Ice and Snow in Ocean Falls

January 13th (Monday)

After a long and full nights sleep, we awoke in the morning feeling well rested.  We were also pleasantly surprised by how warm it was inside. It was a comfortable 16 degrees inside, and once we were up we moved our heater from the v-berth into the main cabin area and it warmed up to 18 degrees, quite reasonable considering it was -6 out in our cockpit and even colder outside. Our main cabin hatch, with its metal frame that always condenses and drips water, was white with a layer of frost, a layer that slowly thickened all day. Our bathroom porthole window had ice designs on the inside. It was a beautiful morning. 

 When we settled down with our tea and coffee for some morning Spanish practice we were disappointed to find that our program was not working. Somehow, while our computer was hooked to the internet at my parents, our lessons became deactivated and required re-activation. Normally this would be easily done with internet access, but because we do not have internet, I headed up to the pay phone to call the support line, because there was an option for those with no internet to call and get an activation code over the phone. Luckily it was a 1-800 number so I was able to call for free from the pay phone at the top of the docks. Unfortunately I was told that because we have an older version, it is no longer supported by the phone support system and we will, in fact, need internet in order to reactive the lessons. So disappointing!

While I had a frustrating time on the phone, Jason enjoyed shovelling the snow off of the dock, and clearing our path down the slippery ramp. After some hot soup for lunch, we headed out for a snowy walk. We noticed that the bottoms of our fenders that were usually out of the water, but dipped occasionally depending on how the wind blew the boat and rocked us from side to side, were growing ice off of them. They all had growing rings of beautiful ice. The back of our boat, which gets splashed from the choppy water, was also growing a line of ice.

We wandered up through Ocean Falls towards the dam, stopping to admire the beauty of our snowy, frozen surroundings. We saw rabbit tracks criss-crossing the road as we trudged up the unploughed, old road through powdery drifts over icy snow. 

In some areas the wind had blown the snow completely away and only ice was left. 

The rapidly flowing river of excess water over the dam ran down through the rocks, and each rock was covered in blown snow and ringed with icicles that hung to an even length of the running water.

As we walked up to the lake we enjoyed the unique shapes and patterns of the hanging icicles that covered the rocky wall to our left. Up at the lake, cool ornamental-like icicles hung off of the bottom of logs and branches that stretched out over the lake and the in-flowing stream. It was beautiful! 

We explored some of the old roads that wound up the hillside to areas where there used to be houses and where there is now only the forest. We enjoyed the beauty of the winter day, walking under branches hanging low from the snow, and we hoped for more snow to come with the forecasted cloud on Thursday. 

Shortly after we were home, and as the darkness of night was rapidly approaching, our shore power went out. Since I was still in my outside clothes I went back out to check the breakers, and although all of the breakers on our power post were on, I could see that other vessels were also without power because their lights were off inside. A few minutes later, the power came back on.  A little while later, and it went off again. I went out again, and this time I checked our power post breakers, then the main breaker panel for all of the power posts in the marina, and finally the main distribution box for the whole marina with the power meter inside, everything was dead.  

After this had happened a third time, I called the wharfinger and left him a message, as we were worried that it would go out during the night and not come back on. He came down to the docks later to make sure that we had power, and to tell us that it had been the whole town that had lost power. He had called the power company and was told that it was due to a power overload in Bella Bella.  Since the fourth time it went out, it has not happened again, so hopefully all is resolved.  

Jason made us some delicious crab-fried rice for dinner with mushrooms, onions, and cabbage. It was nice to be back eating seafood that we had caught ourselves.