October 13, 2016 – OK, so technically the way home from the Island is East, but since I live on the North Shore…..
There are three storms lined up to hit the coast, the first hit last night, not too big a deal, but the one to hit tonight, and the following one to hit late Friday/early Saturday are forecast to be progressively stronger, that third and final one is the remnant of a typhoon.
So this morning three of us caught the first ferry, headed for a hatchery between Qualicum Beach and Courtenay, to do a fish sort/egg take/milt collection/matrix spawn/cryopreservation/disease sample/otolith sample/scale sampling/PIT tag removal….. just another day at the out-of-office-in-the-fall kinda day.
Our major concern was not getting home. The fall ferry schedule is on now, so that means no 7pm ferry; there is a 5pm and then a 9pm. If the 5pm is full, we would be stuck, and if the weather hit, we could be really stuck.
I made a reservation for the 5pm, and we finished up just before 2pm, so we piled back into the car and drove like man-women down to Nanaimo where we just caught the earlier ferry; it was loading as we drove into the holding lot.
I was running on three hours sleep (none of it consecutive) and no lunch (hangry comes to mind), but we made it.
In other words, perfect timing!
But it wasn’t an uneventful trip home.
Though the weather held off, the captain came over the PA system to tell us we would be taking an alternate route to Horseshoe Bay. Unusual, but the route took us past Gibsons, past Keats Island, and around the north end of Bowen Island. They didn’t provide a reason, but our theory is that with the weather coming in it was an opportunity for training on different approaches to the terminal in foul weather.
The second thing that happened was even more unexpected.
While the three of us were looking at our GPS position on nautical charts on my iPhone, I received a text from my former graduate supervisor. He’d contacted me the previous week asking if I wanted to get together for a coffee, but I was in Campbell River and heading to a remote site at the time. This time he said he was just finishing up a visit to a University I used to teach at, and that a former labmate sent a hello. I texted back that I had just passed through Nanaimo, and to say hello back, and that I was now on a ferry home.
He texted back that he was on a ferry so couldn’t say hello to our mutual friend.
(You know where this is going, don’t you!)
The text went something like this:
After that last message I stood up and walked about 30 feet and stopped in front of him and said, “Well Hello!”
We first met in 1989, I took an undergraduate course with him, then I did two graduate degrees under him, and managed his lab in between those, so, basically, he’s my extended family.
Hugs and an, as always, interesting conversation followed. I only wish that conversation had happened an hour earlier so there could have been more time. But better what we got than none at all.
I just absolutely love those unexpected and wonderfully serendipitous happenings where all things align perfectly, like the points on a compass.
116 Photos in 2016 – 85. Measuring Instrument
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116 pictures in 2016