Cruising Adventures of the Red Witch

May 26th (Tuesday) We have running water!!!   We now have an endless supply of drinking water!  For the last couple of months John has been hard at work trying to get into motion the repair process for having running water on the docks.  At the end of last year they had some issues with the water, but left it until after the winter to fix them.  Because of this we had been making water once every week here at dock, just as we did last year out at anchor.  Yesterday, when we got home from work, John had left us a note saying, “Go for it”.   We hooked up the water and turned on our hot water heater. When we are making our own water we do not use the hot water heater because it is a large waste of water to run it through the taps to get hot.  We do turn it on for shower-time, or let the engine heat the water tank when we are motoring, but otherwise it remains unused.  So now, after almost 13 months, we...

May 13th - 25th   These last 13 days have been spent mainly at work.  It was our second shift at MOWI and since we are still part-time employees we were only allowed to work 11 days out of the 15-day shift.  That worked out quite nicely for us because it meant that we had two days off in the middle as well as not working the two crew-change days.  It was quite nice to have two days off in the middle of the shift as the 10-hour days of physical work got quite tiring, especially when we also had things that we had to take care of after work at the boat.   We finally made up our minds about what to do around working this year, and we decided to stay in Ocean Falls and work.  We will become full-time employees with the fish farm and we will get to see it in operation for a full year, which will be very interesting.  On our next shift we will be getting fish into the facility so that will be a whole new learning curve....

May 12th (Tuesday)  It was the first day of the crew change onto our next shift at the fish farm, but like last time we did not work this day because of the timing with the last crew leaving on the floatplane; it would have only been a part day for us.   We were quite happy to have the day to relax after our hike yesterday.  It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed our coffee and tea out on the dock in the sunshine in the morning.  The wind picked up mid-morning so we relaxed in our cockpit after that.   It was a rather uneventful day, but one very exciting thing did happen. The other day, a bit after low tide, Jason noticed what appeared to be sea cucumbers down below our boat.  We had been watching for them from time to time ever since we got here in December, and up until a few days ago we had not seen a single one, and suddenly there were several.   Today, at low tide we had a look and spotted five sea cucumber...

May 9th, 10th and 11th (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday) On Saturday we got picked up in the morning to go and help Gladys and James with their roof.  We spent the day working up on the roof with both of them, and we had fun.  Then in the evening we went for dinner to a couple’s house and the man made us Chinese food.  It was a nice day, but we were tired from working up on the roof in the hot sun. On Sunday we had a relaxing day around home.  We worked on some little projects and got caught up on some things we had to get done.   Monday was our fun day!!  We started out on a hike around 08:00.  At the beginning of the trail we put up the trailhead sign.  It was a beautiful sign that Gladys and James had made for us.  Gladys is very artistic and James is a good woodworker.  Gladys used three languages, English, Japanese, and Chinese because of all of the Japanese and Chinese workers...

May 8th (Friday) We had a relaxing day at home doing some projects on the boat and just enjoying the sun.  It remained fairly windy all day, but in the evening it calmed right off.  After our day of rest we were excited to go out and try some salmon fishing, so we headed out at around 17:00.   We planed our way out over glassy calm water to the area of Barba Point where we stopped, set up our salmon fishing gear, and started trolling.  It was a spectacular evening, so glassy calm and warm.  We puttered along looking around for wildlife.  We saw a mink scampering along the low tide shoreline and two porpoises coming up to breathe.  In the distance we spotted something that must have been dolphins, but they looked like porpoising tuna.  They were rocketing along and porpoising up out of the water.  It was very cool to see, but unfortunately we were way too far away to go and check them out or ...

May 7th (Thursday) We headed out fishing in the morning.  It was a beautiful day, the wind was light, the water was calm, and the air was warm.  It felt like summer.  As we planed our way out to the area of Wallace Bay we went through patches of warm and cool air.  There is one area in particular that we have found always seems to collect cool air, and it is the first spot to develop a low-lying mist on a cool evening.  We watched the little Guillemots on the water as we planed along, and they were almost completely back to their summer coat of black feathers.  We had our lines in the water and were fishing by about 09:30.   For the first three hours we drifted around and barely had any action.  We had one bite from a Quillback rockfish, caught one small Walleye and one small Sablefish, and we had a couple of nibbles from some unknown small fish, but that was it.  It was a beautiful day to b...

