with the rudder hard over and the props countering each other holding it in with the bow thruster. Normally that would walk me sideways but today it more or less held me to the dock but didn’t really gain much against the wind. When I got up behind the club boat and couldn’t got any further ahead I snuggled up against the dock one last time and then ducked outside onto the dock to start tying up. Of course as soon as I left the helm Gray Hawk started to leave the dock but I got my spring line tied as short as I could and was able to pull her back close enough so I could get back onboard immediately with the spring line holding me amidships. By that time the bow had swung over the dock so that we were at about a 45 degree angle facing into the dock. I pushed the bow back out, ran the stbd engine for a few seconds to pin the stern to the dock and hopped ashore again to tie up the stern line.

As I was doing that I saw a fairly well dressed woman coming down the dock towards me. I got the stern tied off and had the bow line wrapped on a cleat by the time she got up to me. My first instinct was that she was from the yacht club and that I had done something wrong. She had that kind of gleam in her eye that says “I’m right and you’re wrong” but when she started speaking I realized that it was much worse than that.

She had a badge around her neck that she was thrusting forward with one hand and a clipboard in the other hand. When she started talking she never paused for breath “I’m Nosy Nomind with Statistics Canada and I’m walking the dock today and and anda ……..” I kind of zoned out there for a while until she came up for breath at which point I simply said “I’m single-handing today, this is a bitch of a wind so why don’t you go bother somebody else.” Which she did, muttering to herself about how she would have helped me if only she knew what to do. I’m just guessing but likely docking boats isn’t the only thing she’s clueless about.

I’m not a big fan of Stats Canada, having had some memorable run-ins with them over the years. The best time I ever had with them was when we were living in town in Nipawin. When they phoned me at the shop I’d ask them if it was a personal call and then tell them I couldn’t take personal calls at the shop. When they phoned the house I wouldn’t talk to them and apparently Marilyn was telling them to phone me at work. In this case I suppose I’d likely have been an asshole no matter how she approached me but she’d have had a lot better chance if she had stood back and at least waited until I was tied off.

Now I’m sitting here checking the weather and waiting for Marilyn’s plane to land. I think we’re going to get beat up a bit but we’re going to cross to Roche Harbor anyway. Once we get in the San Juan Islands we’ll be pretty sheltered for the rest of the trip to Anacortes and I don’t think the crossing will be all that bad anyway. We’re out in the open on the Strait of Georgia for about an hour on this crossing so even if its bad its not bad for very long. There’s some kind of a front moving over and the wind is supposed to slack off as the day wears on. Something big just landed so I expect Westjet has arrived.

A job well done

2011-05-07T14:37:00.001-07:00

I’ve been working against the incessant rain to get the anchor remounted. We’re going to Anacortes next weekend for Trawlerfest and I’m vain enough to want the boat looking as good as possible. I love the look of our new Sarca but the mount left something to be desired until this morning.

Initially I planned a search of the various second hand stores in the vicinity and on the mainland because bow rollers heavy enough to mount the new anchor are not cheap. Then I added up what the search was likely to cost – its over 100 bucks round trip to go to the mainland where the best stores are – and I quickly raised my budget for a new bow roller. I made a trip to Nanaimo, stumbled onto an incredible chandler on the waterfront and ended up coming home with a stainless steel bow roller with a nylon roller. I think the roller is maybe a little light for our purposes but if/when it fails I’ll replace it with something more substantial. The bracket itself is pretty well exactly what I wanted and it was all lying on the shelf in Nanaimo for a mere 1/4 of a boat unit.

Today the epoxy that I applied yesterday was cured enough to drill again. I like using the West System slow hardener because the ultimate strength of the epoxy is higher if it cures slowly but in this miserable weather its awful tempting to use the fast hardener because the weather pretty well guarantees a slow cure either way. Eventually I’d like to coat the teak in the bow pulpit with West System using clear hardener but there’s no way I’m going to even try that until the weather smartens up.

The biggest challenge of the installation was to conjure up a tie down mechanism that looked good and was secure. I’m not 100% happy with the appearance of the tie down for the CQR but it will do until I come up with something better. The biggest consideration for the CQR mount (aside from appearances and security) was to keep it out of the way when we deploy the new anchor. Now that the windlass is working the way Chuck said it would the chain runs out pretty fast. Its actually kind of cool to watch and hear it go out but its going fast enough that I don’t want it to get hung up on the old anchor when its really flying out.

