News from Ocean Falls

Note: Written January 20, 2020

Because there is neither wifi nor cell service here in Ocean Falls we have decided to make use of Canada Post to get these blog stories out to all of you. I am going to take a letter to the post office tomorrow (January 21^st), addressed to my Mom and Dad in Victoria. Mail is supposed to go out on the 22^nd, but it is weather permitting for the floatplane to land. The letter will contain an SD memory card with a word document containing these blog stories, and also picture files to go along with them. Jason and I have a windows computer and my parents have an apple, so hopefully all works okay to get these files onto their computer. I know the picture files should work fine, but I am unsure about the word document. As a precautionary measure, in case my mom is unable to open the word file, I will take pictures of the text and include them as well. This would be the worst case scenario as it would mean that my mom would have to transcribe all of the text from the image files onto her computer to post. Hopefully she does not have to do that; hopefully it all just works.

Anyway, you will get to see all of this when the mail person delivers the letter to my parents, they transfer the files onto their computer, my mom composes the posts, and sends them out to you each day.  

I hope you enjoy the stories. 

(Sheya's mom writing: The word document worked out well, so I did not have to transcribe any of the blog posts. I will put the pictures with the stories, and get these out to you over the course of the next few days.)

January 12^th, 2020 (Sunday)

Our trip back up to Ocean Falls went smoothly, and we made it home at 09:00, 2 hours and 40 minutes later than scheduled. The roads were good for our drive up island with my parents, and they dropped us off at the Port Hardy ferry terminal at around 15:30. We purchased our tickets, and got all of our duffel bags onto the luggage carts. Although the ferry was not scheduled to leave until 18:00, people were requested to be there two hours in advance. We began boarding at 16:30, with the foot passengers getting on before the vehicles. On the Northern Expedition, the foot passengers board via the main car ramp, which is a single-lane entrance through the front of the vessel. The whole V front of the boat rises up, opening the front for boarding. 

Once on board, we went to the same seats that we had enjoyed on our trip down, and settled ourselves in for the evening. The ferry left on schedule, and when we got hungry we enjoyed our picnic dinner of leftover deep-dish pizza and vegetable sticks, with black forest cake for dessert.  

Because my parents had given us new pillows for Christmas, we had them on board with us. I laid them down on the floor, and then lay on top of them and made a pillow out of some clothes. It was relatively comfortable, so I was able to get a couple of hours of broken sleep before Jason woke me to get ready to disembark in Bella Bella. It was 01:00 and snowing hard.  

The terminal in Bella Bella was surprisingly busy, and we waited with 11 other people for the Nimpkish ferry. We finally boarded the ferry in a blizzard of blowing snow at 03:20. 

The Nimpkish ferry is quite small, and it has an open car deck with one raised deck area in the middle of the vessel. There are two indoor heated seating areas, one on the port side and one on the starboard side of the vessel. The bathrooms are at the aft end of the ferry, and you have to go outside to get to them.  

We settled down on the front, bench seat in the starboard-side seating area, and enjoyed watching the snow blowing by. After our stop in Shearwater we heard from the ferry crew that due to the whiteout conditions we would be taking the longer route through Lama Passage instead of the shorter one through Gunboat Passage, as Gunboat Passage is quite narrow and hard to navigate. 

When we came out of Lama Passage and rounded into the wind heading up towards Dean Channel the progress got slow. Our speed dropped from about 15 knots, to between 4-7 knots. The boat was pounding into the large waves coming out of Dean Channel due to the already strong North Easterly outflow winds.  With each hit that the bow took into the waves a wall of salt-water spray came up and across the whole vessel. It did not take long for the whole front window to be covered in ice, and when dawn finally came, and we could see out the corner of the window, the deck in front of us was dripping with frozen-spray drops. The floor of the deck was a thick layer of ice, and the railings were covered too.  

