Rains

Other than a snowfall early in the month, December has been relatively dry on Bowen.  Until today we had had about 41mm of rain for the whole month.  That changed yesterday with a steady 20 hours of rain giving us another 30mm.  The rain has stopped how and the wind has swung northwest, bringing clearing skies which should result in some sunny cold weather leading up to Christmas.  The creeks are quite swollen, the Lagoon is brown and there is a great deal of detritus in the bay.  No sight of salmon today, but everything was murky anyway.

Pine siskins are active at our feeder, coming down from the higher elevations in search of seeds to eat.  They have been joined by juncos, nuthatches and steller's jays.

Happy solstice!

Snow is falling, community is breathing

Light flurries as I leave the island for my last trip of the year.  If you are worried about the road conditions, have a look at the Road Status Map, and update your section to gift information to your neighbours.

Last night a lovely community gathering at the Library, where 100 of us gathered to hold a candlelight vigil in support of the global call for a real deal on climate change.  Caitlin organized the whole thing and she and Aine spoke.  Aine talked about the need for world leaders, especially older ones, to make decisions with their grandchildren in mind so that they can tap into the perspective of the youth who are to inherit what we leave for them.  the choir sang dona Nobis Pacem and I helped the group in a rousing rendition of "With my own two hands," the great Ben Harper song.  We even added and improvised verse, being islanders:

We stand with Tuvalu

With our own two hands

They're an island too

With our own two hands

They're sinking into the blue

With our two hands, we support them with our own two hands. 

Pacific Islanders unite!

 

Big wind

Storm number two this week...winds gusty to near 90km/h.   Lots of fir boughs down, and heavy rains everywhere.  Power has been in an out.  A real Pineapple Express.  The above unusual configuration of lows is delivering these gales.

First autumn storm

The first serious windstorm of the season hit last night, with winds gusting to 70km/h coming howling out of the southeast.  They built in steadily over the night, becoming strongest at about 5am and then the rain started, deluging everything.  This morning, taking a late morning ferry into town, the Sound was choppy with swells and whitecaps and full of logs that had been lifted by this week's 15 foot high tides and scattered hither and yon by the wind.

Respite from the fall rains

Fall rains have begun in earnest but not with heavy winds yet.  Lats night it poured straight down and this morning a northwesterly cleared the air and brought a chill to things.  Snow on Mount Brunswick today and a definite chill in the air.  The salmon should be home very soon, if they survived running the gauntlet of fish farms in the Broughton Archipelago two years ago when they went to sea.  Most of the salmon runs who pass by those farms have been decimated in the past few years.  Sea lice kill the young ones.  Our chum and coho both swim through there on their way to the sea.

So we'll start to keep a vigil for the chum that return in November when the conditions are right.  In the meantime, enjoying this beautiful day before the rains come for good.

Another season at the ball yard draws to a close

Spent the weekend down at the ball field in the Cove watching the 24th annual Bowen Island Men's Fastpitch Tournament. All six teams play three games each and the top four go through to a knock out round.

There weren't too many exciting games in the round robin, but the first game between the Diggers and the Celtics was fantastic. The lead kept switching back and forth and the Celtics won 8-7 holding on to secure the victory over the Diggers. The Diggers are a great young team, coming into their own with excellent defence. During the regular season they won their last nine games in a row to finish well. They are definitely the team to watch.

All of that youthful vigour however comes at a price, and in the semi-final they drew the Twins, a long standing and very experienced team. The Diggers were one out away from victory when an errant throw from third led to two runs scoring. Needing to bat again, the Diggers had the tying run on third with two out when the runner was called out for leading off, which is of course illegal in softball. The umps had no choice - he was at least two paces down the third base line, nut it was a heartbreaking way to finish their season.

The Firemen beat the tired Celtics in the other semi-final and a rematch of last year's final was set. The Twins put on a clinic, with their years of experience showing as they couldn't let the Firemen get started. Despite a late rally, the Twins won the Championship again this year making it two in a row and moving to an all-time record of 12 wins out of the 24 tournaments dating back to 1986.

So fastpitch on the dry field in the Cove wraps up for another season, and the first signs of the end of summer are upon us. Bowfeast next weekend, followed by BowFest two weeks after that. As if to foreshadow the change, a low pressure system has moved in today and it is cool and raining, heavily at times, and the southeast wind occasionally shakes the trees.

Grey

The cloud is moving in...a couple of cold fronts and some low pressure zones have found their way through the high ridge and are builing in to the coast. This will bring welcome relief to those fighting fires up higher in our airshed, which extends up towards Lillooet, but only if it rains. The weekend looks to be completely wet which will be good news.

This has been the worst fire season in BC history with hundreds of forest fires bursting out all over the place. The big ones near Lilooet are send smoke down our way so there is a fine veil of haze in the Georgia Basin hanging under the high cloud.

The sky feels pregnant, like it wants badly to rain, but so far, nothing.

The return

The heat has broken, the clouds are moving in and the sky is lowering. Much needed rain is on the way.

Reflections from a stormy night

There were many photos taken of the storm that raged across Bowen last weekend. My favourite one so far has to be the slide show time lapse from the webcam at the Burrard Street bridge. When we lived in Vancouver, this was our view of Bowen Island, and I've always been fond of it. The old header from the previous incarnation of Bowen Island Journal was a screen capture from that webcam.