The new bracket came with a storage pin which required drilling the new anchor to accept the pin. That only cost me one drill bit so it could have been worse. All in all I’m pretty satisfied with the appearance and it won’t shame us when we open the boat to trawler-crawl in Anacortes.

I did some hard drive housecleaning and discovered the following two pictures of prawns. I continue to be amazed by how easy the little devils are to catch. A sink full of prawns pretty well sums up how we have been catching them.

The one on the right is the finished product after I pulled all their little heads off. Actually their heads aren’t so little so the pile is quite a bit smaller but still pretty impressive.

The prawn fishery is supposed to be in very good shape. I hope so because the commercial guys are out there now trying to harvest all the little buggers.

Wingnuts incorporated

2011-05-06T20:28:00.001-07:00

For some reason CBC has been focusing on the rapturists today. Right now there’s some loony tune babbling on about how the world is coming to an end imminently. On any given day I’d be inclined to agree with him to the extent of saying that it is going to hell in a handbasket but I’m disinclined to believe that some western-centric deity is about to dissolve us all. And coming on the heels of this week’s election I’m more sanguine about our possibilities.

If you’re seriously worried though here’s an idea: most of us know somebody somewhere else in the world. I for example have a brother in law living in Tokyo. Since its already tomorrow there, were I inclined to believe that some calamity was about to befall the world tomorrow, I could simply phone Brad to see if it had.

Me and the cat are wifeless this week while Marilyn returns to the prairies to rustle up some work. I’ve been putting my time to good use getting messy boat projects out of the way. Our new anchor doesn’t stow properly in the old bow roller but I have a solution in progress. I bought a nice shiny stainless bracket with a roller in it and if the bloody rain will ever quit falling I’ll get it bolted down on the deck. When I’m all done we’ll be able to carry the nice shiny CQR anchor on the old roller and the new Sarca over top of it on the new roller. Today I got the holes drilled and then immediately filled them up with epoxy paste in the hope that the resin will soak into the surrounding wood so that when I drill it out again I won’t have edge grain exposed to water. No matter how miserable it may be tomorrow I’ll get it mounted.

This afternoon I also got a ground wire run from the bow thruster to the mid-hull zinc plates. I’m worried about how rapidly the zinc on the bow thruster eroded. I tested the wiring with my multi-meter and it tested OK but there has to be something going on there. The voltages are tiny which means that the currents and resistances are also miniscule so perhaps I just don’t have a good enough meter to measure what I was trying to measure. Whatever the situation I now have a straight run of #8 AWG wire directly from the bow thruster case to the mid-hull zincs. Once SWMBO gets dive certified I’ll send her down to have a look but until then I’ll just have to hope its OK.

The only way it could have been better

2011-05-03T07:48:00.001-07:00

……… is if the stupidest woman in the world hadn’t won her seat.

OK that may be a bit harsh – she may not actually be the absolute stupidest woman in the world. But I guarantee if they ever hold an Olympic event for stupid Elizabeth May will get an invitation. And the voters in Saanich Gulf Islands will get honourable mention for electing her stupidness to parliament.

However as my son pointed out last night one of the first things a majority Harper government has pledged to do is to remove the party per-vote subsidy. That will whack the so-called green movement’s finances. Since only half as many Canadians were suckered by the message this time I’m betting that nobody will really mind that we aren’t supporting their loony tune agenda from the public purse.

I’m not going to go for coffee for a few days so as to avoid telling the people around me how stupid they are for electing this woman. Stupid is as stupid does and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Jacob and Esau

2011-05-02T15:21:00.001-07:00

It’s hard for us in the west to understand the mid-east mindset but the story of Jacob and Esau sums it up perfectly. In the west we assume honesty and trust in the absence of evidence to the contrary but that whole structure is turned upside down in the mid-east. In the story Jacob uses trickery to extract the blessing that his father would normally have reserved for his elder brother. That is normal behaviour for a large portion of the world’s population.

Nobody reading this will likely live long enough to read the true story of the death of Osama Bin Laden but rest assured that treachery was involved. Does anybody really believe the fiction being floated by the White House? They followed some random errand boy for 8 months? Give me a break already.

