Codville Lagoon

Last weekend the sun finally shone, and we took advantage of it! After checking on some equipment, we fired up the big boat and took a vacation. There was actually a bit of wind and it was behind us, so we got the sails up and spent 7 hours sailing, fishing, and basking in the sun.

As I reeled in the fishing line one last time before entering the lagoon, I felt a tug and then a bigger tug. I tugged back and reeled in my first salmon!

John kindly filleted the fish and prepped dinner.
Then we went for a long kayak. This is Karen's kayak- and has a perfect third seat for Chaco!

(that's our boat back there)

Then we came back and ate said salmon- yum.

It was a much needed vacation after a 65 hour work week.

A Day in the Life

Here is where we live.

Here is where we work.

The inside's not done yet, and is a wreck, but we're getting there.

Here is our company vehicle.

Here is where our bosses live (and work and play).

Here is what our view looks like at 10:30pm when it's not pouring down rain.

8 days a week

I get overwhelmed when I think about describing this place, this work, and this new life. So instead of trying to get all the points across all at once, I think a portrayal of what we do will come out, piecemeal, over many coming blog posts.

So far, we work an 8 day week, which just isn’t enough for all the researching, learning, tinkering, and troubleshooting we still need to do. We spent last weekend ‘training’, and on Monday jumped right into projects with Ian. Tuesday and Wednesday we spent working without Ian, and on Thursday, Ian and his family left- leaving John and me on our own for 4 days (yikes!)

We spent several days this week working on what we call the Mountaintop. This is a site at the top of a nearby mountain that will are using as a relay site. Data from hydrophones, underwater cameras, and HD remote cameras gets sent via radio to a tower at the top of the mountain, and from there is beamed wherever we want it to go (the school, a coffee shop, the town center…). At the top of this tower is a wind generator and next to it are a set of solar panels to power this relay station. Everything that we set up up there has to withstand wind speeds up to 130 MPH (have I mentioned the nasty winters here?) so we spent a few days this week engineering (read: jury rigging) the tower to make it “totally bomber”, in Ian’s words.

While we were up there, we set up a few radios and aimed them at Ian’s house, in hopes of testing some equipment and their transmitting abilities from here. Unfortunately, we had no visibility from the mountain when we installed them (it was pouring down rain) so we basically guessed which way to point them. I’m not sure we got it quite right, as we can’t pick up a signal from down here. But we’re not totally sure because we haven’t seen the mountain from Ian’s house either (it’s still pouring down rain).

I spent all day today troubleshooting two encoders that we have to use for the hydrophones and underwater cameras. 10 days ago, I didn’t know what an encoder was and now I know what the inside of one looks like, how to reconfigure it, how to change it’s IP address, and who to talk to in their customer service department.

The fascinating thing about this work is that nobody else is doing this. We are not dealing with one company that makes remote wildlife video cameras and hydrophones and relays and recording software and all the connections in between. The cameras are meant to survey casinos, the radios are meant to pick up internet signals, the encoders ---well, who knows what encoders are supposed to do. It seems like there is an extra adaptor between every connection because the two pieces of equipment are not made to interact.

This keeps it challenging, and sometimes frustrating, but also exciting because we will be getting data nobody else knows how to get.

And that’s the ramble I will leave you with today.

ReCap

Well, we're home. After 12 days of travel, 65 1/2 hours of motoring, 14 hours of sailing, and $320 in diesel (we started with a full tank), and about 9 inches of rain, we arrived in Bella Bella.

I believe when we left you last, we were anchored in Montague- that was quite a while ago! We have slowly and steadily chugged up the coast, making progress every day but one (we spent an extra day in Nanaimo, scratching our heads over why our alternator was not charging our batteries. Turned out to be a blown fuse…doh!). We have anchored out most nights, and motored most days. Of course we would prefer to be sailing, but we have had very light wind and spend most of our time in narrow passes without enough space to really shake out the sails.

A few highlights:

~The anchorages have been spectacular. Occasionally there will be one or two other boats, but frequently we have the whole place to ourselves.

-Having Sarah and Trevor with us for the beginning of the journey. They were a huge help in Victoria- buying all of our groceries and liquor while we were dealing with customs and banks. They took their turns at the wheel so we could tinker and relax. They cooked and they did the dishes. They were great spirits and great company. Thanks to you both!

-We had a few good sailing days, and one perfect sailing day. This was in the Strait of Georgia, headed to Nanaimo. The wind was behind us and strong, the sun was out, and the sails were up! We took the opportunity to finally raise our spinnaker (that big colorful sail)

-Miles inlet was one of our favorite spots. It’s just 10 miles south of Cape Caution (see next highlight) but totally protected. You feel like you can reach out and touch the trees on either side of the inlet.

~There are a few milestones as you head through these waters, and we can now check a few off them off. Seymour narrows is one, where the current can run up to 16 knots! It’s all about timing. We hit it perfectly, right at slack before the tide began to ebb and it was calm and peaceful. Another one is rounding Cape Caution, which leaves you completely exposed to the Pacific. The going can be pretty rough here, with big winds and huge waves. We woke up at Miles inlet, however, to this:

We rounded the cape  early in the morning and while there was intense fog, the wind was settled and the seas calm. I took this picture less than ½ a mile off Cape Caution- isn’t it a beautiful piece of land?

