Cruising Adventures of the Red Witch

February 23rd (Sunday)  The day started out as a beautiful, sunny morning, and since the forecast had been for rain, it was a pleasant surprise. When I went out into the cockpit to look around I got to see a few scattered, pink clouds around the mountains as the sun rose.   After our morning Spanish lesson time we headed out for a hike. It was a beautiful day to get out into the forest. Unfortunately, only a couple of hours after being out, the already thickening clouds started to rain on us. At first it was only a sprinkle, but it continued to get harder, but we were happy to be out hiking.   We made our way up the same stream that we had tried gold panning in earlier in the week, and continued on up much further than we had been before.  We tried our luck with panning a few pans here and there, but unfortunately we didn’t find any gold. We did find lots of other cool rocks, however, and had fun exploring.   For some of the hike...

February 20th, 21st, and 22nd (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday) These last few days have been a combination of relaxing and boat projects.   On Friday it poured rain, the temperature dropped and the snow line came back down the mountains. We did not get any snow here, but it was not far away. It rained hard and steady all day and night, and the wind was blustery on and off.  It was a perfect day to stay indoors.   We did a bunch of reading, and made more plans for our trip heading north. It is so exciting thinking about where we will be and the adventures that we may be having soon.   On Saturday we had a day of outside projects. Although there was a definite nip to the air, the clouds were thin and high, and we could see the sun through them.  It was a nice day to be outdoors. It was nice to be working our way through our list of projects in preparation for heading out adventuring.   While we were outside, our resi...

February 19th (Wednesday) It was an almost cloudless day as the sun came up over the mountains and landed on our boat at around 08:50. Ken came by the marina at 10:00 to pick us up. We had told him in the past that we would be happy to give him a hand getting a load of firewood, and today was a beautiful day for doing so.  We drove out past Martin River, and followed the logging road along the shore of Cousins Inlet until we reached where the river flowed out from Twin Lakes. As we drove along the first of the two lakes, we were able to look down through the trees to see that the lake was still covered in a thin layer of ice. It had been another chilly night last night, with a heavy frost.   We drove slowly along the logging road so that Jason and I had a chance to take in the views of the mountains in the area; we had never been in this particular area before. We also kept our eyes open for some good trees for firewood. When we got to the end of the first lake...

February 18th (Tuesday) This morning dawned a beautiful day. The high clouds began to break up, and before 09:00 we had sun shining on our boat. It was lovely.  After our morning Spanish lesson time we made up some hot tea, packed a light lunch, and headed out. We stopped by the post office to mail the next letter to my parents, and to say "hi" to Dorothy and Tiger.  We made our way up to one of the many streams and rivers that flow into Link Lake, and we followed it upwards. It did not take long before we had left the stream bed of loose rocks behind, and came up into an area of smooth and rolling bedrock.   Small six-foot waterfalls dumped into beautiful, crystal clear pools, and flowed down over the rock. For the most part we were able to walk up the stream bed itself, but when the drop was too steep at a waterfall we would go into the forest and climb our way up and around. It was a beautiful area, and the sun was shining down on us. The water was ...

February 17th (Monday)    We had quite nice weather, with a high cloud that broke up through the day, and we even got some sunny periods. It is amazing how high the sun is in the sky now compared to a month ago. Spring is on its way! Because of the lovely weather, we worked on outside projects. We installed some more snaps along certain areas of our enclosure to make it more rainproof in the wind. We raised our main sail, checked connections and cotter pins, and greased grease nipples. We changed out the line for our topping lift, and worked on the installation of our jiffy-reef line for our third reef point on our boom.  Since our boom is round, and the block that we needed to mount was flat, we had to make an adaptor piece. We used a piece of StarBoard, and used a flap sanding-disc on our grinder to round out one side into the shape of our boom. That way when we mount the block it will have a flat solid surface to mount to, which will, in turn, fit the curv...