One of two things happened. Either Bin Laden pissed somebody off and got turned in for that or the prospect of an American reward finally got to somebody in Pakistan. Either way its good riddance to bad rubbish but the American jubilation seems a little declasse. The real story should be that Obama’s flaccid international policy wasn’t able to persuade the Pakistani government to turn over America’s most wanted. Let’s not pretend that they didn’t know he was living next door to their military academy.

And if anybody seriously thinks the world is safer today than it was yesterday then give me a call because I’ve got some ocean front real estate in Buchanan that you may be interested in.

An evolutionary dead end

2011-05-01T13:49:00.001-07:00

The smart cats evolved into lions and tigers, pumas and panthers – kings of the jungle, tertiary predators, the top of the evolutionary food chain. The dumb ones on the other hand ended up as housecats.

Just as I was sitting down (on the deck, in the sun) to eat a wonderful dinner Marilyn discovered that idiot brain was missing. I managed to convince her that he was either gone or OK and waiting while we finished dinner wasn’t going to make any difference except of course that dinner would be cold if we dropped everything to look for Brainless the Second. So we ate dinner and then I went looking for the fool. As you can see I didn’t have to look far. He looks deceptively relaxed in the picture but in fact he was more than a little disturbed by the fact that he was too stupid to find his way back out. The trap is complicated enough to fool a crab so it shouldn’t be any surprise that it is also complicated enough to fool our failure of evolution.

This morning we were treated to a sail past by most of the West Coast Workboats that were still here for their gathering. I think they did it to honour some guy who died over the past year but by the looks of most of them honouring a comrade who died in the past 12 months is likely an annual event. Whatever the excuse it was fun to see all of them parading around the bay. We launched Hawkita so we could watch from water level.

I counted something over 20 boats doing the grand tour around the bay. Not all the boats that were still in the marina participated in the parade and some left before it started so I’m guessing that they had maybe 30 boats in total show up for the weekend. Some of them were more attractive than others but most of them looked like pretty seaworthy accommodations. A couple in particular were really well done.

I won’t pick on one that looks bad but Raincoast Spirit (below) is a good example of one where the converter obviously paid attention to aesthetics as well as functionality. The rear cabin has been added on top of what would originally have been the working deck. Note how the new cabin top line picks up its direction from the line of the original cabin and blends with the sheer line to the aft. (the sheer line is the profile of the boat minus the cabin) Rather than trying to match the new cabin to the original cabin the builder has deliberately separated them with an obvious break that mimics the drop in the sheer line below it. Very well done.

Romance (in the picture below) is an example of one with a particularly bad cabin line so I won’t show it in profile but the workmanship on the boat was absolutely exquisite. I didn’t pay attention to what he used for drawings because obviously they came from somebody with a bad eye but the boat’s fit and finish could be stacked up against the best fibreglass construction in the world. The boat is built in cold molded epoxy which means that it is a wood/epoxy sandwich. In this case the hull is 3 layers of 1/4” x 8” cedar with the first two layers diagonal and the last layer lengthwise. He used nylon staples to clamp the cedar layers and of course everything would have been slobbered with epoxy. When its all done the hull is every bit as strong as a fibreglass hull and perhaps stronger plus it has some of the weight and warmth of wood.

Long time --- no typing.

2011-04-30T07:49:00.001-07:00

….. but blame it on Doug and Jo. We were having so much fun this last week that I just didn’t bother.

Doug and Joanne arrived in Sidney last Friday and we were sitting on the dock at Sidney North Saanich Yacht club waiting for them. We spent their first night aboard on the dock because the big question going into this adventure was how well Jo was going to handle the motion of the ocean. That turned out to be a complete non-issue thanks in large part to the wonders of modern medicine in the form of gravol patches.

I pretty well had to fight Doug for every minute of helm time except when I wanted him to do the docking in Nanaimo. If you look close in the picture above you will see that George II was keeping a close eye on the new skipper. When it came time to dock Marilyn cracked the whip and kept Doug busy handling lines. Actually now that I think about it they probably won’t ever want to come back because we worked Doug too hard.

That picture of Joanne isn’t really fair because she took over cleanup duties in the galley. She’s likely just recovering from cleaning up one of my galley messes. We ate really well because we showed up in Sidney with a huge haul of prawns and then dropped the traps outside Ladysmith and got another batch of the little buggers. Marilyn even caught some crabs off the dock in Nanaimo but none of them were big enough to keep. They did provide some added entertainment for our guests, particularly the aggressive one that locked himself onto Marilyn’s finger and bruised her through her glove.

