She’s Baack! This gorgeous wooden schooner is a feast for the eye no matter what flavour of boat suits you. She has reappeared since her visit of last summer and was certainly eye-candy to me. (I had a nooner on a schooner with no name!)
A deadline not to be confused with a dead line. That bit of dark humour ran through my brain as I typed the title. I was going to call this “I’ve done it again!” as reference to my second video, just posted in time for Remembrance Day or Memorial Day if you prefer. After completing my first video I decided to see if I could meet the deadline of November eleventh and compose something in respect of that date. Mission accomplished! Here’s the link:
Or, go to You Tube and type in: Swoop Fred Bailey. As it turns out, there are a lot of Fred Bailey dudes on YouTube, all shapes, sizes, ages and colours. Take your pick! My video, I hope, is visibly improved from my first. Please, please, if you see any hope in my effort, look for the thumbs up icon below the YouTube screen and give it a click. I need all the help you can give. I have tons of clips in my archives so there will be more to come. It is a fascinating art form, especially if you go at it self-taught. GAWD! But this cyber-neanderthal is determined to master videography. What I need now is a proper video camera. So far I’ve been using DSLRs, my mobile phone, and cheap action cams. I regret not diving into this discipline before computers came along and wonder at some of the brilliant work done on celluloid. Older short films and full length movies are especially amazing when you consider the considerable skill that went into making them.
My video muse is a good friend named Pär Domeij. His videos are what I aspire to and are of superb quality, flawless and award-worthy in every way. Coddiwomple is his latest masterpiece. Here’s that link:
If you don’t want to come sailing on the West Coast after seeing this….well real estate is still cheap in Donkey Shin Kansas or wherever it is you choose to live as far from the ocean as possible. And, I suppose, someone has to grow the wheat to make sea biscuits!
On a final note about film-making I’ve discovered a beauty this week called Fauve. You can find it on Twisted Sifter or Vimeo or simply by googling up the name. It is filmed in Quebec in real time, in real places with real people and is one of the most brilliantly made short films I’ve ever seen. This award winner is poignant, it does not have a happy ending but it is beautifully acted by two young boys and is perhaps an oblique consideration, in regard to today’s date, of how we seduce young men into going to war to die for someone else’s ambition. They have a sense of being invincible. By the way, if you are a short film junkie like me, one more film to google up is called Room 8.
Here are some still photos taken locally in the past few days. We have had spectacular weather this autumn and still, nearing the middle of November, we enjoy intermittent hours of soft, golden sunlight. I’m trying to enjoy it while it lasts because, as we all know, good weather is never, never paid for in advance. See you in the movies.
Boo Rex! Just a plastic toy, right? I was panning a film shot when this apparition appeared in the corner of my eye. It scared my witless for a moment. Kudus to someone’s great sense of humour!It came from a crack in the wall. Not until I was editing this grab shot did I notice the spots of light in the darkest bit. I had to add a touch of green to them!Roberts Street Pizza…and Sunflowers. This was growing in front of the colourful facade of the local pizza shop. Some of the best “bad for me” food ever!Some days, in some places, with a certain light, you just can’t go wrong.The last rose of summer. There is always a special beauty in a faded flower.CLOSED! This monstrous padlock appears to be the real thing. It secures the gate to a lovely outdoor dining area beside Roberts Street Pizza in LadysmithYou gotta look up, and down. There is so much we look at and don’t see. This slug was enjoying the afternoon sun in the shelter of a tree root. If you click to enlarge and look carefully, there is a tiny fly piggy-backing the mother critter.Beauty in miniature. Rain drops on a spider web.A river grave. Nestled on a bank of the Chemainus River this appears to be where someone has interred the ashes of a wife and mother. It is beautiful and peaceful. Note the bark owls nailed to the tree above the memorial plaque.Surface tension. I think summer’s over Dorothy!Reflections of summers passed and children grown up.There was a secret world at the far end of the tunnel. It might not be much better but it was upstream. Actually, it’s a massive culvert beneath our main island highway, it has resting blocks for spawning salmon to rest behind. They also raise the water level for fish and provide handy stepping stones should you want to go tunnel-trekking.More logs for Asia. A tug delivers logs to a freighter standing-off in Ladysmith Harbour. NO COMMENT!AVAST YE SWABS! This bronze statue is an effigy of Frank Ney aka Black Frank. He was mayor of Nanaimo for many years, intrepid realtor, and father of the now world-famous annual Bathtub Race. There is some disgruntlement that he was not placed facing the water but it was was reckoned that tourists wanted their mug shots taken with a harbour background and not with Frank’s arse in the scene! Haar! I think the six feathers in his cap are a means of keeping birds from perching and pooping on his fizzog.