~ Namu was probably the most interesting place we stopped. It is an old cannery, built in the 1800’s but active until the 1980’s. It is a ghost town now, with the exception of three wacky individuals that live there all year. It is very obvious that when the cannery shut down, everyone simply got up and left. There is a store front window, glass broken, with books and can goods rusting in place on the shelves. The cannery buildings are literally falling down.

There is an old tanker that the owner of the place bought intending to fix up, but apparently “hasn’t gotten around to it”

This is one of my favorite shots- I snapped it quickly in 35 seconds of sun we got between cloud bank and horizon.

~Arriving in Bella Bella! It seems like such a dream actually getting here. More on this soon.

A few lowlights:

-We have spent many many hours in the stomping grounds of orcas. It’s July, prime time to see said orcas. We have not seen any. Not even one. We have, however, seen one humpback, hundreds of porpoises, and dozens of bald eagles!

-The weather has been less than wonderful. It’s rained most days and is not getting much warmer than 60. We have even had to fire up the arctic heater a few nights. That long-awaited northwest summer has not yet arrived up here. People keep promising me it’s on it’s way. And so we wait, with rain gear on.

-Our VHF antenna did not seem to be working well (we had to be very close in order to transmit/receive calls) so we decided to replace it. We were in Campbell River, one of the few places with a marine store, so we bought a new antenna and John hoisted me up the mast to swap them out. Pretty simple. Except that the old antenna had a different connection type and they weren’t compatible. Four trips to the marine store, three trips up the mast, and 7 hours later, we had a new antenna (and a new splice and attachment on the end of the coaxial cable). Boat owners joke about boat projects taking twice as much time and money as you can ever expect, but it is no joke!! The fact that it was Sunday and every store but two were closed did not help the situation.

On the 2^nd or 3^rd trip up the mast, I took my camera and snapped off one or two pictures of our pretty girl

-We ran out of water in our tanks a few days back and have not yet been to a place with potable water. So we don’t have running water, and must boil everything we drink. It’s getting a bit old. Apparently Bella Bella (we are technically at Shearwater, across the way) has potable water. Tomorrow we will investigate.

-Diesel is expensive! Another reason we would rather be sailing.

Ok, back to the good stuff. We arrived in Bella Bella at 4pm on Thursday and gave ourselves a tour. We did a drive-by of old Bella Bella, Whiskey Cove (where our bosses live), and settled at Shearwater marina. Shearwater is the ‘tourist’ spot, with showers, laundry (only $10 a load!), power, a post office, a restaurant, and a general store. We probably won’t be here much, as the tourists are not our target, but  it might be nice to come by and have someone else cook for us every once in a while.

Yesterday we ran some errands then went to find some fishing. We caught a few small rock fish-just enough for dinner for two. Then we anchored in Whiskey Cove and waited for our bosses to return. They got in around 9, we moved the boat to their dock, they toured our boat, and we went up to their house for some wine and to start mapping out our jobs!

It is such an understatement to tell you that we are so excited to be here, but I don't know what else to say about it!

Dropping the hook

We spent the minimum 24 hours in Victoria doing chores: clearing customs, receiving the work visa, applying for our Social Insurance Numbers, setting up bank accounts, and buying a cell phone. Then we got out of there. It's not that Victoria isn't lovely, it's just that moorage is $70 a night!!

We managed to get the sails up for a little bit on Tuesday afternoon, but cranked the motor back on when we converged with two tankers, a ferry, a sailboat, and a tug and tow. (Sorry, I was too busy navigating to get the picture, but it was very bizarre; we were sailing along with the channel completely to ourselves when from every corner boats appeared and all wanted to go a different direction!)

We pulled into Montague harbor on Galliano Island at about 7:00, dropped the anchor, unstrapped the dinghy, and headed to shore for a walk. It felt good to be off the dock and away from the big city. The anchorage was peaceful and the sunset was spectacular.

John, rowing us to shore (having listened to the engine most of the day, we opted for the oars over the outboard)

Things up here are BIG!

But other things, like this beach, are very little.

Isn't she pretty?

Provisioning

Somewhere in the middle of Van Isle, John and I found out we had been granted a positive LMO, providing us permission to get a work visa in Canada. The rest of the race we fought to focus on racing, anxious to get home and start our next adventure. We returned to Seattle the night of Sunday, June 19th and set our ETD as Sunday, June 26th. That gave us 6 days to get ourselves and our boat ready to leave Seattle indefinitely, navigate up the coast, and live in a remote part of the world. Needless to say, those 6 days were somewhat stressful...

But I kept a (3-page long) list of 'to do's' and 'to buy's', and one by one we scratched items off that list. Mostly we bought food, supplies, tools, and boat parts that we might need one day, anticipating the enormously high prices to buy things and have them shipped to Bella Bella.

I didn't document the week very well (something to do with that somewhat stressful thing) but I did manage to snap a picture part way through organizing some of our provisionings. This is about half of the non-perishables I managed to fit into those two lockers. We are set on canned beans and ketchup for a long long time...