This one shows the eerie light that filled English Bay. My friend and neighbour Alison has a shot from Deep Bay that rocks, and shows the double rainbow we saw.

Stormy weather

This morning the temperature is dropping and the clouds are building into Howe Sound. A complex of mini lows and a deteriorating front are moving into the coast this morning, and in advance of all of that. the winds have swung southeast and come up. Probably blowing abou 30km/h now, from dead calm an hour ago.

A flock of black scoters just flew by low over the water and there are other birds around too. The last couple of mornings, a yellow warbler has joined the dawn chorus and yesterday, in Horseshoe Bay, I spotted my first violet-green swallow of the year.

Herring snow

It has been snowing for the past two hours. Snowing I tell you. Why am I surprised?

Around here the joke is that Obama made quick worlk of global warming. Welcome to British Arctica!

Snow has returned

A spectacular cold front has made its way down the coast, with a low pressure centre travelling directly down the Strait of Georgia Strait.  At 5:20 I left Victoria in a Sikorsky S61N helicopter and just off Swartz Bay we flew beneath the roiling clouds of the front, forcing us to descend from 2500 feet to only a few hundred.  The seas were calm on one side of the squall line and boiling white on the other.  We flew into Vancouver low, staying below the cloud ceiling, and just above the treetops of Stanley Park and by the time we landed, the rain squalls had quickly turned to snow.  I arrived back on Bowen at 8:00pm and there was a centimeter or two of snow on the ground and the temperature had dropped 8 degrees in three hours.  

A brief blast of winter, just to remind us not to get cocky with the early spring plantings.

Midwinter brilliance

A beautiful day, bright and sunny and relatively warm. Finn and I spent the day together poking around hoe in the sun and then heading to BICS where he played indoor soccer for a bit. After that we headed outside and played together in a pick up game with some of our favourite island youth on the only uncovered spot on the field, a little strip at the north end - the rest of the field is still covered in deep packed snow.

While there we heard about a little event at Crippen Park, where a small winter festival was wrapping up. We headed down to the Bowfest field and joined the fun at a beach fire where the was chocolate fondue and stories and songs. We stayed for a couple of hours, as the sky darkened and Venus shone brightly in the western sky. The moon was low behind Apodaca Ridge and the stars popped out one after another, constellations taking shape all around us, a shimmering glitterworld above us reflected in the still water of the Cove on a low low tide. Looks like the sun will continue for the rest of the week.

Return

I've been away for a week in sidereal time but it has seemed like an eternity for some reason. This morning I grabbed the water taxi from Granville Island and we sailed over a smooth sea, passing by a Steller's sea lion just off Point Atkinson. It is a calm grey day, but the cloud is thik and one notices the sun much higher in the sky as we dive towards the vernal equinox. The snow is still lying in piles around the island, but is melting fast, and the soils are coming back to life in garden and forest.

The snow has stopped and now coats the island with three inches of white slush beneath a low grey veil of cloud. There has never been so much snow on the ground for so long, in my years on this island and I feel as if the garden has gone to sleep. Heavy snow, new and old has flattened the structure of our plants - the lavender has self pruned and the bamboo is spent most of te past month forming an arching gate over our entrance path. It will probably be a few more weeks until most of the snow pack is gone - especially around the house where the roof has shed avalanches. I'm getting impatient to work on our little plot of land, hoing last years plants into the soil and building new beds, so that we could grow some more food, and be in touch with the land.

All gardeners itch in the winter. Soon it will be time to scratch!

Snowing again

Returned home this afternoon to a steady snowfall here on the island. The snow is fairly wet, but as the day goes on and it gets a little colder, it has started snowing more vigouously. We're expecting 5-10 cms tonight, and then rain tomorrow. At our elevation the preciptation is mixing a little but is mostly snow. I expect that above 75 m it will be very snowy indeed tonight.

Looking at the weather map, there are some big storms out in the Pacific at the moment and some heavy frontal systems due to hit towards the end of next week. Also, another winter hurricane is sirling around the Kamchatka penisula, too far off for us, but impressive looking nonetheless.

A visitor

Awoke to a dusting of snow on the ground with a little more expected, although it's not snowing at the moment. Also awoke to a juvenile red-tailed hawk calling out from a fir tree in front of our place. I saw this bird yesterday for the first time, and this is the first red-tailed hawk I've ever seen on Bowen. Looks like it's hanging around, but who knows for how long. Haven't seen much of our neighbours semi-feral chickens either. Hmmm.

Multimedia fog

I wasn't here for the great sock in of 2009, but other Bowen bloggers covered it. Here's what the fog looked like to Richard Smith and here's how Robert Ballantyne heard it.

Wht did I miss?

Just back from two weekes on another, much warmer, Pacific island. Seems while we were gone, the island was socked in by 19 straight days of fog, and the turf war erupted again. My friend James has a nice posting (with great conversation in the comments) on the issue of installing artificial turf at BICS.

There is still a lot of snow about. At our place, where the snow plummeted off the roof, there are mini glaciers surrounding the house. Hopefully they will melt before the scour circques into our new landscaping.

Rains have returned

The rains have returned. Last night and this morning the skies have poured and the snow has melted away except where it was piled up. Fog is coming and going this morning and our palette has returned to grey and green.