I dared not go down and outside to go use the toilet, as I knew I would get covered in freezing spray. When we finally made it to the beginning of Cousins Inlet the waves decreased, and our speed increased. Finally I decided it would be okay to go and pee, but when I went down the stairs and tried to open the sliding door, it was frozen shut. I went and got Jason, and he jiggled and pulled until finally it came open. 

When we stepped outside we were met by the icy, nip of the wind, and also the stunning surroundings of a ship covered in ice. Every surface was covered in a thick coat of ice, and the deck was a mixture of ice and thick, salty slush. It was very neat, and very cold!

Because of our slow progress, we did not arrive into Ocean Falls until 09:00, and according to the ferry workers who we talked to as we disembarked, it would be another 6.5 hours of pounding into the waves and wind for them to get to Bella Coola. 

Arriving into Ocean Falls.

We were very glad to get off, and since we were late arriving it was daylight for our arrival. 

The snow had stopped during the early morning, and Ocean Falls was a white, snow-blown landscape. Each gust that came brought more billowing, dusty snow whipping across the roads. We got our bags off of the luggage truck, and made our first trip to our boat with our heavy bags. The wind nipped at our hands and faces, and we had to stop several times to warm up our fingers.  

When we got to our boat all looked good from the outside. We had to be gentle opening up the door to our enclosure as it was covered in ice and frozen snow.  Once into the cockpit we immediately noticed that something had been inside and had chewed on the rubber cap that covers an electrical port that we have in the cockpit for plugging in our hand-held VHF. As soon as we got our forward hatch open to go inside, we were devastated. Whatever had been chewing in our cockpit had also gotten inside our boat. What a mess! 

We grabbed our big, winter mitts and toques, and headed back to the ferry terminal for our last bags. As we grabbed our bags, the ferry worker who lives in Ocean Falls came driving up and told us to throw our bags inside. The other doors to his truck were frozen shut, but when we got one open we hopped inside.  Although it was not too far for us to go, it sure was nice of him to offer us a ride.  It saved us the trek in the cold with our heavy duffel bags.  

Finally we were home, but we could not yet relax, we were tired, but we had to deal with the mess. Based on the poo that the critter had left behind for us, and also from now having spoken to some locals about it, we have concluded that it was a marten that had gotten inside. There was evidence, in the form of dried, muddy marks that it must have gotten in through one of our deck, air cowlings. 

Paw prints of the marten.

These are, however, in our ceiling, so the marten must have made quite the commitment and dropped a full 4 feet onto our table to get in. Seemingly it was not still on board, so it must have found its way out through our engine room cowling which is on the side instead of the ceiling. Unfortunately, it never even crossed our minds that we should close these air cowlings up while we were away. Oh well, lesson learned.  

We started cleaning; the marten had gotten into four of our food storage cubby areas and chewed into a variety of items from flour to crackers, to dried potatoes.  Two of the cubby areas that he wanted to get into, but that were blocked off, he had started chewing the access holes bigger. 

Chewing around the cubby access hole.

Each access hatch has a 1.5” circle through it so that we can easily lift it up, and he had started chewing around these to make them bigger, so, there were wood chips everywhere. Luckily he did not seem to poo where he ate, so there was no poo in any of our food storage areas, and all we had to do was clean up the food and wood chips, and deal with the open packages before repacking the area. He had, however, left poo for us on our floor and up on our v-berth area. Luckily, before leaving, we had lifted up all of our cushions so they were still all clean, all except a bit on two pillows. Overall the mess was a lot better than it could have been, but it was still super frustrating.  

Once we were done cleaning we were able to start unpacking and putting away all of the food that we had brought up with us. Because it was so cold out, we did not want to leave the bags unpacked in the cockpit, so we started, one bag at a time, unpacking and putting everything away. It was nice to see our storage cubbies getting fuller and fuller as we made our way through our bags. Finally we finished the last bag and sat down to a hot cup of tea. We were tired. We had only gotten a couple of hours of broken sleep each in the last 32 hours. We were ready for bed. 

We had an early dinner, and crawled into bed at 18:30 and fell asleep.