Cruising Adventures of the Red Witch

December 18 th  - 20 th   (Wednesday – Friday) This is being written in a hotel room in Shearwater, on our way to Victoria, so this will probably be the last time that I write for a few weeks. The past couple of days were spent getting our boat ready to be left alone for three weeks, and on the morning of the 20 th  we watched on our AIS vessel tracking as the "Nimpkish" (BC Ferry) neared Ocean Falls. It was supposed to arrive in to Ocean Falls at 10:45 and leave at 11:00, but it rounded the corner and came into view just after 10:00. We rushed to get going, worried that we had the schedule wrong since we had been without internet for a while, and were unable to check to see if there had been any changes. We hurried up our dock and along the road, and arrived at the ferry dock about five minutes before the vessel docked. We were surprised by how many local residents were arriving as well, and wondered if the ferry would be busier than we had expected.  On...

December 16 th  and 17 th   (Monday and Tuesday) On our first night in Ocean Falls, when the precipitation started, we could hear on the roof that it was not rain. We stuck our heads out during the night and saw that the dock was white. Yay, snow. For the rest of the night we hoped that we would wake up to a winter wonderland, but as the early morning came we could tell by the sound that it had changed to rain. There was still a good layer of white slush on the docks and on our boat in the morning, but by then it was pouring rain. It poured all day, and an outflow wind continued to howl. On Tuesday morning the winds died off, and the downpour changed to rain and then to a steady drizzle. After a productive morning of Spanish and thoroughly cleaning the interior of our boat, we headed out to explore Ocean Falls. We took a letter to mail at the post office, and there we met Tigger and Dorothy. Tigger is the post-office cat who was a fantastic greeter, and who loved to ...

December 14th (Saturday) We untied our lines and left Bella Bella at first light. It was a foggy morning and everything was white with frost. Our deck was also slick with ice so we had to be very careful, although we did wash part of the deck with salt water before leaving to help the ice melt.  We motored around to Shearwater where we pulled up to the fuel dock to fill up with gasoline and diesel. We then went over to the marina dock where we tied up for an hour while ashore. We filled up our propane, and went into the post office where we picked up our mail. It was lovely to get our Christmas cards and letters, and once we were at anchor later we opened and read each one. So nice. In town we met a lovely couple who work on the Central Coast as divers taking samples to test for paralytic shellfish poisoning for the commercial geoduck fishery. They have lived on their sailboat on the north and central coast for several years, so there are other people who are as crazy as ...

December 24th (Tuesday) Since the blog posts are about 10 days behind, you will not be hearing about our journey to Victoria just yet, but we want to wish you all, all of the best for the holidays. Hope they are filled with happiness spent with friends and/or family. Here is a new saying that Jason and I have come up with: "It is not about your latitude, it's about your attitude."

December 13th (Friday) Once again we were up before the sun and ready to leave when it was light enough to see. However, since sunrise was not until 08:30, and given that it was a cloudy morning, there wasn’t enough light until just after 08:00. We pulled up anchor and motored up Meay Inlet and out through the narrow channel into Hakai Passage. According to the marine forecast the swells were 3-5 metres, and they were very big. We were lucky that for the most part we were able to maintain a good angle through them, so we did not get rocked around too badly for too long. It was amazing to watch the surge and crash of such large swells hitting the shoreline around us. It was also quite dramatic watching the next swell come up behind us. It looked like a wall of water and we could no longer see the horizon, then it would pass underneath us, and of course we would rise stern first, then bow, and then back down again into the next trough, where we could no longer see the low lying land ...

December 10th–12 th  (Tuesday – Thursday) Our last three days at Calvert Island were nice and relaxing. We made a delicious goose pasta with the last of our frozen goose from Eucott Bay. It was too bad that we did not find another good spot for hunting them after leaving Eucott, as they were a delicious change to our regular seafood protein. We went ashore in Kiki and are happy to say that our patch worked perfectly. Kiki was as firm as the day we filled her.  Kelp roots on a rock cast ashore. These last few days were much warmer. When it clouded over and the rain came, all of the ice in the bay melted quickly. In contrast to the below freezing temperatures we had been having, it almost felt like spring. Along with the rain came another day of strong winds. It was a fast moving system, so it was all over within 24 hours, but it came with 50-knot winds. Although only southerly winds were forecasted, we ended up getting east winds for the first few hours. East is the...

Here are some bird pictures taken by Sheya earlier in their journey.  Seagulls in a feeding frenzy  Canada goose on the nest Osprey approaching the nest (Sheya's mom writing: Sheya and Jason have now moved from Calvert Island to Ocean Falls where they will be mooring the Red Witch for a few weeks while they journey south on BC Ferries to spend the holidays with family and friends. Hopefully we will get some more posts from Sheya when she arrives. Merry Christmas everyone, and all the best for the New Year!)

December 9th (Monday) It was the last nice day in the forecast before more rain and wind. After a productive morning of cleaning and doing projects, we attempted to head to shore. I say attempted, because the ice was now even thicker than before. It had never really broken up the previous day, and what breakup had occurred, had simply made one piece slide under another and then they had frozen together double thick. In the areas of a single layer of ice it was about 1/4" thick.   Jason went first, and I followed in his broken up path. The bow of his kayak would ride up onto the ice and then settle, breaking the ice as he went. The hardest part was the paddling. He had to use significant force on each attempted stroke to puncture downwards through the ice so that his paddle could be of any use. It was slow and somewhat comical progress, but we made it to shore.  A face found carved in a tree. “Calvert,” one of the two dogs of the caretakers, decided to spend...

