Beginning to Learn About Ocean Falls

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 be petted and scratched under the chin. It had been a very long time since we had seen a cat and we relished in her attention as much as she did in ours. Dorothy is the post lady who is a permanent resident of Ocean Falls, and she was very friendly and willing to chat, and tell us about hiking trails, sites of interest, and some of the community history.

The majority of the “residents” of Ocean Falls now live at Martin River, which is just down the inlet a bit.

Martin River in the distance.

Ocean Falls, for the most part, is a ghost town with buildings both big and small in varying degrees of disrepair. 

Some have almost completely fallen apart, with caved in roofs and fallen down walls, while others are still standing but with broken windows and nature gradually overtaking the land. 

It is interesting to think of the 5,000 people who once lived in the sawmill town of Ocean Falls, and now only about 30 permanent residents remain, and mostly at Martin River. 

We walked to the base of the dam and watched the incredible volume of water flowing over the top.

Such a perfect, flowing curtain of water thundered over the edge, and then it became a mass of white water that boiled up with upwellings, and then crashed down over the rocks to the ocean. 

 

We walked up the old road to Link Lake, which feeds the dam, and looked around at the dock and boat launch area. Unfortunately the mountains were completely socked in, so we did not get much of a view, but hopefully we will be back up to the lake on a nicer day. Apparently the trout fishing is good.

Back at the docks the divers were finished with their repairs, so we were free to move our boat. We were told that about three years ago there was a time of up to 100 mile an hour outflow winds that caused some damage to the docks. The divers, who were hired by the harbour and port authority, had just finished installing ten new anchor points. They barged in large concrete blocks that were lowered into place. The sea bottom is such a soft mud that if they had dropped the concrete blocks into place they would have sunk too deep into the mud and would have disappeared for being able to attach cables to. Apparently, even though they were lowered into place, they still settled down so that just the tops were showing. We moved our boat to the inside, of the inside float, where she should be the most protected from any strong winds that come while we are away.