Oil and swell don't go well

Saturday, September 29, 2007

We woke up at Snug Harbor to oatmeal for breakfast and a full holding tank to pump out.  After chores and cooling the fridge, we headed to Roche where we emptied the holding tank, topped off the water tank, stocked up on a few essential items (i.e. cocoa), got our espresso fixes, and posted postcards to lucky, lucky recipients.  We had our voyage planning in the cockpit as we left Roche.  Anne informed us that we were under a gale warning for the weekend, with winds predicted up to 30 knots.  A superpod was reported southwest of Victoria heading west, so the group decided to motor sail south for a few hours and see what the weather and whales were doing after lunch.  Alex and Anne prepared quesadillas for lunch and heated up leftover stew from last night.  Before 1400, the wind had picked up and the pager informed us that they weren’t going to be sending out anymore messages.  After a few unsuccessful phone calls to try to find out more about whale whereabouts, the group decided that whales weren’t happening today and the seas weren’t suited for studying.  We turned around and headed back to Garrison Bay to take shelter from the storm.  Anne and Tim did some dinghy driving training, Alex plotted a graph of VATO’s water usage, and Ash caught up with the pager data.  Todd passed out the sail assessment test, Scott planned our Sunday turnover, and Shannon wrote this.  As the students tried to catch up on entering data, Scott and Shannon prepared chili and cornbread with cheese and sour cream on the side, because as Tim declared earlier today, “oil and swell don’t go well.”

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.