This morning I awoke to a gorgeous, sunny day, an obvious sign that my move out of False Creek would go smoothly. Of course, I neglected to check on the phase of the moon or something and it all went horribly pear shaped – I am currently still at anchor in False Creek, about 500m west of my previous anchorage. I’ve been sitting around doing dayjob work and waiting for the VPD to show up so I can tell them my sob story and pray they don’t issue me a fine or tow me.
This morning I cooked a big breakfast, checked in on work stuff, and prepared Tie Fighter for the grand exit. I fired up the engines – she started (almost) right away! I pulled the anchor; no small task, with months of False Creek grime and growth along the full length of the rode, and noticeably heavier due to the addition of a thick steel cable that I dragged up from the bottom also. The ocean floor of False Creek has a legacy of a hundred years of industrial garbage.
I motored away from my anchorage, a bit nervous, and made it about 200m west before I heard a strange ‘clunk’ and the engine started making a new and different noise – nothing huge, but a perceivable shift, and that’s never a good thing. I went down and checked out the engine compartment, and I could hear a bit of a noise but couldn’t see anything out of place. I later discovered that the secondary water pump – which wasn’t hooked up, but which I had bolted loosely to the engine “just to get it out of the way” – had shaken loose of its mounts and was resting against the beltwheel of the primary water pump, grinding into the bronze housing of the pump.
I went back up to the cockpit and throttled up, and things went smoothly for about five minutes – I could almost see the Granville Bridge, and I figured I could dock there and sort any further problems out before making my way out into English Bay. No such luck; within another minute I felt the engine power drop suddenly, and I saw smoke begin to pour into the cockpit via the engine compartment vent. I immediately throttled down, dove below and opened the engine compartment hatch, only to be met by a cloud of black smoke. I killed the engine and waved the smoke away looking for signs of fire, ready to jump for the fire extinguisher at the first sign of flickering yellow and orange. Fortunately there were no flames, just thick, black smoke pouring out of the dark engine compartment. I thought at first that perhaps I had over- or under-tightened a belt, but as I looked closer I realized that there was a gaping hole melted into the side of the brand-new water trap I had just installed, and the plastic elbows in the exhaust line had both melted beyond recognition. $@&%! The smoke was a combination of diesel exhaust and scorched plastic.
With no engine, floating free in the shipping lanes of False Creek, I was in a bit of a bind. I threw out my anchor and got on my VHF radio.
“Vancouver Coast Guard Radio, Vancouver Coast Guard Radio, this is Tie Fighter, Tie Fighter, over.”
“Station calling Vancouver Coast Guard Radio, go ahead, over…”
I outlined the situation – normally the Coast Guard would recommend me contact a towing company, but given that I was about 500m from their station I thought it might be worth a try giving them a call. About ten minutes later they showed up and offered me a tow, which I gladly accepted. They tied the massive Coast Guard zodiac – the ‘Kitsilano 1’ – to the port side of Tie Fighter and towed me the 150m or so to the nearby anchorage, where I dropped my anchor. I thanked them and sat down to give them all the information needed for their incident report. They left me a copy of the report, so that I can present it to the VPD when they come knocking next.
Anyhow – the long and the short of it is that my exhaust system has been malfunctioning for a while, and now I am 95% certain the problem is in something called a “raw water injection elbow”. The elbow is where seawater that has been used to cool the engine is injected into the exhaust system, cooling down the exhaust and ejecting the warm seawater from the boat. These elbows apparently only last about five years, and lacking a decent record of maintenance on my engine, I have absolutely no idea when the last time mine was replaced.
End result? I’m still in False Creek, albeit closer to the Granville Bridge. A new water trap is about $330 (I know this well, having just bought one last week, argh), a new injector elbow is $390, the connecting bit which may need to be replaced is about $120 and the replacement exhaust elbows are about $35 each. Instead of moving on with my great adventure, I’m now out about a thousand bucks and have a bunch of engine work ahead of me.
Someday. SOMEDAY this engine will be stable and reliable!
It is January the 26th 2010, one day past my due date to get the heck out of False Creek – but here I am, still about two hundred meters from the Cambie Bridge. I’ve had visits from the VPD two days in a row, but since I haven’t been able to start my engine there hasn’t been much I can do. Yesterday I managed to get my engine started again, and today I blew a large portion of the day working on day-job stuff and reprovisioning Tie Fighter for an extended stay where there isn’t a grocery store a block away. I’m still here, but I’ll be leaving in the morning. Tonight is my last evening in the Creek for a while, so I figured I’d relax and enjoy it.
I thought I’d update the blog with a few notes on what has changed in the neighborhood over the past month – besides the constant visits from the VPD, that is. As I write this, there is a massive inflatable boom across False Creek, about ten meters west of the Cambie Bridge. There is a gap of about thirty meters across, and that gap is currently being patrolled by no less than four RCMP boats. Still, I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s start from the beginning.
denied access to my favourite bike path!
Southeastern False Creek is home to the newly-constructed Olympic Village. The Village will be home to all the athletes during the games, so of course security is a big question – but the sheer amount of money being spent on this project is astounding. The most recent roadblock to go up, a block or so from my boat, was being staffed by seven people at last check, including three uniformed police officers and four people in VANOC jackets! As far as I can tell, there is a similar roadblock on every road adjoining the Village. The entire area is surrounded by tall steel fences.