A Long Day of Fishing May 5th (Tuesday) On Tuesday morning we decided to head out fishing for the day.  We headed out around 09:30, but unfortunately although it had been fairly calm at home, it was blowing with enough outflow wind in Wallace Bay that we could not bottom fish.  Since the tide was going in and the wind was blowing out it meant that our lines were pulled one way by the current, and Jason and I in Kiki were being blown the opposite way, which pulled our lines out on too much of an angle.  We reeled up and headed over to the point at the mouth of Cousins Inlet called Barba Point. Here, in the chop of the converging winds and currents we trolled for Salmon.  Ken, our manager at the fish-fry farm had caught the first Chinook Salmon of the year out here on Monday, so the salmon were starting to arrive.  We trolled for a couple of hours, but as the wind seemed to pick up and the chop got worse, we headed into one ...

May 2nd – 4th, 2020 (Saturday – Monday)  This weekend it rained a lot and we spent the time mostly inside.  We took the time to do a bunch of cleaning and gave a good scrub to some of our walls.   I had ordered some things to make Jason a black forest cake for his birthday dessert, but the barge did not arrive that week with the whipping cream until after his birthday.  Since we missed his day for the main dessert we saved it until this rainy weekend, so I made him a belated birthday black forest cake on Sunday.   When we left Vancouver, we also left behind with my parents in Victoria our two round cake pans.  We had one round pie pan, but only one.  I decided to use our glass 9” x 9” square pan as well, but I also did not have any parchment paper.  Although I was a little worried about being able to get the cakes out of the pans in one piece, I went ahead and gave it a shot.  I greased the p...

April 29th to May 1st, 2020 (Wednesday to Friday) One year ago, April 30th, we left our slip in Mosquito Creek Marina in North Vancouver, BC and headed out on our adventure.  If you had asked us where we thought we would be in a year, we would have said Mexico.  If you had asked us in August where we thought we would be come spring, we would have said Haida Gwaii, and here we are now, one year after leaving Vancouver, and we are in Ocean Falls on the Central Coast of BC.  It just goes to show you, you never know where life will take you, and the important thing is that the adventure along the way, whether you get where you are planning on going or not, is awesome; for us, it has been.  This past year has been full of so many awesome adventures, wildlife encounters, new experiences, and new friendships.  It has been a great journey!! Some highlights would include watching Humpback whales feeding, boogie boarding in the surf on Calv...

April 14 - 28, 2020 Part Four About every three days over these last two weeks we went out to check our prawn traps, and on average we got about twenty prawns each time.  They were large prawns, so they made a very delicious addition to our dinners.  We also caught a very cranky looking, but very cool, Grooved Tanner Crab.  The two days that we had off of work were on the Monday and Tuesday (20th and 21st) midway through our shift.  It was nice to have these two days off to rest part way through the shift, and it was nice to get to spend Jason’s birthday, the Tuesday, doing something fun rather than working.   On the Monday that we had off, the weather was calm and partly sunny.  We headed out to Wallace Bay for an afternoon of fishing.  It was a beautiful day to spend the afternoon on the water, it was calm, our drift speed was perfect, and it was very peaceful.  I caught a decent-sized Pacific Co...

April 14 - 28, 2020 Part Three While working in the feed shed we were visited several times by some very cute martens.  The first time a little guy came in from the outside through the large garage door and he came in sniffing around.  Every so often he would freeze and look at us, and then carry on sniffing around.  He jumped up onto the rim of the garbage can, which was probably my fault for throwing an apple core inside, otherwise there would have been no food in it at all.  He was very good at balancing on the rim of the can and then hanging off of his hind legs while rummaging around with his front legs.  When he was walking around on the ground he looked like a cross between a kitten and a bear cub, and he was very cute.   Another day I was up on one of the four corner second-floor areas.  There were two stacks of pallets in the middle of the area and I kept hearing a grunting noise.  Then when ...