Cruising Adventures of the Red Witch

March 28th and 29th (Sunday and Monday) On our way back in from pulling our traps, Jason and I grabbed our electric pressure washer from the boat, which we have as a spare high-pressure pump for our water maker, and Jason decided to clean up our 27 steps.   It had clearly been a long time since anyone had paid any attention to them and they were incredibly moss covered.   Unfortunately, the high-pressure pump, which works perfect for our water maker, turned out to be quite lacking in psi for moss removal.   With persistence, however, Jason got the steps looking like new.   I pulled out the chop saw, air compressor, and nail gun from downstairs and got to work on building some birdhouses.    I wanted to build some birdhouses for the swallows this year, and I had done quite a bit of research into the types of houses that best suited the different types of birds.   It turned out that the wider boards that we get off of the pallets fo...

March 28th (Sunday) In the morning we headed out to pull up and bring in our traps.   Because we would be back at work on Tuesday (March 30th), we wanted to bring our traps in, as we would not be getting out to check them.   We did not get any crabs, but we did get another 95 prawns.   We also got another squat lobster, which was, I think, the largest squat lobster that we had ever seen.   Their arms, especially their front pincer arms, get so incredibly long and gangly compared to their body; they are such interesting creatures.  

March 27th (Saturday) Today it rained heavy and steady, with strong southerly winds, all day.   In 24 hours we got just over 100mm of rain in our rain gauge.   In the evening, when it was low tide, Jason and I bundled up in our rain gear and headed out for a beach walk.   We explored along the shoreline looking at all of the interesting old pieces of metal and pilings, wondering what it all used to be.   We walked up along Martin River, along the part that would be all ocean at High Tide, and watched the tumbling rolls of water rushing along.   The river was running very fast due to all of the rain.  It was nice to get out in the blustery rain, but it was also nice to come back into our warm dry home. Our house is the one in the middle.

March 26th (Friday) As I believe I have mentioned, the biggest, and really the only negative for us of Ron’s house is that he really doesn’t have a wood storage place.   We can keep a couple of small stacks on the back deck, but that is it.   So, we extended a tarp out from the back roof down to the bank and created a much larger protected area.   Then to keep the wood up off of the wet ground we laid down two pallets making a 4’ x 8’ area.   We used two more pallets upright on one corner so as to create a corner with walls; we now have much more wood storage. Since it had been a month since we last brought wood over from our old house we took what started out as a dry day and moved two truckloads of firewood over to Ron's house.   We counted how many trips going down and up our stairs, with bins full of wood, that it took us in order to move a truckload, and it worked out to be 22 trips.   Since we have 27 stairs to get from the road down to our house and ...

March 25th (Thursday) On one particularly nice day, in fact, it was the nicest day that we had had all year, we enjoyed the sunshine.   It was also incredibly calm on the water so we wanted to go fishing.   We got all of our gear together and headed to Little Red.   We started the engine, untied the lines, and pushed off, but when we put the engine into reverse, nothing happened.   What?   Into neutral and back into reverse, still nothing.   Weird.   Jason played with the cable and suddenly we were in forward gear, so we slowly came back into the slip and bumped up against the dock.   I hopped off with the bowline while Jason tried to figure out how to get it back into neutral.   It turned out that the shift cable had broken almost right where it goes into the engine.   We tied up the boat again and looked at our conundrum, and then decided that we would be asking for trouble to go out on the water with the broken cab...

March 23rd (Tuesday) Three days after our last haul of prawns we headed out once again to check our traps.   It was not great weather for fishing, so we just went out to our traps.   The tide was ebbing, and there was also a lot of fresh water flowing on the surface out of Cousins Inlet from all of the runoff coming out of Martin Valley and from Link Lake; we drifted quite quickly while pulling up our traps.   Usually when we pull in the traps the line is relatively straight down, but on this day the line was out on a steep angle which made the pull even harder.   When our traps got to the surface we were happy to see that we once again had some prawns.   The traps did not seem as full as last time, but we still had many prawns.   When we did the final count we had a total of 71.   Yay!   Both times of pulling up our traps we had a couple of squat lobsters as well.   On this day we had one girl carrying eggs.   It w...

March 20th   At the beginning of our last time off we decided to set some crab and prawn traps.   Instead of using our small, square fold-up traps, we decided to try some full-size round traps, and so we borrowed some that were not being used.   It was a bit early for prawns here, as most of the locals do not start prawning until sometime into April, but we decided to give it a shot as we would be back at work for the first two weeks of April.   We set out two crab traps and four prawn traps, and the prawn traps were rigged so that there were two traps off of one line and buoy, and the traps were spaced about 20 feet apart.   We took “Little Red” (the speed boat that we have use of) and went out and set all six traps.   Three days later we wanted to go out and check our traps, and since it looked like it would be a fairly calm day, we decided to try some fishing as well.   They opened the halibut season early this year, like they did last year, so we h...