Through My Lens: English Bay Paddlers
When you live by English Bay, you never know what you’ll see on the water. Thanks to the power of my camera’s zoom lens, I was able to get this shot early yesterday morning.
Salish Eagle
My latest BC Ferry ride — and my third of the summer — was on this boat, the Salish Eagle, which took me to and from Galiano Island just over a month ago.
Three of these Salish-Class vessels came into service in 2017 and a fourth one last year. Built in Gdańsk, Poland, they are the first ships in BC Ferries’ fleet to run on liquefied natural gas, thereby reducing their emissions. Compact compared to the bigger boats that sail between Vancouver and Vancouver Island, the Salish-Class vessels go to and from the Southern Gulf Islands and between the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island. They carry up to 600 passengers and crew and 138 cars, and I absolutely love sailing on them.
Each Salish-Class vessel has original Coast Salish artwork adorning its interiors and exteriors. John Marston of the Stz’uminus First Nation is the one who designed the artwork you see on the Salish Eagle.
Little Qualicum Falls
There’s a gem of a campground on Vancouver Island I’ve been going to since forever. It’s called Little Qualicum Falls, and a family weekend there at the beginning of June was my second BC ferry trip of the summer.
Qualicum, or Quallchum, means “where the dog salmon run.” Dog salmon (also known as chum) is one of the five major species of the BC salmon fishery.
We lucked out with absolute picture-perfect weather for our Qualicum weekend, which we were all incredibly grateful for. A year ago, we were in the thick of a more typical Juneuary and our plans to go to Qualicum were scuttled before we even got into the car.
The provincial park sits alongside the Little Qualicum River and around Cameron Lake. It’s a great family campground with lots of trails to explore, lots of swimming holes to jump into, and then, of course, there are the falls.
As we often do, we took a quick side trip to Cathedral Grove on our last day before turning around to head to the ferry. Driving along Highway 4, we noticed a helicopter with a heli-bucket scooping water up from Cameron Lake. We rounded a bend in the road, and then we saw it — the wildfire on top of one of the mountains along the highway.
It was a small one, but it grew, as wildfires do, and a day or two later, that same highway we had driven on was closed for two weeks, completely shutting off the coastal communities of western Vancouver Island from the rest of the province. A detour over logging roads was put in place, but it was a rough route and not recommended for tourist traffic.
The highway reopened once the wildfire was no longer burning, but assessments of the mountain slopes above the highway have deemed them unstable. And so, beginning Monday, Highway 4 will be closed for most of the day between 9 and 5 to allow crews to do rock scaling above the highway. They figure the work will take at least a month, which is really going to mess up the tourist season for Tofino and Ucluelet.
I’m glad we got our Island weekend, but I feel for all those whose summer plans are being thwarted by a wildfire that has long been put out.
Through My Lens: Sidney by the Sea
Summer has only just started and already I’ve had a number of ferry rides.
My first was a quick hop over to Sidney to have lunch with a friend. Sidney is located on the Saanich Peninsula of Vancouver Island and is considered a suburb of Victoria. It has a lovely waterfront you can stroll along (see above photo), a handful of touristy-type shops (that all seemed to close early), and quite a few places to have lunch (all of which were very busy despite it being a weekday). It took us three tries before we found a place that didn’t have a half-hour wait, although I suspect the wait might have been more about staffing shortages than about there being no empty tables.
It doesn’t feel like summer, to me, until I’ve been on a BC ferry. The trip from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay takes you through Active Pass, one of the most stunning places on the planet, in my opinion. I could not stop gushing about how beautiful my morning’s ferry ride had been to our server at the pub where my friend and I had lunch. She gave me such an odd look that I realized either I need to get out more, or she has never lived anywhere else and still takes her surroundings for granted.
I sure don’t.
Through My Lens: Delphiniums
Summer has finally arrived in Vancouver. Better late than never, I say. We had our first hot stretch this past week and I tell you, it was glorious.
Two nights ago, I headed over to the Stanley Park Rose Garden because I knew the roses would be in full bloom. And they were. So beautiful.
But what really grabbed my attention were these delphiniums. I could not get over the vivid blues and purples.
Stunning.
Juneuary
I know, I know. I keep saying I won’t write about the weather. And then I do.
It’s just that … well, when you live in Vancouver and the weather is great, there is nowhere you’d rather be. But when you live in Vancouver and the weather is awful, there is literally anywhere you’d rather be.
Such has been the case these past few months as we endured the coldest spring in 77 years. That’s quite the record.
This month, we’ve been enjoying a typical “Juneuary.” Every June, a low pressure system moves in over the Lower Mainland and hangs around for most of the month. Cold days, colder nights, and rain, lots of rain. It’s been the wettest June in 30 years, and on June 9, the 26.3 mm of rain that fell made it the wettest June 9 since 1937.
We skipped Juneuary in 2019 and 2020, but it was back with a vengeance in 2021, although most of us quickly forgot about it as soon as the heat dome rolled in. Thankfully, it doesn’t look like we’ll have to endure one of those this summer.
The good news about the cool temperatures is that the unusually large snow pack is melting slowly. We don’t want — or need — any more flooding in this province.
And apparently summer temperatures are just around the corner. I cannot wait.
Here’s a photo of the barge that came ashore last November on the beach at the end of my street. It’s still here, seven months later — no longer an oddity, just an eyesore.
Not to mention a constant reminder that nothing is as it should be with our climate.
Seeking Shade
I learned a new meteorological term this week: heat dome. What’s a heat dome, you ask?
A heat dome is when the summer sun warms the air, which then rushes up into the atmosphere to form a dome of slow-moving hot air. It’s different than an ordinary high-pressure system, however, because it’s stuck and can take a long time to move on.