We made a loop through Vancouver, back over to Nanaimo and returning to Cow Bay. When we got back to “the bay” there was a crew in the midst of changing out the docks at Pier 66, the neighbouring marina, so Doug and I spent some time sidewalk supervising that project.

We finished the trip with one last night on the dock at SNSYC so that it would be easy to get Doug and Jo to their early morning flight out of Sidney. We managed to get both the truck and the boat down to Sidney which meant that I got to singlehand Gray Hawk back home from Sidney. Last night when I got back to Cow Bay the West Coast Workboat Association had taken over the government wharf behind us for their spring rendez-vous.

There’s some beautiful old workboats that have been given a new lease on life thanks to a recreational conversion. I have managed to leave my tax return to the eleventh hour so I promised myself that I wouldn’t go walk that dock until I had my taxes done. I think I’m far enough down that trail that I can go drool over the workboats today.

The bounty of the sea

2011-04-21T21:25:00.001-07:00

People have been telling us that when you really catch prawns you can get 200 in 3 hours. We didn’t believe them and I still think that’s a reach but after today it doesn’t seem quite so impossible.

That’s the second trap we pulled today and there was at least 50 in it. Marilyn stopped counting at 20 and she wasn’t half done. The next trap was empty and the last one had about half as many as this one. So we have a lot of prawns in the fridge now waiting for Doug and Jo to arrive tomorrow. We were so disciplined tonight – its hard to believe. We ate most of the leftovers in the fridge and saved all the prawns for when our guests arrive tomorrow. We’ve got so many that we’ll be able to gorge ourselves for two feedings and by then maybe we’ll have found some more. And if there’s anybody local reading this – there’s no way in hell I’m going to even give you a hint of where we had that trap dropped but you better believe I know exactly where it was and we’ll be going back there.

Anybody who’s ever fished knows how fishing boats cluster up in the same location. I’ve always been of the belief that most of those boat clusters happen something like this: Early in the morning a couple of guys are on their way to their favorite fishing spot when the engine calves on their boat. The guy in the back buggers around with the engine and the guy in front thinks “what the hell, might as well fish”. Along comes another boat, sees a guy fishing and his partner getting the motor started so they stop and start fishing. Another boat comes and another and pretty soon there’s 8 or 10 boats clustered in one spot. After a while the first guy gets his motor running and they bugger off because they knew damn well there weren’t any fish in that spot to begin with but all the rest of the crew keeps on fishing and as some of them go in for lunch newcomers arrive to take their place.

I think it’s the same with crabbing and prawn traps. Some places you go through there’s a blizzard of white floats on the water. It can be a genuine pain in the ass getting close enough to a trap buried in the midst of one of those clusters to pull it. Lets just say that the one in the picture above was very easy to access and pull because it was in a pretty lonesome location. And the one that was empty? It was a genuine bitch to get at.

I pulled the heads off all the prawns when we got to the dock at SNSYC and George ate so many prawn heads that he actually quit eating them. Right now he looks like he swallowed a beach ball and he hasn’t squawked once about bedtime lunch.

SNSYC is our yacht club – Sidney North Saanich – and that’s where we are tied tonight. When we rounded the breakwater there was a cruising sailboat tied up at the end of the reciprocal dock. It was obvious it was a serious cruising boat – gear lashed down on deck, 4 jerry cans of diesel in the cockpit, dinghy on a leash – and I commented to Marilyn about how serious it looked. Then we realized it was Estrellita which is the boat that was docked at Princess Louisa when we arrived there. I had a quick visit with the kids tonight before their company arrived for supper. They got their haulout done in Esquimault and now are on their way to the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Tomorrow we’ll meet Doug and Jo’s plane, come back to the boat, run up a bit of a bar tab in the club and gorge ourselves on camarones al mojo de ajo before turning in for the night. Depending on the weather Saturday morning we’ll either go to Vancouver, Victoria or back to our prawn spot.

Catching things

2011-04-17T19:56:00.000-07:00

For about a week we thought somebody had stolen one of our traps. We had the spot marked on GPS but when we went back to get it there was a commercial trap set in exactly the same spot. We searched far and wide with no luck and eventually came to the conclusion that either it had drifted off completely or else someone had stolen it. It was more than a little depressing and took away our enthusiasm for running our trap line for a while. The day immediately preceding was the day we had to cut the line on the other trap after I foolishly entangled it in our running gear so the two events felt like a one-two punch.

