A Summer Vacation

For one of our chunks of time off this summer the weather was forecasted to be rainy and cool, so we decided to go on a summer vacation. On Tuesday, July 13th, we flew out on the goose plane. I got to sit in the cockpit with the pilot and talk to him through the headset, and, as always, the flight out was amazing, with stellar views of the coastline that we know so well.

We rented a car in Port Hardy, and drove down-island to Nanaimo where we caught the 8pm ferry over to Vancouver and continued driving. We spent the night in a hotel and continued on our journey on Wednesday. Since we were on vacation, we took some time on the drive to explore some of the areas that we had always just driven by in the past.

We stopped for a picnic lunch beside the beautiful Skagit River, and then further along took a turn-off from Highway 3 in Manning Park.

We drove past an incredible lookout and continued up into the alpine where we went on a short hike, wishing that we had more time and some water along to drink.

It was a beautiful alpine area, and it was hot and felt like summer. Far off in the distance we could see the massive plume of smoke created by the fire that was burning close to my grandfather’s place in Okanagan Falls, which was where we were headed.

As we continued our drive we were surprised that the skies remained clear of smoke until we were coming down the hill into Okanagan Falls. Here we could clearly see parts of the fire, and at the time the smoke was blowing southward.

That night we watched from my grandfather’s deck as the flames of the fire became visible in the darkness. On Friday, Jason and I headed out again and spent the day enjoying Okanagan Lake. We had rented a boat for the day and we enjoyed the tropical-like temperatures of 30 plus degrees and 20-degree water. There were many mooring balls along the shoreline of the lake in areas of the marine parks, and when we tied up we always seemed to acquire a school of fish underneath us. If we dropped crumbs of bread into the water they would come up to feed.

We also encountered a very friendly female Mallard duck. We were planing along in the boat at over 20 knots when she first found us. She flew up along side of us and politely asked us to stop. We slowed down and she landed beside us, swimming over immediately. We fed her some bits of our bread from our lunch, and she was quite happy. We left her there and carried on. Later, we were tied up to one of the mooring balls and suddenly saw something flying straight toward us. It was the Mallard, she had seen us from a distance and altered course; she flew straight toward us, landing only a few feet away.

She excitedly came and asked for more food, and happily took it straight from my hand. The fish also came up for the crumbs. It was a wonderful day of swimming, exploring, and enjoying the warmth.

We had a great visit with my grandfather and my parents. We ate lots of good food, picked lots of apricots, and we celebrated my Mom’s birthday early with a black-forest cake. On Sunday, July 18th, we drove down to Vancouver and went for an all-you-can-eat sushi dinner at our old favorite place. It was just as good as we had remembered, and it was a real treat. We visited with a few people in North Vancouver and spent the night on Gab’s boat in our old marina. Unfortunately Gab had previous plans for that evening so we didn’t get to see him as much as we would have liked. We headed for the busy ferry on Monday morning and made our way back up to Port Hardy, in order to be ready for our flight back to work on Tuesday, July 20th. That flight was the best goose flight we have had yet. Once again I got to sit up front with the pilot and talk to him through the headset. As we were flying I told him about our trip up in our sailboat and I mentioned how we had always wanted to stop off at a particular outer-coast beach, but hadn’t had favourable weather to do so; when we had motored past in the fog we couldn’t even see the beach. The pilot knew exactly which beach I meant, and it was on our route.

He said that we would do a fly-by; I was excited, but never expected the fly-by that he gave us. We came in low and appeared to be only a hundred feet or two off of the beach.

He tilted the plane on its side so that both Jason and I were looking straight down at our long, dreamt-of beach. It was awesome.

We then took the scenic route to Klemtu because we had to land there to drop off a part for the fish boat that was working at the Klemtu sea site. When a rain cloud was in our way we took a new route through the mountains to skirt around it, and because of the extra distance for the flight going to Klemtu we had to then land at the Bella Bella airport to refuel before continuing on.

Jason and I loved the whole flight, and we were beaming from ear to ear, and our pilot was happy to have had people on board who enjoyed the flight. We had spotted more anchorages to check out, and saw many of the areas that we already knew. The flight back to work was a great ending to an amazing summer holiday.