Still, this is all stuff you can read elsewhere. This is my blog, and so I will tell (and show) you what I am seeing from the water. For instance, my favourite bike path – the one from Cambie Bridge down towards Science World, past the shiny new Olympic Village buildings, over the boardwalks and sculpted bridge, past the immaculately landscaped gardens and artificial peninsula built for the wildlife – has been blocked off. To get downtown I have to skulk my way through five blocks of alleyways and several blocks of fenced-in sidewalk. I hate riding on the sidewalk.
CFAV Glendyne placing the buoys - intimidating!
Anyhow, about a month ago, a large, scary-looking navy tugboat pulled into False Creek. I did a bit of research and found the tug to be the Canadian Forces Auxiliary Vessel (CFAV) Glendyne, a Glen-class tugboat based out of CFB Esquimalt, near Victoria. The Glendyne put a pair of large, orange buoys in place just short of the Cambie Bridge, complete with orange flashing lights on top. I knew that this would be the beginning of the promised ‘boom’ under the Bridge, but I still hadn’t seen any documentation about what the end result would look like, and so I watched with interest as they set the buoys in place. I figured they’d be back in the next couple of days to finish the job, but once they were finished they motored slowly away and never returned.
Off-topic, one of my neighbors has mentioned that he expects to see at least one military gunboat in the Creek, paired up with the RCMP zodiacs and whaleboats currently patrolling the boomed-off area. I am not convinced, but given the focus on security I wouldn’t be shocked if there were some kind of small, fast Canadian Forces gunboat deployed here during the games.
holy crap, a hovercraft!
Anyhow – a few weeks went past without any change to the buoys, but one morning last week I awoke to the sounds of something very large cruising past me. I popped my head up out of the hatch to see a Department of Fisheries and Oceans and/or Canadian Coast Guard (both were painted on the hull) hovercraft making its way slowly down the creek! The hovercraft – which later research found to be the CCGH Siyay based in Richmond – was outfitted with a crane and a large cargo of cement blocks. I figured they were planning to work on the boom somehow, but instead they spent the day lining both sides of False Creek with smaller, lighted channel buoys, indicating the shipping channel in the center of the Creek. This of course was followed by several days of the VPD visiting any boat anchored too far out into the middle of the Creek, issuing warnings and referring everyone to the notice that anchoring within the commercial shipping lane is banned by Transport Canada.
Personally, I think the buoys are actually a nice touch, and I hope they stay past the Olympics. It’s nice to pull into a bay and have your way clearly marked – it makes everything feel a little bit safer, a bit more professional… dare I say “a bit better-managed”?
mmmm, sausages
Anyhow. Sequential Circus 7 was this weekend – it was excellent, thank you for asking – and as such I didn’t spend much time on the boat. When I returned, I found that someone had been busy, and there were now several large black inflatable sausages stretched across the Creek! They’re about two and a half meters in diameter and appear to be made of a thick rubber, with webbing straps every three meters or so, tie-down grommets on those straps, and large metal rings at the end to fasten the sausages together, or to the shore. In other words, the sausages are clearly designed and built to do one thing only: to operate as a boom or blockade over water.
One question we’d be bantering about on the Creek was what exactly they were planning to use for the boom. One guy thought large logs, another thought a very thick rope – I had no ideas, but apparently the answer was easier than we thought.
While rowing back to Tie Fighter yesterday, I made a short detour out to the opening in the boom, where an RCMP whaler was sitting. As I approached, he was quick to lean out the window and let me know that the area past the boom is now restricted waters – as an aside, I have gotten similar warnings from the people manning blockades as I approached them on my bicycle. Seriously? The huge black barrier, the orange flashing lights and the menacing police boat – or in the case of the roadblocks, the seven people in official-looking uniforms, the flashing lights, the pylons, the big orange-striped barrier sawhorses and the police car parked perpendicularly to the road – do other people really not understand these signs? Or maybe it’s just that the barricades are so universally unpopular that anyone approaching them must be some kind of threat. I don’t know. Anyhow.
The officer, once he understood that I was just there to ask questions, was quite friendly and explained that the boom would be closed to all boats except official VANOC-approved vehicles. The boom is apparently scheduled for removal at the end of March, but the officer did not know whether or not the shipping lane buoys would be removed.
Speaking of speaking with officers, I’ve spoken with two different sets of VPD in the past two days, both of whom were somewhat interested in the fact that my anchoring permit had expired. Each time the R.G.McBeath shows up there are at least two officers onboard, and often more. Yesterday there were four officers, none of whom I recognized, and when I explained to the officer doing the talking that I was planning to leave as soon as I could get my engine started, he answered “I’ll believe that when I see it.”. He then pulled slowly away without saying another word to me. In contrast, when they came by today, it was another batch of officers I’d never seen before, and when I showed them that I’d just gotten my engine running again, the officer in charge said “It’s almost 5pm, why don’t you wait until morning before pulling out, it’ll be dark very soon.”. Nice!
Anyhow. I’ve only blown my deadline by two days, but it’s definitely time to go. The only thing I know to expect is significantly rougher waters – False Creek is very protected, and I’m really not looking forward to just how bad the February weather can be out in the open. Rest assured, I’ll blog about it as I go.
