Sailing

I'm back from a two week sailing trip.



The outbound route. I picked up my wife and kids in Lund



Our first stop after Lund. We spent the night in Squirrel Cove, which has a general store and small restaurant a half hour dinghy ride from the anchorage. The blue building is a floating bakery though, so we had fresh cinnamon buns the next morning.



Two stops later was Octopus Islands Marine Park. I took my wife and kids for a dinghy ride around one of the islands where we saw a starfish easily a metre across, huge kelp forests, seals, an otter and this bald eagle perched on the shore. We saw so many eagles on the trip that by the end we were pretty much bored of them. I even saw one of them catch a fish within a stone's throw.



From there we sailed on generally north and west. This bear on Hardwicke Island was turning rocks on the shore over and scooping up the crabs underneath for lunch.

Our ride, the Dragon Star.


This is Port Neville's old General Store and Post Office. Once a community of several hundred, Port Neville now only has a year-round population of one. Alex the caretaker who was hired by the descendants of Neville's founders to keep the historic store in good shape. They have a cabin on the property shared among various siblings, but only used in the summer months. There were only three other boats at the government wharf and I asked Alex how much traffic he sees in the winter. He told me that last winter a coast guard cutter and a large fishing boat had anchored overnight, but neither had sent crew ashore. Otherwise the only times he saw people was when he left Port Neville for supplies.

It is a beautiful spot. We had been making our way up the Johnstone Strait to Robson Bight to see Orcas (my wife, after nine years living here had yet to see one). The transition from the islands to the strait was harsh, water temperatures dropped ten degrees (or twenty if you count in Fahrenheit) and the wind chilled by the same and blew fiercely against us (both directions!). However, once we turned the corner into Neville, the temperature the winds turned warm and it became summer again.



Finally some whales. Just off Robson Bight we found Orca pod A24, we stayed with the whales for about an hour as they cruised east. Two zodiacs patrolled the waters around the bight to inform tourists about the whales and how we can safely approach them without hurting them. They told us the pod consists of an adolescent male, four adult females and a two-year-old.


We stayed the next night in Port Neville again, then travelled to Forward harbour the next day. Preparing to anchor that afternoon, my three-year-old daughter snuck on to the upper deck (the children had been warned to stay below decks during anchoring because there was too much going on and it could be dangerous). Just as I'd started to lower the anchor I heard her crying non-stop at the top of her lungs. I knew it was serious because she's a tough girl, very little makes her cry at all so I came running to find blood all over the place and my wife tightly clasping her foot. Blood ran out and over my wife's fingers and I dashed below for the first aid kit.

Fortunately my wife is a medical professional and I have fairly extensive first-aid training from my time in the Army. We saw that she had a deep cut in the side of her small toe so we bandaged it up and reviewed our options.

The nearest hospital was at least eight hours away, and it would have meant a long cruise to a small port, then a two-hour taxi ride. We called the Coast Guard to ask if they knew any better options and they immediately dispatched the Cape Palmerton, the newest boat in the fleet from Campbell River. We sailed out to meet them, but found the main channels rough, so we loitered in a small cove. About two hours later they came alongside, my wife and daughter transferred and they took off for Campbell River.

There was no other safe anchorage nearby so we returned to Forward Harbour for the night. Cell phone coverage was intermittent, but finally my wife got through to us late that night. My daughter would be fine, she got eight stitches and had a bad reaction to a drug which caused her to stop breathing for a while, but everything had worked out okay. The two of them would stay in the hospital overnight so they could keep my daughter for observation.

The next day we started out before six in the morning. We had huge luck with currents and winds so the trip to Campbell River only took us nine hours. The pick-up went smoothly and we sailed another two hours to Rebecca Spit.

The next morning we spent some time on the beach (pictured above) and returned to Squirrel Cove so my wife and kids could have an early start from Lund the next morning.

I sailed back to drop off the boat. Mostly it was a relaxing and pleasant break. We saw hundreds of seals, dozens of bald eagles and dolphins, otters, a bear, sea lions and of course, the orcas. Makes me wish I had a boat of my own.

History

I've been thinking a lot lately about my personal history. What brought me here? I remember I wanted to be a writer in High School, but I don't remember why. I suppose it's because I was such an avid reader. Anyhow, I had no clue how to put a novel together. I wanted to write fantasy, and I'd spend all day drawing maps, and imagining places, but I never got so far as to create characters, never mind an actual story for my novel.