February 15 th  and 16th (Saturday and Sunday)   Spanish practice and boat projects, have been the order of the day. In one month’s time our plan is that we will be back out at anchor and adventuring.  Depending on the weather we may leave Ocean Falls closer to the beginning of March, so it really isn’t very long at all until we will be leaving.  We have been doing a bunch of reading about the many anchorages up the coast, and we have picked out a tentative route that we will take on our way north. We are hoping to be somewhere very neat for the herring run, and we are looking forward to seeing the wave of life that apparently arrives on the coast in conjunction with it.  We have made a list of things that we want to get done on the boat before leaving. Some of the projects are simply easier to do here, because of either having shore power or having the use of the dock beside us, but other projects are items that we actually want to have compl...

February 14th (Friday) I know you won’t be reading this until much later, but Happy Valentine’s Day Everyone!! While we were doing our Spanish lessons in the morning, Dorothy came by. When we had been talking to her last week she had mentioned that they were going to try to get a large pile of old, metal piping moved. We had offered our help, and she was coming by to say that they were going to work on moving it then, and that our help would be appreciated.  They had been having a lot of work done on the municipal building, and the piping was what had been torn out from the old plumbing.  As we arrived, Dorothy was giving John directions as he backed up his trailer, and then we all started to untangle the pile of pipes. The pipes were piled in a somewhat, modern-art like pile, similar to a towering game of giant's pickup sticks. To add a level of complexity to the game, most of the pieces were not straight, but had a “Y” or a “T” branch in them, and some even t...

February 12th and 13th (Wednesday and Thursday)  We finished our work on Kiki in “The Shack” on Wednesday. We used what patch material we had left to lay a few more patches over areas of the bottom that showed a concentrated number of scratches. Overall I think the process of applying protective armour patches to Kiki went quite well. It was just too bad that we could not apply a second layer over all of the surfaces. Unfortunately, over the last few days we have noticed that Kiki’s forward air compartment was losing a slight amount of air. When I cleaned her on Monday I tried to pay close attention for any possible sign of bubbles in the soapy water as I scrubbed, but I saw none. We have no idea where the possible leak could be or how it got there, so at this point it is just a troubling thought.   Our crabbing has been going much better of late. It would be interesting to know why, but suddenly large males seem to be more consistently in the area. We caught one...

February 11th (Tuesday) In the morning we went to the post office to mail the next blog stories to my parents. We also spent some time attempting to order food from Shearwater with the idea that it would be here on the barge this week. Unfortunately that did not work out, as there was a lot of ambiguity on the part of Shearwater as to whether or not the frozen meat items that we were trying to order would be able to remain frozen on the barge. They also had no sense as to when the barge would arrive. In the end we did not order anything from them, and so at least we saved money.   While at the post office we met another lovely resident of the area named Eva.  We enjoyed playing with her two dogs outside, and she said that she had a lot of produce right now that needed to be eaten. She generously offered it to us, along with some other items from her freezer that were getting old. It has been amazing how kind everyone here has been to us. Back at home we...

February 9th and 10th (Sunday and Monday)  A beautiful sunny morning at the marina. Over these two days we were mainly at home working on projects. Because we were at home, we had put out our round crab trap off of the dock, and used the heads from the fish that we had caught the other day as bait. We hung out one head at a time, from the top, in the middle of the trap, so that the crabs were attracted into the trap, but also so that it was not so simple for them to eat the bait. This way the bait lasted longer, and we could set the trap and check it more frequently.  Because the crabs were able to get out of the round trap, we tried to check the trap every hour or so.  Over the two days, the variety in our catches was amazing. Sometimes we had up to 15 crabs in the trap with all of them being female, other times there were no crabs in the trap, and sometimes we got lucky. In the two days we managed to catch five, good-sized male Dungeness, one of which was a...

February 8th (Saturday) This morning dawned a crisp and beautiful day. The sun was burning off the low clouds that hung around the mountains, and the sky was blue.  We headed out early for another try at fishing. The day was a perfect, early-spring feeling day, and after about 10:00 we were floating in the sunshine. Although the sun was still not strong enough to make black material feel warm, it was strong enough for us to feel some slight warmth on our backs. The view of the snow-covered mountains was beautiful.  Because there was barely a puff of wind, we were both able to fish, and once again we tried both jigging and fishing with bait. As we were gently drifting along, trying many new areas, Jason saw something moving on the shore across the channel. Two animals came out of the forest and onto a sunny rock; they looked like wolves. However, from the distance that we were at it was hard to tell for sure, and since they were both tan coloured we wondered if ...

