ECHO BAY

Well, I missed a day of blogging yesterday, but I can make up for it quickly: rain, cold, rain.

It rained for 36 hours with only one break of an hour or so in the late afternoon. It did make the waterfalls incredibly full and beautiful, but was it wet!

A couple of us tried to help the marina owner, Max, recover some items which had sunk, along with his shower house, last winter. A few months ago he had hired divers to check his anchors and, while they were down there, they secured a rope to a stainless steel fish-cleaning table. Unfortunately it was a pretty thin polypropylene rope and a very heavy table. Three of us couldn't pull it up, so we rigged up another line to Max's 120 year old hand-winch he had salvaged from an old lumber operation. The winch worked fine, but the rope just wasn't strong enough and broke before we could surface the table. All this in the pouring rain...

Most of the rest of the day was spent reading, covered in fleece and getting the boat warmed up now and then with the heater.

Even though it was still raining this morning, we had had enough of Kwatsi Bay, and left for Echo Bay, about a three-hour ride away. The weather gradually changed, with the wind diminishing, the rain stopping and the clouds finally letting a little blue sky show through.

After getting tied up at the marina, we went exploring for Billy's Museum - a locally famous collection of old-time artifacts collected by a fellow who has lived on the island for 75 years. The route to his museum was a bit circuitous, involving a condemned dock and pier, trying to find a path through a grassy meadow, wandering through deep woods, then finally finding Billy's place on the next bay over. It was an interesting collection, and Billy was fun to talk with.

After returning from the museum, I loaded the crab pots into the dinghy and took off for Shoal bay to drop them for the night. Well, it was a bit further than I thought over there, and the water was getting a bit rough from the afternoon winds, so I abandoned that idea and headed back to the boat. I like crab, but it's not worth the risk of having the dinghy get swamped with some very cold sea water...