Well, I’m back to bobbing around in False Creek after a spectacular week in the Nevada Desert. Actually I’ve been back for a week now, but I’m still trying to decompress – funny how the “default world” can seem so surreal. I’ve held off on posting this so that I could edit it slowly as the memories came to me, and so that I could sort out some photos to go along with the anecdotes.
The Man: Just This Guy, You Know?
Rather than evangelize, let me just say this: maybe you’ve planned go to Burning Man but something got in the way, or maybe you’ve seen images or TV shows about it and thought it sounded interesting. Maybe you’ve just seen the deranged, happy looks in the eyes of folks who’ve recently returned from the desert, and noticed the lasting changes in the way they look at the world around them, and maybe that made you wonder just what the whole thing is all about. Do yourself a favour and just get there.
It’s not too difficult; the trick I’ve used to great success several times now is to get a ticket when they first go on sale in February, then stick it somewhere that you’ll see it regularly, like on your fridge. If you have the ticket and it turns out you can’t go, you can easily bounce it on Craigslist pretty much right up until the day the event starts, for as much as you paid for it – so there’s almost zero financial risk. Drop the $250 when the tickets go on sale, and your life will mysteriously get out of the way and allow you to go to the desert. However, if you tell yourself you’re going but wait until August to buy your ticket, your life will conspire to prevent you from going, be it work-related problems, or financial or whatever.
Anyhow. After a few frantic days of last-minute preparation (ok, I admit it, mostly costume shopping), Carrie and I loaded up her truck with a huge pile of camping equipment and headed down to Seattle to meet up with our three-RV convoy. After being denied a border crossing back in February, I didn’t want to take the chance of having our whole RV turned inside out – or worse yet, having the whole RV turned away – just because of a little black mark on my record. We made it across with zero hassles, and spent the night in a Super-8 before reconnecting with the rest of the motley band at the Seattle REI. Interesting fact(*): the Seattle REI is the second most visited tourist attraction in Seattle, after the Space Needle.
(*: by “fact” I mean that someone working the door at the REI told me this, so take it with a grain of salt.)
Carleigh and Bayrock in the Monday sunrise
We drove looooong through the night and arrived at the Black Rock Desert at approximately 2am, where we had to wait in a long, dusty lineup of RVs, trucks and cars for the next three hours. When we finally arrived at the Greeters Station, all the first-timers (“virgins”) were pulled out of the RV to roll in the dust, ring the welcome gong, and receive a certificate good for one spanking at the Greeters Camp. I thought the certificate was pretty lame, personally – in previous years the spanking was administered promptly and with great enthusiasm shown by both spanker and spankee, but apparently there have been complaints. *sigh*.
Setting up camp while the sun rose was gorgeous, and went smoothly – we were all far too excited to sleep, so we broke out the costumes and ran giddily around the playa all day, hitting up bars and checking out art. Most of the big sound stages weren’t yet setup, so Monday night was by far the quietest of the week, but that didn’t stop us from tracking down bar after bar and partying as hard as possible.
Tuesday was much of the same. The first ‘real’ day of Burning Man; wake up, struggle into consciousness, clean up with babywipes, apply sunscreen, don your most fabulous, anticipated costume and stumble out into the blinding white desert in search of adventure. Of course there was no shortage of adventure, and the day was mostly spent riding from art installation to art installation, making new friends at the Man, gathering and subsequently losing a posse, and drinking fabulous martinis at Martini Village. Sleeper hit of the day: Lollipop Shot Camp, where we were served shots of Ketel One vodka and Tootsie Roll Pops in custom take-home glow-in-the-dark shot glasses, on lanyards for easy access of course. The procedure – dunk the lollipop in the shot glass, twirl it around for a minute, take the shot, repeat – was both fun and dangerous, and we all agreed we needed to take a break from drinking shortly thereafter.
Drew and a new friend at Lollipop Shot Camp
By Tuesday night the Opulent Temple was up and running, and the throbbing house music could be heard from one end of the playa to the other. Shortly after we met up with them the crew decided to head for the other side of the playa to catch DJ Dan at another stage, and Carrie mentioned being tired and planning to head back to camp. When she left, I decided I’d had enough of house music and headed off to find some dubstep, eventually meeting some folks who told me that DJ Mimosa was playing at the Space Cowboys stage, so I took off like a shot to get there. Mimosa was hands-down my favourite act from the Emrg-N-See festival in Oregon earlier this summer.
As I arrived at the stage, I rolled up on my bike at a reasonable clip. I wove in and out of the hundreds of bicycles lying on the street, aiming to drop mine as close to the stage as I could to make it a more undesirable target for a bike thief, should any be around, and managed to make it within about twenty feet. As I approached what looked like a good spot, I swung my leg up over the bike and rode on a single pedal, unravelling my long skirt and adjusting my hat while riding with one hand, and then gingerly stepped off as the bike reached the drop spot, allowing the bike to fall gently to the ground. A nearby group of three girls, unnoticed until that moment, began a round of polite applause.
“That was the best dismount I’ve seen this year!”, said one.