“ The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.” … Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘Seafire’ in the night. The bright light is an underwater led I installed on the boom gallows to light the cockpit. The boat is as snug and cosy inside as she looks.
It is one of those sleepless nights when things are heaped up and buzzing relentlessly in my head. There is a program on the idiot box about “Micromorts.” You look it up! I’m working from notes made in the past few days and will leave this blog’s text with just these two paragraphs. There are only so many times I can write about being alone in the boat at anchor in the dark and the pouring rain. And yet here I am once again. There is no internet in the sky here and so no phone or any of the other Cyber amenities we all take for-granted. I must like it, I keep doing it. I am not really a hermit, I’d love some company on the boat, but that’s the way it is. Grumpy old fart that I can be, I don’t mind my own presence and if I’m anchored far enough from shore I can even try singing without making dogs howl or babies scream. Actually I’m on my way to Steveston, a famous fishing community a short way upstream from the mouth of the mighty Fraser River. A local fisherman there has put together a small duplicate of the Fisher Poet’s Gathering in Astoria Oregon which I attend every year as one of the many performers. So I’m off to a reading gig in the old Steveston Cannery which is now a museum. It will be fun and I look forward to meeting many friends, both old and new.
Meanwhile, in Ladysmith, the filming goes on for a few more days. Here is a quick photo essay on that Hollywood event. It is really hard to show the impact, scope and complexity of this endeavour in a small community, but I’m sure folks will have something to talk about all winter. Today, on the main street, there were two cars, complete with Montana license plates, sitting neatly on their roofs side by side, each neatly parked in their own spot. Of, course I was there without even my mobile phone to grab a photo. I am amazed at the massive crew. They all work like gears in a well-oiled machine, efficiently and with great attention to minute detail. It is done without the fumbling and waste we are used to seeing. I hope our municipal works crews have taken notes. Yeah right!
It began innocently enough with a few workers and some work vehicles. Soon the entire downtown with film-making equipment, scores of security people. The town was soon overwhelmed.WOT!? We’ve got a UPS office! Reality and fantasy merge right down the the mailboxes..Next door, the Wigwam Cafe, our mainstreet Chinese eatery has become the ubiquitous small town diner of Green Hill, Montana.Our mainstreet pharmacy has become a little grocery store.Remember these?The local art store transformed. Not the Montana license plate on the vehicles in the foreground.An old building on main street, currently being renovated, has become a sidewalk restaurant. Dang, these Amuricans sure eat a lot!Generators in the alley. The sets require massive amounts of electricity. These units are incredibly quiet.“Cain’tcha read? Huh? Git yer pitchins offa our land! The massive movie crews set up camp wherever they could. This is in the boat ramp parking lot.Third dressing room on the left!Now THAT’S an RV! Actually, would you believe mobile washrooms?The filming goes on into the night. These lofty manlifts provide dazzling arrays of lighting. It must be a long way to the washroom when you’re perched up there for hours! The hundreds of folks in the jet in the upper left corner are thinking of everything except making movies…unless it is a load of extras!While the movie-making happens on main street, traffic has to find a way along the alleys. This wonderful old building could be a film set itself. It is reputed to once have been a brothel.Bleary-eyed, he sat at his writer’s desk aboard his boat late into the night.