December 8th (Sunday) At 06:00 we were rudely awaken out of a deep sleep by the most terrible sound. Thump, thump, crunch, scrape! It was so loud, and since it jarred us both from sleep, terrible thoughts jumped into our heads. Moments later we came to our senses a little more and listened more perceptively to the noise, and realized it was ice, although it was a much louder noise than the other day when we had first heard it scraping past our hull. Later, when we got up, and it had gotten daylight enough to see, we saw that we were fully iced in, shore to shore across the bay and out past us. Burrrr, it was a cold morning. The winds were light, and were forecasted to remain that way until evening, and the swells were down to two meters, so we headed out fishing. The bottom type in Kwakshua Channel is not well marked on the charts, but based on what we had pulled up on the bottom of our prawn traps we were curious if it might be an area for Cod and Halibut. We gave ourselves...

December 7th (Saturday) It sure did pour with rain overnight, but as the sun was coming up in the morning the clouds were parting, and it was a beautiful day! It was the first sunny day in a long time that actually felt warm. We didn't have to wear our long johns or our puffy jackets; it felt so nice to be dressed in less layers.  We rowed to the dock in the morning and headed to the beaches. We had chosen to wear our hiking boots instead of our gumboots, so we had to walk around many large puddles that still remained on the trails. In the area with the floating boardwalk, we had to go one at a time and walk briskly across, letting it float back up after one crossing so that the next person would not sink down too deeply. On Fourth beach, where we had once been stopped by the raging river that was too deep to cross even in our gumboots, we took a slippery log that bridged the river at the top of the beach, and made it across. Patterns in the sand left by the waves. Whe...

Sheya's mom writing: To add some colour to December here are some wildflower pictures that Sheya took earlier in their journey. Sheya and Jason will be leaving Calvert Island soon, but this link should allow you to see the Red Witch anchored out from the dock of the Hakai Institute [web cam is updated every five minutes]. https://www.hakai.org/live-webcams/#webcams-1 If you explore further in the link you will also find a web cam picture for West Beach.

December 2nd-5th (Monday – Thursday) I had not written for the past few days because there had not been much to write about, but thinking about the four days together revealed that there had been some things worth telling. We have enjoyed having access to the beaches on Calvert Island, and one sunny afternoon while we were sitting on a log in the sun at the end of West Beach we saw four people come out onto the beach at the halfway point where the main access trail is. Apart from us, the only other two people here are the caretakers of the Hakai Institute, and we could tell that it was not them because they did not have their dogs. Of course Jason and I started speculating -- perhaps they were other cruisers spending the winter on the coast, although this was unlikely as we had not seen any others so far, and most people aren't crazy enough to do something like that. Perhaps they were new researchers staying at Hakai, but we knew that the last group had just left a few days ago a...

December 1st (Sunday) It has been seven full months since we left Vancouver, and the adventures have been numerous.  Life is full of memories, new experiences, and cool wildlife encounters. We are twenty days away from the shortest day of the year, and then the days start getting longer again.  So far we both agree that the positives to having stayed north for the winter outweigh the negatives, so life is good! We were forecasted to get rain and wind once again, and so we went out to pull up our prawn traps.  In our first trap we had 18 keepers, and in our second we had 32. A total of 50 prawns, which was not a bad haul at all. We also threw back three females and a few small ones. We reset both traps, and headed back. We had gotten a later start in the morning because we had waited for it to warm up a bit before going out. There was a breeze in the morning that had made it seem particularly nippy, and since the wind was forecasted to die off, we waited. Sure enoug...

November 30th (Saturday)  It was another cold, clear, beautiful morning. We packed our hot lunch, bundled up, and got ready to head out. We were heading back to microwave mountain, there were many more areas up there that we could explore, and also it was the last day of grouse-hunting season, and after having seen them three times yesterday, we thought it would be nice to have some grouse for dinner. We figured it was a win-win situation for us, whether we got one or not, it would be a beautiful day of hiking. We decided to take Kiki over to the trail this time, and when went to get in there was frost over everything. We used our ice scraper, which we have for cleaning the bottom of our boat, to scrape off the frost from the seats. We then used a cloth to dust off the majority of it from the pontoons; the frost was about 1/4" thick. Our poor outboard was quite cold for starting, but once it was fully warmed up, we headed out. Instead of going to the normal trailhead, we went...

November 29 th  (Friday)  It was another beautiful, clear, cold morning of minus 7 degrees. The temperature in the boat was down to 8 degrees, but we were nice and toasty in bed.  On cold mornings like this one, one of us usually gets up first and gets the fire going.  It doesn't take long to warm the boat up to 15 degrees or more, so the other person can get up in more comfort. This morning we packed a picnic lunch, bundled up in our many layers, threw the kayaks into water, and headed out. We paddled over to Keith Anchorage, to where the start of the trail that goes up to the Telus microwave tower is. This was the same hike that we had done with my parents back in August. The log that lies alongshore at the landing area was white with frost, and the ground was frozen rock-hard.  We headed up the trail and immediately started noticing differences from when we were last there. There were no spider webs across the trail, and there were no slugs on the path...