I took my top hat in hand and bowed low in acknowledgement, and at the lowest point of the bow I was startled to see that I had dropped my bike directly next to Carrie’s – nearly on top of her bike, in fact. I guess great music is universal; I spent the next half-hour tracking her down in the massive crowd, letting her know that it was just one of those quirky Burning Man coincidences, and that I wasn’t in fact stalking her.
My custom-built Rad Playa Cruiser™
Wednesday I parted ways with my crew to meet up with Miya, whom I hadn’t seen in a few months, and we spent the day riding double on my Rad Playa Cruiser™ which I had equipped with stunt pegs for exactly such an opportunity. In four years of Burning Man I have yet to see a single other bicycle with stunt pegs, which confuses me somewhat – mine cost me a grand total of $6, and have come in handy numerous times each year. What better way to meet cute girls?
“You’re looking for Root Society, hey? Hop on, I’m heading that way now..!”
Just as an aside, my Rad Playa Cruiser™ has now seen three Burning Man expeditions, and currently resides with my friend Dan Ross as his primary bicycle. She began life as a $25 junk store bicycle and underwent massive reworking to become the jewel that she is today – please click here for a photo of her in the “before” state.
Rocking 'Hair of the Dog' with an impromptu band
Miya and I ended up bouncing from bar to bar, eventually finding ourselves drinking at ‘Hair of the Dog’, an open-mic bar a block or so from Center Camp. Miya noticed a whiteboard behind the bar, listing things the bar could use as donations, such as orange juice, tequila, baby wipes and… “little people”. Apparently one of the bartenders had a thing for dwarves and/or midgets, but this entry spawned a furious row ending with Miya standing on a barstool and berating the bartenders mercilessly, arguing that her 5’4″ frame certainly qualified her as “little”. She was quite convincing, and soon found herself working behind the bar helping random burners take the edge off the day. I seized this opportunity to take the stage, and played and sang several songs with an impromptu band. We were pretty bad, but considering none of us had ever met before, much less played together, we weren’t terrible and the crowd was quite appreciative.
Thursday was much quieter during the day than the previous days, spending most of the time taking it easy and recovering from the past three days of lunacy. Most of our camp napped intermittantly, and I had an excellent guitar and mandolin jam with Glyn and a few random folks that wandered under our shade structure throughout the afternoon. Thursday night on the other hand, Carrie and I got into our most dressy costumes and headed out for a night of dancing. We made our way to the enormous Root Society dome to see Bassnectar, which was apparently also the plan of about seven or eight thousand other burners. The dome was packed wall-to-wall, and they’d configured soundsystems outside as well, with spillover crowds extending well out into the streets. The bass could be felt from blocks away! We danced well into the night, and I didn’t get to bed until well after sunrise.
Miya attempting to make breakfast crêpes
Friday I met up with Miya again, who had had a very rough morning dealing with a medical emergency involving a member of her camp. We spent the afternoon and evening just talking and wandering around from art installations to bars, spending an hour or so watching a terrible italian caveman soft-porn flick in the Bad Ideas Theatre and eating popcorn. We ended up crashing reasonably early, in preparation for the festivities of Saturday.
Saturday, the day of the burn, felt like it arrived far too quickly. Our camp, ‘Team Gong Show’ (a subset of the ‘First Republic of Slacking’) had planned a three-hour party in the afternoon and I had been elected bar manager. In preparation for this, we had stopped at the Rite-Aid pharmacy in Alturas, California to purchase alcohol – the ridiculous prices of booze in the states never cease to astound me. We purchased a grand total of twelve gallons of vodka and rum for just over $120, and in three hours of serving heavily-sauced smoothies to a crowd of about a hundred or so we went through it all. The theme of the party was, unsurprisingly, “The Gong Show” and after buttering up the crowd with drinks and house music for an hour or so, the gonging began. I went up to play and sing A-Ha’s ‘Take On Me’ with my mandolin, to much acclaim, though I was gonged when I returned to the stage an hour later to perform Britney Spears’ ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ on the acoustic guitar.
in the Deep Playa, surveying the land
The burning of the man was spectacular, with phenomenal fireworks and a huge fireball erupting from the base of the man to start the blaze. The man himself was particularly well built this year, and it was a solid forty minutes or so before he finally fell. I had plans to meet up with Miya at midnight, but I took a short nap after the burn which turned into a three-hour stretch, and I woke up at 1:45am, groggy and faded from the day’s heavy partying. Fortunately, I subscribe to the theory that every Burning Man meetup plan should have at least one backup plan, and so I had also made a plan to meet her at 2am at Center Camp should we miss out on the midnight meetup. I raced over to Center Camp, losing my third set of goggles of the week on the way, and waited – but she never showed. When I made my way back to her camp to see if she was there, I found her fast asleep in her tent – it turned out she had also partied way too hard during the day, and had slept right through the meetup times as well. We ended up napping for another few hours, intending to wake up for sunrise, but we even missed that by about an hour. The early morning was spent riding around in the deep playa, checking out the furthest-flung art installations, talking and enjoying the morning sunlight.
Overall? Amazing. Very much a different experience from the previous two years, but that’s pretty much always how it is – you go in with expectations of how things are going to be, but you can never really predict what will happen or how it will affect you. I was a lot more ‘crew’-oriented this year, instead of heading out solo like the previous years, and I stayed a lot more sober.