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”…Maya Angelou
BUSINESS FIRST: I’ll be doing a writer/salty dog presentation at the Ladysmith Maritime Society dock on May 12th at 2pm. There’s a link to a nifty poster bellow. Also I’ll be participating in the River’s End Poets Gathering in Steveston in the Cannery Museum on September 22nd in the afternoon.Talk on the Dock -3 sml file
CLICK ON ANY PHOTO TO ENLARGE
Race Rock Light from the westDeep sea vessels anchored in the Gulf Islands waiting for cargo. Mainland Canada in the distance.
Friday, April 13th. A January gale complete with slashing ice-cold rain hammers horizontally outside. Jack and I went out in the rising blast this morning to photograph flowers. We got some good shots and came home cold and wet.
Nettles in the rain.So many flowers look so similar I’m afraid to hang a name on these.Tension and balanceFawn Lilies and Oregon Grape flowers. It has been a fabulous spring for these lilies.The misfit. Weeds are only plants someone else says are bad.
I’ve been trying to teach myself how to use a popular film-editing program. I am frustrated and humiliated. Page 1 in the manual immediately referred me to page 249 and so it has gone. When I learned to fly, and to drive, I was turned out in the local cow pasture with some basic cautions. I taught myself what happened when you pushed this, pulled that, turned the round thing and stomped on that. Yep, I made mistakes, but progressed steadily and gained confidence to the point of competence. I’ve never had an accident on the road or in the air.
My life at sea has gone similarly and no-one knows me for being timid. Now I’m confronted with a set of neo parameters which immediately demand a total fluency in a new blither-gabble all the while pushing this, double-clicking that while holding F49. I’m sure I’ll learn, thousands of others have, but golly durnit! Let’s start with the foundations and the framing before we worry about the flower boxes and the heat pump. All I want to do is make a few simple films. Surely I don’t have to run away to film school. Ummm well…!
A nickel and a robin’s dead egg. I found it where it must have fallen out of the nest. The coin is show its size.A troll brain. Actually a spring fungus.Jack is my faithful companion. He loves snuffling about while I take my photos.A rare purple trillium
After deleting the first film-editing app. in frustration, installing another program then uninstalling it, I’ve re-installed a slightly different version of the first film app. It is called “Lightworks.” It is apparently a professional grade system and did allow me to print a 200 plus page paper manual. I can have this for referral while I plod into this. The other program had plenty of tutorials but I don’t know how to have the program up and running while at the same time watching an online tutorial. There have been lots of walks in the woods this week! I have been called a “Bog-trotter” by a certain in-law; that is essentially correct.
Current flowers
I have, however, just had a wonderful local experience out of the bog. They’ll soon have a fresh coat of paint on their facade but they are easy enough to find here in Ladysmith. The IRONWORKS CAFÉ and CRÉPERIE are on the main highway between the 7/11 and City Hall. There’s parking around the corner and immediately across the highway below the shoulder. Please use the crosswalk. The coffee and food and staff are all excellent. Soon, as the weather improves, their patio under a huge spreading chestnut tree will be open to enjoy an excellent fare. Check it out when passing by. There’s nothing like a fresh crepe to make your day. It leaves me feeling good to mention someone doing something right. And no, creeps are something entirely different. We have some of those too.
Vanilla Leaf. These plants can be bunched and hung to use as an insect repellant.The picnic table. Now, wine, cheese, smoked fish, warm fresh bread.
For some reason of coincidence I’m posting four photos of interesting trucks I’ve recently found along the way. The big Volvo 4×4 from Germany certainly caught my fancy. I could hear the waves on a remote Baja beach the moment I saw it.
The Lurchenwagon A Volvo 4×4 motor home from Germany parked at the docks in LadysmithA lo-brid truck with a little flare.Another whimsical effort at a home-built truck. no airbags, no crumple zone.Mack Attack. This old Thermodyne looks as if it could haul a few logs yet…if there’s someone man enough to drive it.Now that’s a driveway marker! There’s always something interesting around the next corner.More headwork up another back road.A lovely country home nestled in the woodsAnd so the three little pigs lived happily ever after.A rock house.
