Category Archives: Visitors

Mise Tales Thirty-Four

 

For an update on what a Mise Tale is then please see Mise Tales One.

Jaw-dropping animated video on overfishing… It’s time for change!

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The Costa Concordia rests on its side on the morning of January 14, 2012.

 The Costa Concordia rests on its side on the morning of January 14, 2012 (click for larger photo)

 Yes, it is a photo of the Costa Concordia, aground on the rocks, but did anyone else notice the lighthouse in the photo under which the lifeboats are all clustered? See my article Lighthouses Visible in the Costa Concordia Disaster.

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Aniva RockAniva rock [private]Sakhalinskaya Oblast, Russia[/private]- A formal penal island used by the Russians, Aniva was once sought after by both the Russia and Japan. This now Russian controlled territory sits uninhabited in the seas between Japan and the eastern coast of Russia.

This photo story appeared on Distractify and was entitled The 38 Most Haunting Abandoned Places On Earth. For Some Reason, I Can’t Look Away… Continue reading Mise Tales Thirty-Four

Mise Tales Thirty-Two

 

For an update on what a Mise Tale is then please see Mise Tales One.

Image11501252_10152119974792708_1578052892_o 

Click the image or use this link to see the National Geographic article If All the Ice Melted.

 

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Navigational Light to be Fixed Atop Marriott Hotel
May 16, 2013 by KNEWS filed under news

Georgetown-Light-House
Georgetown Light-House

Port Georgetown Lighthouse, Guyana
The Marriott Hotel will have a revolving light atop as a navigational aid for vessels leaving and entering Port Georgetown. In fact, even as the hotel is being constructed the contractor is expected to have the light in place and functional.

A source close to the management of the Maritime Administration Department (MARAD), said that the Marriott Hotel when completed will be taller than the lighthouse. The structure will obstruct light emanating from the 103-foot lighthouse located at Kingston.

But Cabinet Secretary, Dr. Roger Luncheon at his post-Cabinet press briefing last Thursday said, “This revelation has not been brought home to Cabinet about another reason for disparaging this transformative project initiative (Marriott). Now we are interfering with light from the lighthouse.”

Dr. Luncheon jested that a new improved light house would be constructed.
However, according to the source, the lighthouse would not be obsolete since it will still function as a navigational aid for vessels travelling south. Meanwhile, vessels travelling in the northern direction will be guided by light originating from the light affixed to the Marriott Hotel. – . . .  more Continue reading Mise Tales Thirty-Two

Pachena Point Lighthouse

Pachena Point LensThe photo at the left shows the lamp, lens, mercury bath bearing, and winding apparatus which was installed on the Pachena Point lighthouse in February 1908. The lens is a 1st order Fresnel lens made by Chance Brothers of Birmingham England – one of the largest sizes possible, and it all sits on a wooden tower!

The glass lens, 3 m tall, 2.5 m wide and weighing 400 kg was brought by boat around Cape Horn. The 1000-watt bulb in use now puts out four million candlepower and is visible from Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. (reference)

This graphic was sent to me by a friend but I have no idea of the source. I have searched Google and the only mention of the photo that I found was in reference to the Eddystone lighthouse, which this definitely is not. Continue reading Pachena Point Lighthouse

Reprint – In the Sanctuary of the White Bear

In the Sanctuary of the White Bear   Green Living   The Ecologist

A rare white ‘spirit bear’ in the BC temperate rainforest. Photo: Ian McAllister / pacificwild.org.

[su_quote cite=”To many who live here, this singular being is an emblem of the sacredness of the rain coast and its vulnerability. “][/su_quote]

In the sanctuary of the White Bear by Canadian Poet Lorna Crozier

17th November 2013

 

Poet Lorna Crozier vists the Great Bear Rainforest in BC, Canada and finds a fragile paradise imbued with myth, meaning and magic for local indigenous peoples.