One more big post to get out of the way, and hopefully after that I can just update frequently instead of having to play massive catch-up games!
Monday night I arrived in Victoria and stayed in the harbour in front of the Empress, meeting Amanda and company for drinks. The moorage was an awesome location, in super rockstar style. I spent Tuesday morning working, but mostly cleaning the boat and enjoying the parking spot. Tuesday afternoon I went sailing with the lovely Laurel, and scoped out Esquimalt Harbour for a place to anchor. She had to be back at work, so we turned around and I dropped her off at the docks at Fleming Beach and headed back out to find an anchorage. After a few false starts, I stopped at the Canadian Armed Forces Yacht Club to ask advice – nobody had anything constructive to say, with the only exception being the bartender. She took me out to the parking lot, down a rugged, windy little path through burdocks and blackberry bushes to a tiny little beach, half covered by a large arbutus tree.
“You see the bar from here?” she asked. I nodded.
“This beach is probably on the Songhee reserve, but most folks think it belongs to the base. Most of the base thinks it’s on the reserve. The property line is around here somewhere, but nobody is certain where, so it’s kind of a no-man’s land. If you pull up your dingy here and hide it under the tree, you should be ok…”
So that’s what I did for the night. Anchoring in Thetis Cove in the Esquimalt Harbour, then rowing a half-mile through harbour swells – not quite as large as the open ocean, but not what you’d consider “sheltered” either – only to sneak onto a disputed beach, hide and lock my dinghy, sneak onto and off of a naval base, and finally ride my bicycle 10km or so into town to go visit with friends. Some days the mind just boggles. After riding 10km “home” again at 2:30am, only to have to row another half-mile through the waves with a bicycle in the dinghy, I started to understand that this trip would be a pretty damned good series of workouts!
When I woke up in the morning, I realized that I had accidentally left my laptop power supply at Amanda’s house – d’oh! This meant I couldn’t actually start work until I did the row-bike-bike-row sequence again. I kicked myself thoroughly and was starting to make breakfast when I heard voices outside. Out a window (one of the only two in the boat that is actually translucent enough to see through), I saw a small powerboat with two men in it idling nearby. I poked my head out to see what they wanted, and they seemed startled to see me and quickly sped away. Uh oh.
There was no way I’d leave the boat now, so I pulled anchor and headed back towards Fleming Beach. I had noticed a lot of “NO MOORAGE” signs, but since I’d be anchoring those wouldn’t apply, and since the only “allowed” moorage around was surrounded by reserves I was willing to push the rules a bit. The “beach” in Fleming Beach is almost nonexistent – but the bay itself is very well sheltered by a large man-made breakwater. The bay is surrounded by beautiful, million-dollar homes on one side, a large cliff infested with rock climbers on another, and a lovely park on the third. I anchored, rode in, and got my power supply from Amanda’s house, sneaking a shower in the process. Now that I was clean, powered and mobile I headed to Habit for coffee.
As I walked into Habit, a beautiful blonde woman was walking out. Our eyes met and stuck, until she reached the door, and left. I shrugged and ordered coffee, then sat down and began my workday. Not five minutes later, the woman appeared in front of me again.
“Excuse me,” she said with a thick accent, “I think… we are… supposed to talk.”
Her name was Hanne, and she was visiting Victoria from Denmark, enroute to Seattle, then Iceland and finally home. We talked for several hours, and then she invited me to an open mic night at the Bent Mast. I had to be at a Burning Man planning meeting first, so I went to that – meeting many of my soon-to-be campmates for the first time – and then headed down to join them. After a few beers, I ended up playing guitar and singing a few songs and having an excellent jam with two locals. Adam, a bassist with a huge stand-up bass complete with preamp duct-taped to the side, and Vincent, who played fiery leads on a classical guitar with a small amp with the distortion circuit turned up. Hanne was due to leave for Seattle in the morning, so we talked long into then night, then parted ways.
the lovely Fleming Beach
I got a text the next morning from Hanne, saying she’d stayed in town another day. We made plans to meet that night for drinks, and I went back to my day job for the day. Later on we went to a wine bar, and then wandered around Victoria with a bottle of rum until late, having deep discussions on the nature of memory and consciousness – fascinating stuff.
Friday night was a house party at the home of one of the organizers of the Victoria contingent of our Burning Man camp this year – it was Marion’s birthday, and so a large group of folks gathered for drinks, dancing and fire play. I forgot to eat dinner, and wondered why the rum had such a negative effect on me, until I supplemented the rum with pizza and all became balanced again.
Saturday afternoon, I wandered into downtown Victoria with my mandolin and a busker’s license borrowed from Laurel. I set up on a side street full of vendors, and played and sang for about an hour, making a few bucks, until the vendors packed up and suddenly the street emptied. I put my mandolin away and wandered down to Bastion Square, where a guy was playing guitar with a mic and a little guitar amp. After hearing a few of his songs I figured I could follow his style, so I asked him if I could sit in and he said sure.
We played for about an hour together, with his income going up significantly now that he was a “band” instead of just a guy with a guitar, and eventually the next act showed up to take over – Bastion Square apparently is a very popular busking location, and requires acts to sign up weeks in advance. The new guy listened for a while, while unloading a tonne of gear, and finally came up to speak with me.