On the subject of trucks I’m going to wade into this one as delicately as possible. I am impressed with the tremendous collective expression of condolence for the Saskatchewan hockey team that met with such tragedy last week. I am intrigued by the mass mourning for lost hockey players. Yes hockey was the common thread which brought them to be together in a bus yet while they were part of a hockey team they were also human beings with the full range of fears, hopes, dreams and problems we all have. Should these sixteen dead have been young children or senior citizens or a group of indigenous folks would there be the same outpouring of grief? Would flags being flying at half-mast? What if this tragic loss was innocent civilians killed as collateral damage in a rocket attack in Syria? How about a sunken boatload of Middle-Eastern refugees? Are their lost lives of less value? Well, we may never even know about their tragedies, so how can we grieve, but my point is that participants in a national sport seem to hold a higher value than other mere mortals. This trendy scramble to join the funeral parade demeans the entire grieving process. Even my on-line banking site is thick with photos of hockey sticks. You’re right; I don’t get it. Sorry if I’m being obtuse. I’m not saying it is wrong because I am out of this particular loop but surely there are some obvious questions to be raised about our cultural values.
Magnolia blooms in an alley off main street Ladysmith
And I find myself lacking another comprehension. Argentine prawns in our superb local butcher shop. I just watched the daily return of our local prawn fleet to our docks which are just down the hill within sight of the butcher shop. What are we doing?
The mannequin looking out. It’s very eerie to see at first. This grand old building in Ladysmith is reputed to be a former brothel. It looks over the harbour.
Hockey, prawns, film-making; is there nothing that makes sense. I am down on the dock a lot these days tinkering on ‘Seafire’ and other boats nearby. That, at least, is something I fully understand and clearly where I fit in. This old bilge ape knows his place.
How’s this for distracted driving? Something else that is hard to make sense of. I’ll bet there’s a mobile phone in there somewhere.Heartbreak. This is the saddest photo I’ve taken in a long while. In the spring of 2000, just after major heart surgery, I finished building this Gloucester Gull dory and rowed and camped my way through the Gulf Islands. It was a lovely bright yellow boat that rowed like a dream. I later sold it. It has rot in both ends and has clearly seen no love since I last saw it. Her sweet lines are still obvious.A photo taken from the same dory on a happier day.
“Once you’ve become a pickle you can’t be a cucumber again” … Steve Earle
Morning Glory after a night’s heavy rain. Bailing can be a daily routine in winter.
My wife has a great idea. She’s come up with what she calls a B.N.D. or, Buy Nothing Day. In our consumer culture we nearly all have the craving to spend money. We’re incessantly prompted and programmed to do it. “How do you like it? How do you like it? More. More! More!” was a jingle for a local supermarket chain. In remote locations yachters who’ve been confined to their boats for a few days have an overwhelming compulsion to buy anything, something, as much as possible even though it may be useless, over-priced crap that they never needed until they saw it. I know that when I’m down and out, it makes me feel momentarily better to buy something. Prozac is a prescribed medication for compulsive shopping disorder. Yep, it’s considered a medical condition! The compulsion to acquire is a certain symptom of depression just surely as Prozac is a common drug for that illness. And tomorrow is Black Thursday which precedes the Black Friday and Pink Monday sales events.
Anyway I’m happy to recommend B.N.D. as a means of achieving some empowerment and control over one’s life. It sounds easy but I dare you to try it. For those of us driven to spend on credit I recall an old Welsh lady who once asked me, “If ye canna pay for it once, how will you pay for it twice?” That is sage thinking that I still have difficulty with.
Anapaya has risen again, this time to be broken up. The breaker’s crane and barge mark the spot. Meanwhile someone has tried to burn the beached wrecks. The boathouse in the back ground is a newcomer. Will this squatter be the scene of the next fire
Anyway, I’m often informed that sailors are cheap buggers the world over. Sailing is often described as being like “Standing in an ice cold shower while ripping up thousand dollar notes” and that the word boat is correctly spelled with two T’s. Break Out Another Ten Thousand. I’m one of those backwater types who really doesn’t care about impressions. Let’s just say that I’m not a snappy dresser but I keep my old boat seaworthy if not always shiny. If it is a choice between new underwear or a box of flares, you know what will be burned. So, it’s not that we sailors are compulsively cheap, it’s just that all our money goes into the boat. If anything, we’re compulsively broke. And before someone spews out the weary cliché about boats being holes in the water I’ll reiterate that houses are holes in the beach to shovel your money into, and the scenery never changes. You can’t untie your house and sail away when you’ve had enough of your neighbours. See ya later!.
