July 2008

Learning
West Coast Vancouver Island

How Inaccurate Weather Forecasts Plagued My Week. Scream traveled the west coast of Vancouver Island this week. We were careful to study the weather and picked a window of opportunity with favourable winds: Northwest winds from 20 to 35 knots were predicted for the entire duration of our trip. Thirty-five knots is a lot of […]

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Fun
Alert Bay

Alert Bay is a mixed native and non-native community on Comorant Island.  We visited the big house where we were educated by the Tsasala Cultural Group. We also visited the excellent U'mista cultural centre.  There we viewed a large collection of artifacts, including all of the items seized in the Christmas Potlach Raid. We thoroughly […]

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Travel
Other Boats and Waterfalls

If there are two things that the Broughtons have a lot of, it's other boats and waterfalls. For no good reason, we imagined the Broughtons to be a lot like the west coast of Vancouver Island - remote, rugged, beautiful and more or less empty. We anticipated going days without seeing another person and maybe […]

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Learning
Fixing our Profurl Roller Furling

Scream is a cutter rigged sloop, which means that we have two foresails. Both foresails are on ancient, tough-as-nails profurl roller furlers. These devices store the sails for us when we aren't using them and allow us to "raise" and "lower" the foresails from the cockpit. We've been having some trouble with the furlers for […]

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Fun
Mamalilacula

Scream visited the remains of Mamalilacula, an abandoned first nations village infamous as the site of the Christmas Potlach Raid. There isn't much to see in Mamalilacula. The whole place is overgrown with wild roses and blackberry bushes. I strongly recommend visitors wear long sleeves and pants and gardening gloves to protect against the thorns. […]

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