“Listen,” he said. “My backup guitarist is out of town, and my bassist has run off with a cute French brunette, so I think it’s just me today. Do you want to sit in with me?”
I said sure, and he continued to set up his rig – a full PA system with monitors, mic stands, preamps, a mixer, etc. Then, out of the blue, his bassist showed up – and to my surprise, it was Adam, the bass player from the Bent Mast a few nights previous! We did a quick soundcheck, and then they launched into a rowdy set of energetic bluegrass and country, straight out of an east-coast kitchen party. My roots were tickled! We played and sang and danced for an hour and a half to a crowd of probably 60-80 people, making decent money along the way. I did alright I think, especially considering that I’d never heard most of the songs before, and definitely had never played any of them before! It was a lot of fun, and they asked me to come back to play again the next day – but their set would be early in the day, and I had no intention of being awake that early.
Saturday night I went to the nightclub ‘Hush’, where “Boy 8-Bit” was playing. I wasn’t impressed with his music, but the opening act “Neon Steve” had me dancing from start to finish. I ended up drinking and carousing with a great crew of Victorians until well past dawn, before starting the bikeride back to Fleming Beach and Tie Fighter. When I arrived, I found a little note written in sharpie and taped to one of my oars.
“REMOVE YOUR BOAT FROM THE BASIN IMMEDIATELY! NO MOORAGE AT ANY TIME! YOUR NUMBER HAS BEEN REPORTED TO HARBOUR AUTHORITY!”, it said.
Now, those three sentences raised my hackles a little bit, for three reasons:
“moorage” means tying to something, ie private property, which can be owned. I’m anchored in a navigable channel, ie public property, which is protected by the Canadian Navigable Waters Act and has been for hundreds of years,
“Harbour Authority”, regardless of whether they meant Esquimalt Harbour or Victoria Harbour, has no jurisdiction here – I checked, the only folks that do are the police, the coast guard, Transport Canada and the military, and lastly,
if you don’t have the balls to sign your snippy little note, I can’t muster the respect required to listen to you.
I looked around, hoping that the author was nearby so that I could discuss this with them, but they were nowhere to be found – probably a good thing, as I had been awake for twenty-odd hours and wasn’t even close to sober. I rowed out and went to bed.
I didn’t leave the boat on Monday at all, staying in and working. Tuesday was almost the same, though I met Bunny, Amanda, Lori, Mike and Will for beers and pizza, scammed a shower from Bunny, and hit the hay early again.
That brings me up to today. Today, the police showed up, along with a nice man named Bob in a red sweatervest, who served me with a yellow slip of paper essentially telling me to GTFO, citing Municipal Zoning Bylaw 63(2)(c).
Zoning Citation (click for larger)
As it turns out that the Township of Esquimalt has actually put a zoning bylaw on the books somehow prohibiting anchoring in this “water lot”. I’m aaaaalmost certain I could challenge that law and win, as it goes against federal laws protecting my rights to anchor. We actually discussed it briefly, with me mentioning the federal Act, and the municipal governer admitting that yes, in a storm, anyone could anchor in the bay, but that the bylaw prevents permanent anchorage. According to other live-aboards in False Creek (I don’t know exactly how reliable a source they are, but regardless), the Act doesn’t specify how long “safe harbour” lasts, and nobody has ever managed to challenge that in court and win.
So being the gentleman that I am, I recognize when I am not welcome and agreed to leave, saying that perhaps it wouldn’t be today, but at the latest I would get out of here by tomorrow morning. The police took my identification and phone number, ran the usual background check (clean I assume), and left without hasle.
However, being the inquisitive soul that I am, of course I had a few more questions – for one, how exactly are they kicking me out? The Township of Esquimalt fortunately puts all of their bylaws online, and so I downloaded the zoning laws and had a look. I’ll save you opening the .PDF:
63. MARINE SMALL DOCK [M-5]
The intent of this Zone is to accommodate small private docks on Water Lots adjacent to
residential properties.
(1) Permitted Uses
The following Uses and no others are permitted:
(a) Boat Moorage Facility for small pleasure boats.
(2) Prohibited Uses
(a) Commercial or industrial activity
(b) Floating Homes and Floating Boat Shelters
(c) Liveaboards
(d) The mooring of more than two small boats
(e) Accessory Buildings
(3) Siting Requirements
(a) All Boat Moorage must be located within the boundaries of the Water Lot.
(4) Maximum Size
(a) No section of a Boat Moorage ramp shall exceed a width of 1.5 metres.
(b) The combined length of a Boat Moorage Facility [wharf, ramp, landing and
dock], measured from the shoreline, shall not be more than 21 metres.
(c) The area of a dock or float shall not be greater than 18.5 square metres in
area.
Wow. Damn. They do have me there.
Still, I’m betting that if I had the time or interest to challenge this bylaw in court, I’d actually have a case – as I understand it, the feds frown on bylaws that go against federal laws.