The Pacific Northwest and British Columbia experienced a heat dome this past weekend, which has now moved on to Alberta. And so, this morning, for the first time in four days, I woke to comfortable temperatures.
Yup. It was four days of intense heat where the temperature was 20°C above the seasonal normal. Because we had a typical June-uary here in Vancouver (meaning the average daily high was about 18°C), the sudden change in temperature was a bit of a shock. But the time of year also means there is little time for the temperatures to cool down at night. It doesn’t get dark until after 10 p.m. and by 4 a.m., it is already starting to get light.
I know that many parts of the world have endured extreme heat waves before — northern Europe comes to mind — but it’s pretty unusual for Vancouver, which has a temperate climate and rarely experiences extreme hot or cold. I haven’t felt this warm in Vancouver in a very long time — more than a decade, to be honest.
Yesterday a colleague in Toronto asked me if we were also experiencing the same humidity that Toronto gets. I don’t think so, I told her. To my memory (which could certainly be faulty given the time that has passed since I lived in Toronto), what is an extreme heat wave for Vancouver actually feels much like a normal summer day for Toronto.
That’s not to say this heat dome didn’t have serious outcomes. At least 486 sudden and unexpected deaths have occurred in Metro Vancouver since Friday, which is about 300 deaths more than is typical in that time frame. To put that number into context, the health risks from this heat wave are greater than Covid right now. Much of the health risk is because the homes in Vancouver aren’t built to withstand this heat — most of us don’t have air conditioning. To provide some relief, cooling centres were set up in local community centres and libraries.
Until this past weekend, the hottest ever recorded temperature in Canada was 45°C in Saskatchewan, set back in July 1937. That record was shattered on Sunday at Lytton in the Fraser Canyon, about 250 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, when the temperature reached 46.6°C. That record lasted a mere 24 hours. And it was broken again yesterday, with a record high of 49.6°C. For my readers who think in Fahrenheit, that’s 121°F. These are not the kinds of records we want to be setting. That’s hotter than the highest-ever recorded temperature for Las Vegas.
Naturally, when there are hot, dry conditions, there is always the threat of wildfires. Tonight, Lytton burned to the ground. Residents of the village had only minutes to evacuate.
To get through my commitments for this week, I started work at 6 a.m. so I could stop at noon. And then, I headed to the beach where I found myself a comfortable spot in the shade. I do not know how I’d have gotten through these past few days without those hours of respite that the sea breeze off English Bay provided me.
Spanish Banks
It had to end, eventually.
This week marked the transition from our Summer of Covid, such as it was, to an autumn that appears to be headed towards another lockdown. I have begun mentally preparing myself for what I expect to be calling the Long Winter.
But before we spiral too far down, here’s one final beach post to share with you.
And what a beach it is.
Spanish Banks is the furthest of the beaches along the southern shore of English Bay. It looks a lot like Locarno and Jericho, but with one rather significant difference. That would be the sandbank it sits on, which lets you walk far out into the bay at low tide.
Both Spanish Banks and English Bay got their names in commemoration of an accidental meeting that took place in 1792 between two expeditions: the English one led by George Vancouver and the Spanish one led by Cayetano Valdés y Flores and Dionisio Alcalá Galiano. It was an accidental meeting because the English did not know the Spanish were in the neighbourhood, nor were the Spanish aware that the English were nearby.
Awkward.
In the end, though, they all got along and spent several weeks exploring and charting the Strait of Georgia together.
Although Spanish Banks, like all of Vancouver’s beaches, has swimmers and picnickers in abundance, it is really popular with kitesurfers and skimboarders at low tide.
Locarno Beach
Locarno Beach is like the proverbial middle child. Sandwiched between its wildly popular sister, Jericho Beach, and its aloof and distant brother, Spanish Banks, it is easily missed and often bypassed.
The real reason Locarno is quieter, though, is because it’s a designated “quiet beach.” Meaning: no loud music. Its name comes from an unlikely source: a town in southern Switzerland right next to the Italian border.
Here’s a pro tip: being quieter and often overlooked means that Locarno is the only beach where there are no lines for either the concession or the washrooms.
Even on a hot summer long weekend.
Jericho Beach
About a half hour walk (or ten-minute bike ride) past Kitsilano Beach is another of Vancouver’s most popular beaches. That would be Jericho.
Jericho Beach got its name from a man named Jeremiah Rogers, who in the 1860s established a logging company nearby that he named Jerry & Co. Jerry & Co. eventually morphed into “Jericho.” Or the name evolved from Jerry’s Cove. (You decide which version you want to believe.)
Long before Jeremiah, or any European settlers for that matter, came along, the Musqueum Nation lived on the beach in a village they called iy’a’l’mexw, which means “good land.”
There has been a military presence at Jericho Beach since 1920, and Jericho Garrison was established during World War II as the Pacific command headquarters for the Canadian Forces. Later, some of the military buildings along the beach were repurposed: the army barracks were converted into the Jericho Beach Youth Hostel, a military gym is now the Jericho Arts Centre, and the base itself became the Jericho Sailing Centre.
It’s the Jericho Sailing Centre that makes Jericho Beach so popular and busy today. There are schools, clubs, and rentals for all types of water sports, including sailing, kayaking, windsurfing, and paddle boarding. In addition, Jericho Beach Park, just adjacent to the beach, is the site of the annual Vancouver Folk Music Festival.
All these varied activities are enough to keep most people happy and busy, but I have to say, nothing beats knocking off work early and enjoying a beer and burger with friends on the deck of the Jericho Sailing Centre.
I should know.
There and Back Again 