The big grizzly is perched on the other side of the river bank, so near he can hear the rain on my jacket. He raises his blunt head and courses the air. Stares at me and sniffs.

Above the stench of rotting salmon, my smell has been drawn into a grizzly’s nostrils, through the nasal passages inside his long snout. Part of me now lives inside the mind of an omnivorous animal whose Latin name ends with horribilis.

The bear is here for the salmon, who have returned to the rivers of their birth to spawn and die. We’re here for the bears.

Photographer/filmmaker Ian McAllister has joined my husband Patrick and me on our first morning to help introduce us to his home turf, the Great Bear Rainforest, a tract of land that follows B.C.’s coastline from the tip of Vancouver Island to the Alaska Panhandle. He and his wife Karen run the Pacific Wild conservation group to protect this astonishing piece of wildness that they’ve known intimately for over twenty years.

The largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, the traditional territory of the Kitasoo / Xai’xais First Nation, this region is only two short flights from Vancouver. But we are as far from a city, as far from ordinary life, as you can get. . . . more

This essay originally appeared in Toque & Canoe, and in Counterpunch.

[private]With seven others, we’ve been bounced across the ocean to our riverside destination in an old forestry boat. At home, most of us can’t spare the time to meet a friend for coffee, but here we’ll wait side by side, motionless and quiet, for several hours in the drenching rain.

Two guides armed only with pepper spray keep watch over us. They assure us they’ve never had to use it. Their confidence and my excitement make me tuck any fears I have away – into a back jeans pocket I can’t reach under my layers of hoodie, vest, jacket and rain gear.

All of us crouch with binoculars and cameras, careful not to sink our knees into a salmon. Hundreds of them, tossed by bears from the river, are turning into a foul mush. When the grizzly appears again, about twenty feet across from us on the other shore, we know Ian is getting the best pictures. We keep snapping anyway.

Our group is staying at the First Nations-owned and operated Spirit Bear Lodge located on the ocean’s edge in the fishing village of Klemtu.

Through its tall windows, we scan what looks like a National Geographic documentary. Pointing out seals and eagles, we and the other guests, most of them from Europe, crowd around the window like kids around an ice-cream truck.

Maybe if we’re lucky, at dusk, we’ll see one of the wolves unique to the western coast. Along with deer, they catch salmon.

The lodge is modeled on the traditional long house and it’s named after the elusive white bear called the ‘Spirit Bear‘.

Raven, the traditional story goes, made one out of every 10 black bears white to remind us of the ice age. This unique creature is here to make us grateful: the world wasn’t always as green and lush as it is today.

Every morning, rainforest life generously comes to meet us. Five senses aren’t enough to take it all in.

Isn’t this what Canada’s all about? Barely inhabited, out-of-the-way places that remind humans who we were before we became so fearful, so tame? Before we became so destructive as a species?

As twilight falls, we return to the lodge by boat for its scrumptious dinners, the halibut so fresh that the name of the man who hooked it and the date he did are listed on the menu. Manager Tim McGrady – fierce in his love of this watery ecosystem – greets us at the dock and asks what we’ve seen.

Over the 12-foot-long cedar dinner table, Patrick and I go on and on about a mother and a baby humpback, the mother slapping her tail repeatedly on the taut skin of the ocean. Was it whales who invented drumming?

Five minutes later, we would see two Orcas knife through the water. Then we understood. The humpback was warning her nearby pod and scaring off these skillful hunters who might have targeted her calf.

The next day, I travel up the ocean channel to an old crab apple grove where a spirit bear might appear. Patrick chooses a shorter trip. In my case, the spirit bear lives up to its other name – ghost bear – and stays invisible.

But Patrick sees a grizzly flop on her back to feed her triplets, so close a camera catches a drop of milk on her nipple when one cub tumbles off her belly.

I’m jealous. But an afternoon boat trip on the Pacific makes up for what I missed.

Patrick and I watch two humpbacks blow an elongated oval of bubbles to trap shrimp-like krill. The whales then rise to the surface through the centre of this airy net, their magnificent mouths wide open, catching their meal.

