Friday, March 25, 2011

Part 7 Spring has sprung!!

Since my last posting there have been some very interesting and disturbing happenings in the world. We all are affected in some way by world events and although we are along way from anywhere, we are no exception.
The massive earthquake in Japan could have affected us the most with the resulting Tsunami. As it turned out we only saw some strange water movement and no damage to report.
Just to show how fast news travels, we were awoken at 2.00am by a freind who had seen it on the midnight news. She has travelled to us by sailboat so immediatly phoned everyone she knew on the coast to warn them. Further phone calls were received from 6.30am onwards, by which time we were listening to the news and had the marine radio tuned to the emergency channel.
Tsunami are a fickle thing and you never quite know what is the best cause of action. For us we secure boats, make sure everything is safe and have added protection from the many islands the wave has so negotiate before entering our bay.
As I said, we did not see anything here but there was different movement of water in channels where it usually is quite calm. Hard to explain and doesn't picture well but swirling and bubbling like boiling water in a pot but without breaking the surface! The water level did rise and fall in a very short time which was the only sign there was any problem.
 It is hard to imagine that the Tsunami wave was travelling at over 400 miles per hour! and that the earthquake was so large the whole island if Japan is now 8 feet closer to North America!!
We still keep abreast of the problems in Japan and can't imagine the hardships they are enduring.

So that bring us to a more happy thought......Spring!

Yes the first day of spring was sunny and warm. The garden opened an eye so see if it really was time to wake up and everyone enjoyed the warmth and the extra shot of Vitamin D.

A great day to go to the beach. This beach is just outside our bay, about a 3 minute boat trip. Not large but sandy, rocky and a nice place for both humans and dogs to swim. Have to admit at this point that the humans only swim in the summer but the dog loves it anytime!!






This time of year means the water is clear. There is a huge amount of sea life visible just from the side of a boat, or from our front deck!
We have a large amount of star fish of various sizes, shapes and colours. Some are in the rock pools on the shore and others live in the crevices of the rocks where they get good water circulation bringing in food.





Hope spring has sprung wherever you may be.  As the old timers used to say..... "I think we have the under cut in her"      This is a reference to hand falling trees. The undercut is the first cut!

Happy Spring!


Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Part 6 Weather update.

At the moment we are experiencing some quite unusual weather for the coast. Yes we do get some snow during the winter. Enough to make life interesting for  a few days but nothing to exciting......Well we now have 18 inches of snow and more in the forecast!!

It all start around mid Feb when we had a fall of about 5 inches. Most of that started to disapear until this last week. It got very cold and there was a wicked wind that brought the wind chill temperature down to around -15 or so.

Saturday it started again and sunday it snowed all day. By monday morning we had another 10 inches so the snow shovel was deployed!

Now snow is very beautiful but a bit of a problem on the floats.
Any floats that are already low floating seem to go down even more.
Snow is very heavy. There must be some sort of scientific explanation for the weight such as......
Size of flake x falling velocity x atmospheric pressure  =  a heck of a lot of white stuff!


One not very happy boat!!



This picture gives you some sort of idea of the amount of snow, and consequently weight, on the roof of the house!

The forecast for the rest of the week is snow in varying amounts all week.
Tonight we have a hurricane wind warning and the sea state between here and Port Hardy is to get to around 11 metres!!



Just a short post this time.....if there are no more it is because we have either sunk, blown away or left for Hawaii!!