We eventually recovered our enthusiasm and purchased a couple of commercial prawn traps. On Friday we took a friend of a friend out with us when we went to set our traps. We’ve been at it long enough that we were able to ask some semi-intelligent questions and Geoff had some good tips. Time will tell whether or not they improve our success.

We had also been tied up to the dock for close to a week until Friday. We’ve been losing about a cup of coolant every four hours or so. For a while I put it off as the system recharging itself after I did the coolant change in Seattle but lately I’ve been sure it was using coolant. Not much but enough to notice and by extension enough to matter. There were only two places it could be going – either we were burning it or it was going out with the raw water through the heat exchanger. It clearly wasn’t going into the oil and for a variety of reasons I was pretty sure we weren’t burning it. Last week I finally got around to replacing the heat exchanger and I changed the oil coolers at the same time. All that activity meant that the engine was hors de combat for several days so it felt good to fire it up and go for a cruise again.

Yesterday Marilyn got an email notifying her that whales had been sighted in Sansum Narrows. After we had dashed off (“dashing” meaning 8 knots in this case) to not find them she discovered that the message said they were sighted Friday afternoon. On the way back from the whale non-sighting trip we checked the traps. We were skunked on prawns but Marilyn pulled up a whole trap full of crabs. It turned out that most of them were females and out of the whole works we only could keep one but the full trap looked pretty impressive coming out of the water. And thanks to some cooking advice from Geoff we were able to extract a surprising amount of meat for supper from that single crab.

Yesterday I got some teak veneer and started gluing it onto the cupboard renovations that we’ve been doing. Like my father, I’m more of a carpenter than a cabinetmaker and this project is no exception but it doesn’t look as bad as some of the jobs I’ve tackled over the years. Epoxy covers a host of sins.

This morning we caught another mess of female crabs and one great big male. Geoff explained that the best way to clean a crab is to whack him in half before he goes into the pot. It actually works really well. You take the live crab, flop him on his back and use a cleaver to whack him squarely in half down his middle. He doesn’t go into this willingly mind you but when done cleanly you have two crab halves and its dead simple to get the guts out of him. Once he’s split in two you can clean away his mouth parts, remove his gills and peel his shell off him. In the process you wash out all the guck in his stomach and clean away the guts. When you’re all done you have 4 legs with half a body attached to throw into the pot. Then you use him as an excuse to eat a bunch of butter, garlic and fresh bread. Life is good. (maybe not so good for the crab)

What the hell is that thing?

2011-04-11T16:11:00.001-07:00

I’ll come back to it later.

We had great seats today for an SAR exercise. While we were eating lunch we noticed a big yellow plane circling overhead. Then came a very large helicopter in the same bilious yellow. It hovered over the entrance to the bay for a long time, slowly settling lower until it was maybe 50 feet over the big green derelict in front of the marina. It was around for so long that we stopped paying close attention to it.

I wasn’t paying close attention so I didn’t have my camera handy when I realized that they were lifting a guy off the deck of the derelict but I had my camera out a while later when they dunked this guy in the ocean. They lowered him down to the water, dangled him with his feet in the water for a while, dropped him completely underwater and then eventually winched him back onboard. That seemed to satisfy whatever they were doing so shortly afterward they buggered off.

Marilyn was in a cleaning frenzy so now the flybridge looks much better. While she did that I was cleaning the fish we caught this morning and deheading the prawns. We weren’t intending to fish but one foolishly wandered into one of our traps and I wasn’t inclined to release him since he was clearly too stupid to live. We’ll see how stupid-fish tastes tonight.

The mysterious device on top of our anchor windlass is my latest invention – a homebuilt trap puller. They want anywhere from $700 to $1400 for trap pullers online and if past experience is any indicator the prices in the Canadian retails will be at least 20% higher than US online pricing. There’s no way in hell I was going to pay $1000 or more to avoid pulling traps up by hand but at the same time its damn hard work. It also takes a really long time and sometimes we just don’t have a long time with the wind trying to alternately blow us onto the rocks or into another fisherman’s crab floats.