My second question was, of course, the subject of fines – Bob let it slip that if I refused, they would fine me $100. I noticed that aside from the yellow slip of paper in the photo above, he was also holding a ticket book, open to a new page, and I think he was a little disappointed that I was both polite and accommodating. I wondered afterwards just what the frequency of fines would be. Staying the night in Victoria Harbour cost me $58-something – if staying a week in this sheltered bay would only cost me $100, I count that as a deal! So I checked, and:
8. PENALTY
(1) Every person who violates any of the provisions of this Bylaw or who suffers or
permits any act or thing to be done in contravention of this Bylaw, is punishable in
accordance with the “Offence Act”, and shall be liable to the penalties hereby
imposed.
(2) Any person who violates any of the provisions of this Bylaw shall upon summary
conviction thereof be liable to a penalty of not more than ten thousand dollars.
(3) Each day that violation of this Bylaw is caused to continue, constitutes a separate
offence.
Yep, looks like I pretty much have to move.
So anyway, back to work for me. I will likely head back to the Bent Mast tonight for the open mic night again, which was fun last time, and likely will head over to Oak Bay or somewhere around there tomorrow morning. Or maybe later today? Who knows. At least this brings me finally up to date, and now I can start updating the blog in a more timely fashion.
I definitely need to get my camera back in action. Somehow I managed to completely lose the battery charger during my move onto Tie Fighter, and despite tearing apart both the boat and my storage locker, I cannot seem to find it. Just now I logged into eBay and purchased a charger and a pair of new batteries for a grand total of $22 including shipping from China; we’ll see if they actually arrive before Burning Man.
So! The next chapter of yesterday’s massive update. After two epic sailing adventures, both with crew but both with significant solo-sailing time (ie, crew sleeping, cooking, whatever), I figured it was time to really push myself and head out on the epic adventure of the summer: wandering the islands alone, going wherever the winds blow. I had also promised my friends in Victoria months before that I would be sailing over for a visit “any day now”, but the weeks of work on the boat piled up and the summer was slipping rapidly away from me. Having a destination, however fuzzy, would be a good kickstart to the adventure.
I tried to leave on Thursday, July 30th, but the wind was nonexistent. Then I tried to leave on Friday, but errands and work got in the way, and I left quite late – I made it as far as Kitsilano Point, where I anchored for the night. I rowed to shore at about 10pm, pulled my dinghy up the beach through a few small groups of drunken fratboy types, padlocked it to a signpost and went to have beers with Jason Stormchild. Lesson learned: don’t leave your dinghy on Kits Beach at night, or some drunken asshole might piss in it. Ugh! Seriously, that’s the second time I’ve had to clean the bodily waste of a sub-human out of my dinghy – the first time at least it was a harbour seal, which, while disgusting, was at least somewhat forgivable. Sort of. I guess.
Saturday, bright and early-ish (ie. somewhere around the crack of noon), I left Kits Point and headed out to sea. Heading across the Georgia Straight I caught some excellent wind for the first hour or so, but then it died utterly leaving me with slowly luffing sails and almost no forward speed – so I had to fire up the engine and motor for a couple of hours. This was actually the first exciting part of the trip, as I found myself further out to sea than I’d ever been, somewhere around fifteen kilometers from land! At this point, in the beautiful, thirty-degree summer sunshine, at least three kilometers from the closest other human beings, I found myself unable to come up with any decent argument for pants, and so I spent the next couple of hours letting Steve the Autopilot steer the boat while I lay out on a towel reading a book.
the anchorage at Clam Bay
Eventually I made it across the Straight, and headed towards Porlier Pass. My Canadian Tide and Current Tables showed me that the next slack tide (ie when the tide would be neither coming in nor going out) would be at 8:29pm, which was a good solid two and a half hours away. I tacked around for an hour and a half, but then finally grew impatient and decided to go through the pass an hour early. This was a mistake I won’t make again – the pass was a series of eddies, whirlpools and standing waves, and a couple of times Tie Fighter was spun around nearly ninety degrees by the current! I learned my lesson, and made it through to a crowded anchorage at Clam Bay where I spent the night. I put on my swimsuit, planning to jump in to cool off, but when I went to dive in I saw to my surprise that the water was absolutely full of jellyfish! Seriously full, like a jellyfish every two to three feet – there would be no way to avoid them, so instead I played guitar for the jellyfish for an hour or two, then went to sleep.
The next day, Sunday, I made my way south, past the Secretary Islands, past Salt Spring and the Pender Islands, and finally to Sidney, where I decided to rest the night before making the final leg of the trip to Victoria. When I left in the morning there was excellent wind, which lasted up until about noon before dying off for a few hot hours, then coming back up… in the opposite direction. This meant that while before I could “run” south with the wind, now I had to tack back and forth up the channel. Tacking is slow, but it makes for fun sailing – you trade good sailing speed for actual progress though, as you have to basically go diagonally back and forth across the channel to make any headway. I had hoped to make Victoria this day, but after tacking around for hours and hours I kind of blew the schedule, and so around 6pm I decided I’d had enough for the day and pulled into Tsehum Harbour for the night.