Frost on the skylight. With much of the province buried under snow, this is a small price to pay for a rainless morning.
The last one, I promise. A final shot of autumn colours. The rain and wind have knocked down most of the leaves by now.
Another symptom of depression is hoarding. I was recently horrified to realize that maybe I’m inclined toward hoarderism myself. I’ve been living on ‘Seafire’ for years in remote locations. I wear only work clothes and can destroy outer wear sometimes daily. When in town I cruise my favourite second-hand clothing store and acquire shirts, jeans and other outer wear “just in case” I run out of togs. My brother once said of me that “Somewhere there goes a naked clown!” Today was spent unloading the boat. Sacks of manky clothing, bedding, towels, extra tools and never-used boat parts filled my truck. And there’s more to come! I realize that when I go south I won’t need nearly as much “stuff” crammed into every locker. I’m sure only one parka will do. I swear the boat has visibly risen on her marks. If hoarding is a symptom of depression then our culture is seriously ill. You can’t go far without finding extensive storage facilities. Folks have so much “stuff” they can’t cram it into their too-big houses so they rent space to store even more “stuff.” Once, all I owned could be fit into a backpack. Then it became what went into a pickup truck. After all the years wasted acquiring “stuff” now my joy is getting rid of it. If you see an old geezer on the roadside, stop and offer a ride; it could be me.
On Autumn Pond. An all-day downpour in Victoria. Wet beyond words.
Now ‘Seafire’ is safely tucked into a berth for the winter. The space is available permanently.
That is a frightening prospect. I won’t let her sit and gather green, but for the moment there are no voyages planned. November wears on. I tidy out my tool boxes, tend to little jobs around the house and wonder where the money is coming from. When I first arrived I never wanted to see the boat again and I’ve forced myself to stay away from her for over a day at a time. Now there is a building tension. I check my lotto numbers; yeah right! I check the weather; yeah right. The rain and wind continue.
Last week I visited with my friend Pär Domeij. He was passing through Victoria on his way home to Sweden for the winter. His beautiful boat ‘Sjoa’ is stored in Shearwater and he’ll return in the spring to continue filming and exploring the mid and north coast. His short films are stunning. You can see several of his works on YouTube. The camera skill and editing are brilliant. His narration is gently understated and the final result is superb. One of his recent films is posted as “An Ode To An Estuary.” His work and his deep enthusiasm for the backwoods of Coastal B.C. will inspire you.
Less than two weeks after my return, I’m becoming antsy. I’ve worn out the blog themes of autumn colours and yet another storm. Now there’s a part of me that wants to shout “Bollox” in sheer frustration. I’ve tidied up my tools, which was no small job, and now I’m beginning a serious clean up of old “Seafire.” We’ve removed the cooking-grease-stiff curtains which were also coated with coagulated dust. I was disgusted to realize how badly things had become. I do regularly clean the boat but after a few years of living aboard I have to admit to some root-bound grime in my hermit’s man-cave. Jill is helping me bring things back to life and I’m very grateful. If nothing else, the curtains were a serious fire hazard as Captain Olive Oil sizzled up yet another one-dish meal. When the boat’s interior is again immaculate, there’s plenty of writing to dust off, edit and market. There are certainlyno excuses to ever be bored.
And that’s how it is in my world for the moment. No dramas, no thrilling events. I’m not dressed up, nor sitting out in the pouring early morning rain waiting for any trains. I know I’ve missed the last one. There’s even plywood on all the station windows. Haar! Life goes on.
The abandoned railway and train station at Ladysmith. The E&N railway should be a vital artery on southern Vancouver Island and it is genius that it is seldom used.
Looking to the south at high noon. The urge is overwhelming.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Switzerland and see what the army does with those wee red knives.” … Billy Connolly
