And how was your day at the office?

5

August 21, 2013 – Over a few months the last two years, I’ve been involved in some lake sampling on Vancouver Island. The purpose is to evaluate the water conditions and gain some insights into the productivity of the lake – nutrients, phytoplankton composition and abundance, temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH at varying depths – so as to better evaluate some salmon and trout stocking programs. It’s not my immediate project, but I help out on it when I can, and that means a quick trip up Vancouver Island every month or so and a few hours out on a boat on Comox Lake.

So yes, this was a day at the office for me yesterday.

Rough life you say?

It gets rougher.

This was my commute 🙂

I kinda, sorta, like my job, a little bit. . .

And this trip up worked out so nicely for a couple of other reasons.

I usually work the full day at my real office, then head home, change, gear up, and take a fairly late ferry. By the time I make the Island the sun is usually setting and I am heading up the Inland Island Highway at a fairly good clip, trying to get to Courtenay before it is completely black out. I don’t mind riding at night, but when I know there are as many deer out as there are, it feels like a game of roulette. When is that deer going to pick me to dart out in front of. The deer on the Island are Sitka black tailed deer. And even though they are small (80 – 120 lbs), they could take a rider down easily, so they provide a significant concern at any time of day, but particularly at dusk and after dark.

So this trip up I decided to be a bit kinder to myself and left the office at around 1:30pm and headed for a 3:10 pm ferry, only to discover that I made it in time for a 2:30 pm ferry, which actually didn’t leave until 3:00pm. Typical summer congestion on the BC Ferries. So I was early, but because of that, I stayed on schedule.

I made good time on the way up, although I rode the old highway for a pleasant change. It’s a much nicer ride – some gentle curves to the road, coastal scenery, and MUCH less traffic. While I don’t mind blasting up the Inland highway when I am in a hurry, slowing the pace down and enjoying the view is sometimes a nice alternative.

Friends of ours are out for a few weeks on their sailboat, and as coincidence would have it, they had docked in Comox that morning. They had invited me for dinner, but the place was a bit fancy for me to show up in full gear so I hedged. And since I was staying in Courtenay and the restaurant was in Comox, it was too far for me to walk. I decided to ride straight to Comox thinking maybe I could change on their boat and walk up to the restaurant with them, but as I passed through town I noticed the restaurant in question was closed.

It’s weird, but all the good restaurants that I like in Courtenay and Comox seem to be closed on Mondays.

I stopped down at the government docks and texted to see what they were up to, and they had decided to go to the pub I love instead, just a few hundred metres up the road. Gear is OK for a pub, so I joined them and their son, who had just arrived by float plane, and we had a great dinner before I headed to my favourite hotel for the night.

Tuesday on the lake was perfect. Calm, clear, warm, sunny. . . just awesome for getting the sampling done without any difficulty. We finished up, knocked around the lake for a bit,  headed back the the hatchery around noon, and had a bite to eat before hitting the road homeward.

I rode back down the old highway again, with no hurry, why rush? Again, the traffic was light, the weather was stellar, and the scenery was fabulous. There were a few deer along the way, but at least during the day you can see them and gauge what they are going to do as you near them. Coming from the Interior of the Province where there are big deer, these little ones – barely the size of a great dane – seem so tiny.

I had a rest stop in Qualicum and enjoyed the relative peace of the mid-week beach.

I’ve been trying to stop in and visit a couple of childhood friends on the Island the last couple of trips, unsuccessfully. One friend moved a week before I got there last month, and I don’t yet have her new address. The other just always seems to be working and I don’t want to bug her at the Pharmacy. But this time, when I took a chance and rode up her street, a familiar vehicle was parked out front, as was a large, very PG looking, truck. What makes a truck look like it’s from PG? I don’t know, it was just a feeling.

But then I wondered if she’d moved too, since two dogs were bounding around in the yard. Christine had cats, not dogs. An energetic black one was barking furiously, but not exactly menacingly, at me. An older woman opened the front door to call to the dog to be quiet, I called out “Betty?” and she responded affirmatively.

Excellent, I had the right house, it was her Mom visiting from PG.

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen Chris, and her father passed away a few months ago. I’d been wanting to stop by and offer my sympathies, and just say hello. I have a few very long-time friends that are even worse communicators than I am, so I make it a priority to hunt them down when more than a year or two pass, just to see how they are doing and touch base. And I am always glad when I do. What I like about them most is that none of us ever gets offended when a span of time passes, it’s just life, a busy life, and we always just pick up where we left off.

We visited for a couple of hours and then it was time for me to head for the ferry and get myself back to the Mainland again. Another thing I love about the motorcycle is that it offers more time since it’s virtually guaranteed that I will get on the ferry, even if there is a sailing wait for cars, and I don’t have to be there early. Sometimes I have barely waited for 5 minutes before riding straight on the vessel. Once I didn’t even turn the engine off. That’s how I like to catch a sailing.

And as I pulled out onto Hammond Bay Road I ended up behind two scooters, big ones, probably 250ccs or so, riders geared up well. As I tailed them around a corner I saw a rider coming the opposite way on a big black cruiser, in full black leathers, and he did the coolest thing, he gave the scooters the wave.

All I thought was “Dude, you ROCK!”

So it was a great commute, a fabulous day at the office, and wonderful to catch up with some friends.

On the ferry ride back there were about a dozen motorcycles ahead of me, all cruisers, and two behind. Half of the ones ahead had Oregon plates and when I mentioned that I’d just been riding in their neighbourhood the previous week, it turned out that they were riding pretty much the reverse of the trip Kirk and I had just come off of. Nice.

It always seems that when I exit the ferry there is one sport bike rider who takes off like a bullet and disappears into the distance, leaving all the ferry traffic far behind. The trick to getting ahead of most of it is to pull towards the right lanes rather than the left. You’d think the left lanes would lead you to the faster route, but because of some merges up the hill, they don’t. Unless you’ve taken the ferry a fair bit, it’s easy to forget, or just not know. So ass the line of bikes rolled down the ramp, single file, towards the light, I alone shifted to the right hand lane. When the light went green I was out of the gate and ahead of the pack. After a few corners I looked back and there was no one behind me. No one!

Oops, I was “that rider” this day. But honestly, I wasn’t going that fast, I didn’t clear 110kph at any point in time! Maybe everyone else was in holiday-slo-mode. I choose to think so anyway.

Just one thing puzzles me this morning.

Why, over nine days of hard and relatively constant riding did my body never really complain, but after a very easy ride up and back on Vancouver Island, does my butt hurt like I hiked a mountain?

I don’t really get that. . .