Monday I got up early and set sail for Victoria, to an absolutely gorgeous day. Beautiful 25kn winds, tonnes of other sailboats out, a spacious semi-protected bay with low swells… I found myself with a big smile on my face, ripping across the bay at 8kn with one hull barely touching the tips of the waves. Then I heard the sort of sound that could only come from something under tension suddenly coming loose – kind of a loose, non-metallic “spaaaang” sound – and the windward hull dropped into the water with a thud. I looked up to see that my big genoa headsail was looking a lot baggier than it had been moments before. As it turned out the top of the sail had torn; the big steel grommet that the halyard attaches to had been pulled right out of the sailcloth. Reading up on this, it usually only happens when the halyard is pulled far too tight, but I don’t think this was the case – I may have been pushing the sail a little too hard, but honestly I think the sail was just getting too old. There’s signs of degradation around some of the other seams as well, and it’s “blown out”, meaning the material is stretched out making it difficult to properly trim for the best power and efficiency. Sails have a lifespan of about five to eight years usually, less under heavy use, and as far as I can tell my genoa was at least ten years old, possibly fifteen or maybe even more.
a cutter rig at sail, flying (right to left) yankee, staysail and mainsail. this is not my boat.
It actually turned out quite well in the end, as it forced me to put up a combination of my storm jib and my staysail – but when I did this I realized that what I had thought was a storm jib, or perhaps a small genoa, was in fact a “yankee”! I had been sailing Tie Fighter as a sloop, using the larger genoa and the main, and occasionally the staysail for novelty, but adding the staysail really didn’t seem to have any benefit over using just the genoa and main and usually just blocked the wind, taking the power out of the genoa. Once I put up the yankee with the staysail, the benefit became obvious, and Tie Fighter took off like a shot, hitting speeds of up to 8.4kn! The two sails worked together flawlessly, as though they were designed to be used that way – which, of course, they were.
I blew a couple of hours just sailing aimlessly around the bay, but eventually decided to set out through Cordova Channel and make my way to Victoria before the day slipped away again. I probably should have checked out the tide and current charts again though, as I spent the next three hours battling the wind and current in the channel making probably less than one kilometer per hour tacking back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
That’s when it all started to get bad, actually. The wind blew up a bit, and maaaaybe I went a little too close to the shore. When I went to tack away I found the wheel difficult to turn, and when I did get it to turn Tie Fighter had lost her momentum and got stuck in “irons”, which is what it’s called when the boat is pointed directly into the wind and comes to a complete stop. I found myself at this point harnessed in, leaning far over the back of the boat, boat hook in one hand and my knife in the other, pulling long strands of kelp off the rudder and cutting them. I was drifting slowly towards the shore, and at that point I drifted right over top of a crab trap. My easy answer was to start the engines, but the batteries were dead – so I had to pull out the generator, hook up the battery charger, start it up and then return to the stern to continue cutting away kelp, racing to finish all of this before the wind and current took Tie Fighter up onto the rocks on shore! Fortunately I managed to get it all done in time, the crab trap freed itself without getting stuck around the propellor (that would have required a swim), got the engine started and I motored away safely.
The wind shifted again, so I stopped the engine and tried to sail my way out of the channel, just on principle. The next two hours were a battle against the wind and current, and about fifteen tacks back and forth while I got the hang of tacking a three-sailed boat solo. The practice was well worth the effort though, and I’m now much better at handling her under stress! Finally the channel narrowed to only a few hundred meters wide, and while I could see the end, I was tired of tacking every three minutes and so I gave up and motored out.
In fact, I motored for the next couple of hours, down the coast towards Victoria, where Amanda was waiting to go for beers. I had estimated a 7pm arrival, but when I rounded the horn and went to pass between Vancouver Island and the Chatham Islands, I noticed eddies and whirlpools and standing waves, just like Porlier Pass from two days prior. I decided to avoid that, and made my way out into the open ocean and around the Chatham Islands instead. The water out in the ocean was a bit larger, with rolling swells around four feet in height, making sailing more like riding a horse than driving a car. I continued along, and as I was coming up on the Trial Islands just south of Victoria I noticed that off in the distance there seemed to be a lot of whitecaps for about a kilometer. On a hunch, I put on foul weather gear and battened down all the hatches, and as Tie Fighter came up on the whitecaps the sailing became a lot more interesting. I have no idea why – perhaps tides, or a current pattern, or some kind of squall way out at sea – but the water suddenly became six foot breaking waves for the next kilometer! Waves were breaking up over the deck, splashing over the bow only to be caught by the wind and come whipping back at me. I had been out in big weather once before, and knew Tie Fighter was up to the challenge, so I harnessed myself in and enjoyed the ride. Not one square foot of deck was dry by the time we pulled out of the range of breakers.
Finally I pulled into Victoria around 8:30pm. I just wasn’t interested in trying to find an anchorage after the long day, so I pulled into the harbour, got on the VHF and booked a space at the wharf in front of the Empress Hotel in downtown Victoria. As I pulled in, a single guy in a massive sailing trimaran, folks on two boats on the wharf called out to their families to come watch me try to dock. I brought her around, settled her neatly into the spot and tied her off, which brought a round of applause from the onlookers. I bowed, and one of the men yelled out.
“Ninety-three percent!”
“Only ninety-three?” I yelled back.
“Yeah, you caught your dockline on your vent there…” he called. He was right, I definitely did. I thanked them.
I went below, shut down the engines and packed up to go meet Amanda for drinks. When I came back up on deck he yelled again.
“Hey – we couldn’t see that boat behind you from here – didn’t realize you parallel-parked her! Ninety-eight percent!”
