Ping Pong

Lately we have been feeling like a ping-pong ball, bouncing between Nanaimo and Edmonton.

Our latest trip lasted about a week, just long enough to attend our medical appointments and see a few friends and family again. The good news is that we have been given a clean bill of health, and can now get back to planing our futures.

Each trip through the mountains gives us more appreciation for the wonderful land we live in. Right now spring is just starting to appear on the southern sections and it gives us hope that this winter will soon be over. It is interesting that Edmonton has been one of the warmest places we have seen in the past few weeks - the coast has been rather cool and rainy for the most part. All of the warm weather has apparently gone east to Toronto and beyond.

We elected to come back on the Thursday before Thanksgiving in the hope that there would be extra ferries on to handle the rush. As it turns out, it was a close call - by the time we got to Horseshoe Bay, the only ferry that was not sold out for the day was the one we wanted to take. They told us we would probably be on the last ferry at 9PM, but we managed to squeeze onto the 7PM instead and were back at the marina by 8:45. Of course the ferry was so busy, and we were one of the last cars to get on board, so we were not able get any food. That, coupled with the cold, rainy weather, prompted us to have a late supper at Miller's Pub before venturing onto the boat.

Over the last few days, the weather has continued to be mostly miserable, punctuated by one of the worst wind-storms they have had here in years. We sat on the boat, heeling over dramatically in the gusts, wondering just how strong those dock lines really were. In the end, no damage was done and everyone here survived OK - the same could not be said for some of the other, less well-constructed marinas. One of our latest acquisitions is a new wind-data instrument, which I hooked up the day after the storm. As a result, I don't know how hard it was blowing during the worst of it. The picture here was taken the next night - we were getting gusts up to about 35 knots, but certainly not as dramatic as the night before.
One thing that did come to light was the fact that a lot of the ferries were cancelled and the ones that did go were facing extremely high seas and crossing times of up to 5 hours (instead of the usual hour and 35 minutes). So it is just as well that we did not wait to come back on Friday as we would most likely have had to stay overnight in Vancouver.

The weather as usual is very changeable here, nice one minute and nasty the next, making for some dramatic skies.

Oh, and with the coming of spring, the geese seem to have decided that our neighbor's fishing boat would be the perfect spot for some noisy courtship, making it completely unnecessary for an alarm clock in the unlikely event that we have any desire to get up early.

With the storms, it has been impossible to get any work done on the outside of the boat, so I have been concentrating on some inside jobs, and some progress is getting made. There really is nothing that is all that important in any event.