Cruising Adventures of the Red Witch

June 18, 2021 (Note the date of this writing) As we rapidly approach the longest day of the year, summer in Ocean Falls has yet to arrive.   Our average temperature so far in June has been between 12-14 degrees and we have had over 90mm of rain, and since January 1 st we have had over 2,000mm of rain.   So far it is not looking likely that we will have a better summer than last year, but, it is still too early to say for sure and we still have our fingers crossed for a nice July, August and September.   For us it is frustrating to watch the weather patterns with the awareness that everywhere south of Port Hardy it has been beautiful weather.   About a month ago, my Mom received a notification from the blog site that we use, that things were going to be changing with the site.   One of the main reasons that I chose the site originally was because it offered the ability for readers to subscribe, and that once the subscriber verified the email address the blog s...

May 18th – 25th   During our most recent time off we had some fun salmon fishing.   We had a few beautiful days out on the water, and we saw our first two whales of the year.   They were feeding their way along the rocky shoreline where we were trolling, and it is always breathtaking to watch them bubble feed and come up with their massive mouths scooping up fish.    I caught my first Chinook salmon, and our first one of the year.   It was a lot of fun to reel in, as Chinook are fast and active fighters.   It was 29.75” long, 13lbs, with white meat.   It is interesting that Chinook salmon can have pink-red, marble coloured, or white meat, and it all has to do with their genetic ability to metabolize the natural colour in some of their food.   This was our first white salmon, last year we got one red and one marbled one.   It looked funny on the dinner plate; if one had not known what fish they were being served they might easily have gue...

April 27th – May 18th   During our final two-week shift a lot changed at work.   Some people got moved around, and we lost one of our experienced people.   Because of this, our manager had to juggle the work schedule around because he needed some experienced people on the other shift.   Jason and I were on day 11 of our last two-week shift.   We only had four more days before we were supposed to get two weeks off before going back onto an eight-and-six schedule.   Unfortunately, because of the staffing changes all of this had to change, and it meant that Jason and I only got three days off after finishing our 11 th day, and then we were back on shift for another eight days.   It worked out that we worked 19 days, 190 hours in 22 days.   Now that we are no longer on our former supervisor’s (Dave) shift we are the most experienced people on our shift.   Jason managed a crew of people in Vancouver for enough years that...