February 7th (Friday)  This morning we headed out fishing again. They say that “perseverance pays off,” but at this point I am not convinced. The snowline had come way down the mountains overnight, and it was a cold, drizzly rain in the morning, but the winds were calm, so we headed out first thing. Because of our drift rate, we were not able to both be fishing, as one of us had to row, so we took turns fishing with the baited hook. After a couple of hours the wind started to pick up, so we packed up our fishing gear and headed back home. We had only felt one nibble, and something had managed to get the head off of the bait, but otherwise, all had remained on our hook. On our way back home we pulled up our prawn trap, and it was empty except for one little crab. So, we packed it up and brought it home.   It sure was nice to get inside into the warmth, and we settled down with some hot tea to do our Spanish and then to have some lunch.   At 15:00 we me...

February 5th and 6th (Wednesday and Thursday) Wednesday was a highly unmotivating day outside, so we remained indoors as much as possible. The mountains were socked in, it poured rain, and it was cold.  We did as much Spanish lesson time as our brains could handle, and then busied ourselves with reading, writing, and inside projects, and I made a chocolate cake to take over to Ken’s house as dessert for dinner.     At 16:30 Ken picked us up, and we went to his place for dinner. He had made meatballs and gravy with potatoes and carrots for dinner; it was delicious. We had a lovely visit with lots of stories and two games of crib. It was a nice evening.   On Thursday it was still pouring rain, although it did lessen up as the day progressed. After our Spanish time and workout time, Jason went to try some fishing off of the dock. We had heard that in years past, of course not at this time of the year, people had had luck fishing off of the dock, so he thou...

February 4th (Tuesday) We got another couple of inches of snow last night, but unfortunately it had turned to rain by morning. When Jason went out to shovel the dock he made two dock snowmen for us, and I added a third one to the party later.  It was our first snowmen of the year because it was the first time that we had had enough packy snow. When we had our largest quantity of snow, back in January when we were first back from Victoria, it remained so cold that the snow was just powder and we could not make any snowmen. So, at least we finally got to make some, and throw some snowballs, even though the snow was very wet and still not ideal.  While Jason was outside, one of the residents from here, who is in charge of shovelling the docks, came down. He is an older man, and was happy to have Jason shovelling the heavy snow for him. Another resident also came down, and Jason got quite a few stories from the two of them. One of them had been in Ocean Falls fo...

February 3rd (Monday) The sky cleared last night, and we could see the moon and some stars through a thin layer of cloud. In the morning our cleared area of dock, where Jason had shovelled the snow yesterday, was covered in a thick layer of frosty ice. The remaining snow on the dock, which had been wet yesterday, was frozen solid.  Many seals were hauled out on the log breakwater in front of the marina. The logs were snow-covered, and the seals seemed to be holding their heads and tails up higher, leaving less of their bodies touching the cold logs. The seals, with their winter coats, look like they are velvet when they are dry. In particular, there are a few of them that are pitch black, and when the top half of them dries, as they lay on the log, their hair fluffs up and looks just like soft velvet.  Although we were discouraged from our lack of luck fishing yesterday, we bundled up again today and headed out. The conditions were good, with light winds, so we thought...

February 2nd (Sunday) After our Spanish lesson in the morning, we decided to go out fishing. It was hard to tell how much wind might be coming up the inlet, as we were in the calm around the corner in Ocean Falls. At least we figured it would be calm enough to pull up our prawn traps, if not to fish.  It was a crisp and beautiful morning, we had gotten about two inches of snow overnight, and the mountains were white and glistening.  Looking back toward Martin River. Out from Wallace Bay, in Cousins Inlet, it was still quite choppy, but the wind was light. We were able to fish with one person fishing and the other person keeping the bow into the waves. As the day progressed the wind calmed off even more, and the chop gradually dissipated.  It turned out to be a perfect weather day for fishing. The sun came out on and off, the wind was calm, and the sea almost turned glassy. Ocean Falls Unfortunately it was not a perfect day for fishing in terms of t...