Cruising Adventures of the Red Witch

October 4, 2021  At the end of September, Dorothy, our post lady, approached us and asked if we would be interested in fostering a cat. She had rescued a young cat about a month earlier. When she rescued it, it was skin and bones, and barely had the will to live. She had to force-feed it at first before it started to eat on its own again. Over the month of August Dorothy had nursed it back to health, but since she already had two cats of her own, two more that she looked after in her second house that had been left by a resident who had died, and Tigger, at the post office, she could not keep a sixth cat. She had been in touch with the Vancouver Island cat rescue and SPCAs, but they were all full. Realizing that if we took the cat in we would probably decide to keep her, we said, "Yes".  We named her Jiji, after the cat in the movie "Kiki’s Delivery Service". When we first brought her home she was very scared and she hid under everything, but it did not take...

September 11, 2021  After my birthday, on one particularly sunny and calm day, Jason and I decided to kayak over to Nascall Bay. The Nascall hot springs are privately owned by James Murdoch, and they are off limits to the public, however a beautiful glacier-fed river flows into the bay from Nascall Lake. We had been to Nascall Bay in Kiki back in 2019, and we were curious to go back with our kayaks to see if we could possibly get up the river and into the lake. It is a very short river and so there was the possibility that it would be navigable by kayak. When we were there in Kiki two years ago we could not venture up the river because the water was so full of silt that we had no idea about the depth and we did not want to risk hitting bottom with our outboard.  We began the 6 nautical-mile paddle out of Eucott and further up the Dean Channel in the sunshine over beautifully calm water. As we arrived at Nascall Bay the wind had just started to pick up, and we were very aware t...

October 1, 2021 October 1st was the closing date for our house purchase, and we officially became homeowners.  We had been looking at buying a house in Ocean Falls since the spring, and we had looked at six different homes, but there was really only one of them that interested us because of its location and condition. The previous owners had moved away three years ago due to old age and medical issues, and they were looking to sell their place. They contacted us, and made us a sell offer.  We were in touch with them through the spring and summer, and when we accepted their offer it turned out that they were not quite ready to sell, as they wanted to make one last trip “home” with the plan to collect some of their possessions. In August, they made the trip in and showed us, in a detailed way, around the home and property telling us stories about their 30 years of living in Ocean Falls. When they left, we shook hands on the deal and the man left us with a key, giving us perm...