Looking down a whale’s gullet makes me shiver. Boy, how small I am!

On the day a storm blows in and the boats can’t go out, Doug Neasloss, the visionary behind the lodge, invites us into the Big House in Klemtu and tells us the history of his people and the work they’re doing to protect their homeland.

In 2012, they declared their territory off-limits to trophy hunting of bears (even though the B.C. gov’t allows it). Then, with other Coastal First Nations, they made a film about a grizzly skinned and left to rot in a field, head and paws carried out past a sign banning such hunting.

The timing of the film is sadly relevant. Just before its release this past September, The Vancouver Sun published photos of a defenceman with the NHL’s Minnesota Wild – how ironic is that name? – holding the severed head of a grizzly he shot in a rainforest estuary.

The tenderness the Kitasoo / Xai’xais feel for their culture and their home territory is palpable. We hear it in our skippers, who are all from Klemtu, and in Sierra, a grade 11 student who’s one of the lodge’s guides-in-training.

Every night in bed, she reads one of her people’s stories, and in her dreams, she’s in the story, walking among the humans and the creatures of the forest. The humans and the animals are talking to one another.

Many believe the Spirit Bear has special powers, she tells me.

Having sunk into the moss floors of the forests, having been held in the mind of a grizzly and the eye of a whale, I’m O.K., this time, to have missed Raven’s reminder of the ice age.

I’m sure there’s another reason for its creation, a reason that will sink in after I’m back home.

To many who live here, this singular being is an emblem of the sacredness of the rain coast and its vulnerability. They fear for potential oil spills in the area.

To them, this nightmare is a real and present danger as various levels of the Canadian government debate the sanctioning of oil tanker traffic through this delicate ecosystem.

They imagine the white bear soaked in oil, rivers and estuaries thick with crude muck, salmon thrashing in its slick, and orcas smeared with bitumen.

I’ve fallen under the spell of this rare sanctuary where salmon are born and die, where wolves have learned to swim and fish, and where mist may turn suddenly into the lumbering body of a mystic bear.

How diminished, how thin-hearted, how lonely we are as a species if there aren’t safe places in the world where the unique, the magnificent, can survive.

Postscript: The day after Patrick and I arrived home, Oliver from Germany, one of our companions who’d stayed an extra day at Spirit Bear Lodge, wrote that he did see a Spirit Bear. It stepped out of the moss-draped trees onto the stones of a river where he was set up with his camera on the other side. How thrilled he was. He’s seen what few people in his country, what few people in Canada or in the world, have ever seen. Check out thislink to his images

Lorna Crozier is a Canadian poet and holds the Head Chair in the Writing Department at the University of Victoria.

This essay originally appeared in Toque & Canoe, and in Counterpunch.[/private]

More Messages in Bottles!

When I wrote the story Message in a Bottle I was just using what information I had on hand. The last quotation in the story was from a news source on the British Columbia (BC) coast where a Tofino, BC man found a one hundred and seven (107) year old message in a bottle.

I wanted to keep that story updated but the local media seemed to have lost track of the story as the man wants to donate?/sell? the bottle to a museum without opening the bottle.

While Googling the story of the Tofino man I found the news video of his find on Youtube . . .

Message in bottle from 1906

Continue reading More Messages in Bottles!

Tidelines and Ocean Currents

Tidelines – it is spelled both ways but I prefer the one-word form.

A tideline, according to Wikipedia

refers to where two currents in the ocean converge (or meet). Driftwood, floating seaweed, foam, and other floating debris may accumulate, forming sinuous lines called tidelines.

Two-rivers-that-meets-but-do-not-mixThe topic of this article came about after I saw the photo above.The photo actually shows two oceans meeting, but is similar to what happens with the tides on the ocean further south, especially with reference to the Pacific Ocean on the Canadian British Columbia (BC) coast where the tides change (from high to low and back again) twice a day – sometimes rising and falling by as much as seven (7) meters (22 feet)! Continue reading Tidelines and Ocean Currents

Something Even Better?

alberta-fire-lookout
photo – Stuart Gradon Calgary Herald

Something Even Better than working on a lighthouse?