Being fundamentally a cheap SOB I didn’t want to spend anything on my creation but I compromised and spent just under $20 on galvanized fittings. Then I epoxied them into some of the plywood left over from the fridge replacement project. (I seriously love West System epoxy) I had to do a little math to arrive at a realistic winding speed which was ultimately determined by the diameter of the circle that I located the fittings on.

The shot above is approaching the end of a pot pull. Marilyn’s job at this point is to shriek when she first sights the crab trap and my job is to shut the winch off. If this continues to work as well as it did today I think I’ll rig up a remote control for the windlass switch. The bonus of my system compared to one of the commercial systems is that mine leaves our lines neatly coiled ready to store with the traps whereas the commercial systems would leave the line in a tangled heap on the deck waiting to be coiled by hand. Once we’re done winding up the line we take a couple of double sided velcro straps, tie off the coil of line, slip it off the “drum” and store it inside whatever trap it belongs to. QED.

Theft in the marina!!!

2011-04-07T21:11:00.001-07:00

I’ve taken to having coffee for an hour or so every morning. Right at the head of our ramp there’s a chandlery with a porch that serves as a coffee room. Every morning 10 to 20 locals gather to discuss everything from the earthquake in Tokyo to goatman who lives at the head of our dock. I’ve always wanted to be a coffee regular but never could get past the effort required to become one. It takes a while to get to the point where you can go away and still be a regular when you get back but I think I’m there now.

This morning one of the regulars came in with a gloomy puss and immediately announced that he had been robbed. He recently purchased two plastic kayaks – shortly before we arrived – and has been enjoying an afternoon paddle pretty well every day. He was obviously shaken up by the theft and once he had tracked down a phone number for the RCMP he reported the theft. Then everybody started offering advice about where they were likely to be based on the most likely profile of the offending parties.

A couple of search parties were organized to walk the docks. Barry (the theftee) and Curry set out to launch Curry’s dinghy to do a water search. As they were leaving I was thinking to myself that I should have said something about the youths I saw on the dock late in the day yesterday. At the time I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to them – I certainly couldn’t have provided any descriptions but apparently Marilyn had paid closer attention. When Barry and Curry arrived back on the dock they ended up talking to her and she was able to provide a description of the perpetrators.

This is where the story gets weird. It turns out that Barry (who is clearly a borderline dingbat) had told two stoners that he met on the street that they were welcome to use his kayaks. He likely expected that they would say something prior to taking the kayaks or that he would at least be on the boat and know what was happening. As I said, they were stoners so any such assumptions about normal human behaviour were at best silly.

Someone else in the marina had been scanning the shoreline on the north side of Cow Bay with his binoculars. Eventually he spotted the missing kayaks abandoned on the shore directly north of our dock, probably about a mile away across the bay. As the story eventually unfolded the two stoners had showed up just before dark and taken off across the bay with some idiotic plan to climb the mountain on the north side. All of us liveaboards on this end of the dock were in the pub for 1/2 price wing night and Barry didn’t notice the missing kayaks when he got home.

With the kayaks located Curry launched his dinghy and then Barry and I headed across the bay in pursuit of the errant kayaks. On our way back we stopped at the derelict hulk that the two stoners were living on to return the lifejackets that they had left in the kayaks. Based on their responses at that point I can safely say that they learned exactly nothing from their experience.

This afternoon we got our zincs checked. I was anxious to get that done as soon as possible after our move here and it turns out it was good that we did. Our bow thruster zinc was totally consumed. It was still in place but as soon as the diver touched it with his wire brush it fell off in his hand. Fortunately I had a spare that he could put on. A couple of the shaft zincs were pretty far gone as well but we have two zincs on each shaft and they are deliberately at different ages in the hope that we won’t ever completely lose our shaft protection so the newer ones were still in good shape.

So now we’re re-zinced and Barry’s kayaks are back on his boat. All things considered a very good day.

Stupid, stupid, stupid

2011-04-05T07:32:00.000-07:00

We lost a crab trap today. Actually its not really lost. We’ve got the GPS location marked as a waypoint so we could get back to within 50 feet of where its lying but its gone nevertheless. It could have been a LOT worse.

Back up a day. Yesterday we pulled my prawn trap off Separation Point. There’s several floats about 200 yards off the point marking where others are trying to capture the elusive Spot Prawns. There were no prawns in our trap but there were 5 Dungeness crabs. Two of them were likely big enough to keep but we only kept the biggest one and sent the other four back to grow some more. Then we headed back toward the dock in anticipation of boiling our catch for supper. Along the way Marilyn decided she wanted to drop “her” trap. She has been using the trap that came with our spare anchor rode but she only has 75 feet of line on it so we had to drop it in much shallower water. HAD 75 feet of line.