I did create stories and characters, just not in a way that I saw as a step towards writing at the time. I created RPG campaigns for my friends and at night, before I fell asleep I scripted stories in my head, one instalment a night in my ongoing adventures. In fact I still do that sort of pre-sleep daydreaming, but these days I try to focus it on whatever I'm writing at the time.

Anyhow, after High School I didn't know what to do. I had no clue how to step towards becoming a writer, all I knew was that most of the writers I read had fascinating backgrounds. They'd travelled, done a wide variety of work and just seemed like they'd been around.

So, with the naiveté of youth propelling me forward, I joined the Canadian Army. I wanted to sign up for the infantry but, after a battery of tests they thought I'd be better used as an electronics and optical technician. Anyhow, you've seen the movie, you know what training was like, more or less. One of the guys in my basic training platoon was an ex-US Marine. After five years in the Marines he said Canadian basic was the toughest thing he'd done.

Fast forward through three years of training, exercises, boredom on base, more training etc. By this time I'd entirely forgotten my dream of writing a novel, but I still wanted to DO something. I'd arrived with my regiment while they were all off peacekeeping in Cyprus and they weren't deployed again the entire time I was there. I knew the Army was not the right place for me, but I didn't want to give up the dream of actually getting involved in something bigger than firing blanks at an 'enemy force' who was firing blanks back at me. So I transferred to the reserves, and a year later the call came for volunteers to go peacekeeping in Croatia.

Here is where the history part comes in. During my tour there was a small, but significant engagement in a place called the Medak Pocket. At the time I had no idea it would be later deemed a historically significant event. I wasn't actually there, only a few dozen of the Second PPCLI can claim that, but I was in the radio room that night, I heard it all in short bursts. The Croats were moving in on the poorly armed Serb defenders (the opposite of the dynamic in most of the rest of the former Yugoslavia). A few platoons of our boys were sent in. They drove right up in their APCs, right in between the opposing forces and began to dig entrenchments. Our orders were not to fire, unless fired upon but, being in the middle meant that when the Croats started shooting at the Serbs, they fired right over the heads of the soldiers in the middle. Close enough!

Afterwards the officer reporting the engagement was audibly shaky on the radio. The Sergeant manning the radio had to guide him through the report. Officially the Croatian forces opened fire on Canadian peacekeepers. The Canadian troops returned fire with assault rifles and light machine guns. Sixteen Croatians died and none of our guys were injured. The Croatians left, tails firmly tucked behind, and they never came back.

Why was this historically significant? Because two years later the Serbs massacred 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in a nearly identical scenario. Only those peacekeepers stepped aside, and let the Serbian troops in. The Battle of the Medak Pocket became the big argument for peacemaking rather than peacekeeping.

So I was part of a historically significant event, if just as an observer on one end of the radio. Imagine that.

All these experiences and many more, in some way I can't really explain, brought me back, full circle, to the guy who dreamed about writing novels. Only this time I think I actually have a story to tell, and hopefully the maturity to do it well.

Prescience

Well, yesterday's post was just slightly ahead of its time. About fifteen minutes after I made that blog post, whether through Karma for making light of the situation in Japan, or mere impudence, my drive finally gave up the ghost.

I spent a good chunk of time last night and again this morning trying to fix Windows or at least install it on a spare drive with no luck. Then I threw up my hands in disgust and decided I would just use Linux to recover everything and then switch back to windows. Under an hour later I have Linux installed nicely and I'm getting all the system settings where I want them. It has all the tools I need for writing and seems generally smoother and more user friendly than Windows. It even seems to be doing a good job of copying my old drive so I won't lose any data.

I'll keep Windows, just in case there's something I can't do in Linux, but so far I haven't found anything.

In a few days I hope to forget all about Windows. I'm sure there will be flashbacks, like a Vietnam veteran sleeping under a ceiling fan. But I'll get over it.

My Computer is a Fukishima

I should have saved that last picture (the exploding blimp below) for today. I spent all morning struggling to get my computer to work. A bad boot sector on the hard drive stops the computer mid-boot about 95% of the time, the only approach I've found that works is to simply try over and over until it works.

It put me behind in my work and I ended up sending out a sub-standard synopsis today because I was frustrated and feeling pressured to get something out.

So far I've been unable to set up a drive image, but I made a boot disk which I hope will work (I am reluctant to test it for obvious reasons).

This is what happens when you are your own tech support.