In an email with an ex British Columbia (BC) lighthouse keeper he mentioned that he was going to work in Alberta, Canada as a Fire Tower Lookout!

What does that have to do with lighthouses?

A lot from many people’s perspective! Both jobs have the isolation and romance that a lot of people seek in a job. When I was younger I know it was always in the back of my mind.

Again the same questions pop up – Wouldn’t it be lonely? What about wild animals? What happens if you hurt yourself? These and many more questions are asked, but to the adventurous, it is part of the adventure. Anyways, take a look at the photo at the top – that is an Alberta lookout tower but not as you or I probably imagined it – sitting on the ground!

The photo is taken from a 2011 story by Calgary Herald reporterJamie Komarnicki Mystery and mountains: A look at Alberta forest fire spottersContinue reading Something Even Better?

The West Coast Trail

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The West Coast Trail is a 75 km (47 mi) long backpacking trail following the southwestern edge of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. It was built in 1907 to facilitate the rescue of survivors of shipwrecks along the coast, part of the treacherous Graveyard of the Pacific. It is now part of Pacific Rim National Park (Parks Canada and Wikipedia) and is often rated by hiking guides as one of the world’s top hiking trails.

The West Coast Trail is open from May 1 until September 30. It is accessible to hikers outside of this period but Parks Canada does not guarantee the accessibility of services (such as search and rescue) in the off season. It was originally known as the Dominion Lifesaving Trail (sometimes misidentified as the West Coast Lifesaving Trail).-Wikipedia

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Video courtesy of Parks Canada website

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My daughter and her friend just finished hiking the West Coast Trail this Summer 2013 and thoroughly enjoyed it. (photos on Facebook) It is rough, it is challenging, but it is an adventure, and it is fun! The trail passes by two manned lighthouses (Pachena -photo above, and Carmanah – photo below) which date back to the time when the trail was Continue reading The West Coast Trail

Another Group Protecting the BC Coast

Published on 7 Aug 2013 by the Rainforest Conservation Foundation

Documentary Film about the Great Bear Rainforest Youth Paddle – www.gbryouthpaddle.org

In June 2012, a group of Quest university students travelled to the Great Bear Rainforest, through BC’s Inside Passage and arrived in the remote First Nations community of Hartley Bay. Here, we learned firsthand about the potential impacts of the Northern Gateway Pipeline proposal on Gitga’at culture and traditions. Quest students, along with youth from the Hartley Bay Secondary School, joined together on a life-changing journey through the pristine waters of BC’s temperate rainforest. Together we paddled from Hartley Bay to the Gitga’at’s spring-harvest camp in Kiel. We journeyed through a portion of the proposed tanker route for the Northern Gateway project, the same area where the ferry Queen of the North sank in 2006. Durig our time in Hartley Bay, participants bared witness to the unparalleled natural abundance of the Great Bear Rainforest. This short documentary provides a platform for youth to speak out and express their perspectives of the pipeline proposal. It also celebrates land and culture, while promotes a more sustainable future.

More information: Rainforest Conservation Foundation (online) and Facebook

Chrome Island – a few photos for you

I received the following email from a friend on August 12, 2013:

“Pictures of Chrome Island Lighthouse taken by Bruce’s
sister-in-law  from Bruce’s brother’s living room at their home in Bowser, BC.”

 


View Chrome Island in a larger map
 
If you view the larger map you can see the points I have placed on the map showing Bowser, BC (the photographer’s home – green point) and Chrome Island Lighthouse – red point). I estimate the distance to be about three (3) kilometers.
 
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I wish more people would send me photos of their favourite lighthouses. These are great! Continue reading Chrome Island – a few photos for you