Last night we had a wonderful feed of fresh crab. It wasn’t enough for a meal but it was a good appy. Crab and lobster is really just an excuse to eat garlic butter anyway so we had extra butter and enjoyed our one lonesome crab.

Tonight we have a yacht club AGM at the clubhouse in Sidney. So we left the dock at Cow Bay after lunch and headed up toward Sidney, stopping along the way to pull Marilyn’s crab trap. The wind was blowing pretty strong out of the west and we still don’t have a good system worked out for retrieving the line. Gray Hawk has a lot of freeboard which is great when you’re slamming into the seas on a day when you really should have stayed at the dock. But its not so great when you are trying to snag a little piece of 1/4” line dangling below a crab float.

Retrieving the float from the bow has the advantage of putting the risky parts of the boat (props and rudders) a long way away from the crab line. On the other hand the bow is about 7 feet above the water so its pretty tricky to snag that little line from way up there. Yesterday we managed to hook the line from the aft deck once and once from the bow. Doing it from the bow however required SWMBO to lie prone on the foredeck and reach with one hand holding the boathook. That wasn’t an ideal solution so today I came up with the incredibly stupid idea that I could put our swim grid up close to the float. In theory that meant that Marilyn would be virtually at water level where she could casually snare the float and pull it aboard. In practice it meant that the float disappeared under the swim grid whence it managed to get itself wrapped around something important. I had the engines shut off in a forlorn attempt to keep from wrapping a line on a shaft but by the time I got to the swim grid we were clearly entangled in a big mess.

I was able to pull on the line and for a while it seemed like the trap might come all the way up. I could pull line through and I could release the line and have it drop away but I couldn’t get the line to drift free of whatever it had managed to wrap itself around. Could have been the rudder, could have been the prop or it could have been any of the various support struts that brace the shafts. Whatever it was eventually the line jammed up hard and I could neither pull it nor let it run out. Very bad.

We didn’t have any options left so we cut the line. The line is weighted so we knew that if it came free it would fall to the bottom. Crab traps are required to have an emergency escape hatch held closed by special cotton string that will rot so we knew that it wouldn’t go on catching crabs. What we didn’t know was whether or not the line would fall free of whatever it was caught on. I knew it was jammed and I was reasonably sure it was caught on something on the starboard (right hand) side. So after cutting the line I started the port engine and put it in gear (cautiously). Nothing bad happened so I ran it up a bit thinking that dragging the trap might cause the line to come free. Eventually I got that engine up to maximum RPM and still nothing bad had happened. Then I stopped and ran it in reverse, again thinking that might dislodge the trap that I assumed was still caught up on the starboard running gear.

Finally with lots of water around us, out in the middle of the bay, I started and engaged the starboard engine. For a wonder nothing bad happened. No big noises, no sudden stop of the engine, no vibration. So we dodged a major bullet.

After our hearts came back to a normal rhythm we headed across to Separation Point and pulled my prawn trap. This time we approached it upwind and Marilyn lay on the foredeck again. The difference from yesterday was that I ran out at the last minute and took the boathook from her after she had snagged the line. That actually worked pretty well and by approaching into the wind and letting most of our way die off before we got up to the float we drifted away from the line after we picked it up. So that’s how we will be doing it from now on, with one modification.

SWMBO has come up with an innovation that we haven’t seen on anybody’s floats yet. We’re going to make a loop out of coat hanger wire and fix it to the top of our floats so that she can snag that instead of trying to reach under the float to snare the line. Then in order to ensure that the float stands straight up – which they are incredibly reluctant to do – we are going to put a light (maybe 2 pound) weight on the line about a foot below the float. Once all that’s in place we should be able to pull traps on the fly – just like loading bales with a New Holland bale wagon. Well – maybe not quite that fast but a hell of a lot better than what we have been doing up to this point.

Stay tuned – the excitement continues.

Oh, and today when we pulled my trap we had 4 crabs but only kept two of them. We didn’t have any rubber bands to tie their little pinchers shut with so we used black tape to keep them from fighting in the pot. As soon as we tied up their hands they got all mellow and laid on top of each other like two queers on a honeymoon.