I am once again falling behind on updates! While there hasn’t been a lot going on at home or at work, we’ve made a couple of trips over to Galiano to make progress on a few of the projects we’re trying to get done over the winter. This post gets us caught up on two trips - a short weekend visit and a longer 10-day trip over.
The first trip was a nice long one - a full 10 days, with weekends on both sides. On the first morning, I decided to see if the golf course was dried out enough to play a round. It actually wasn’t bad - still pretty wet, but manageable. My first tee shot was… into a herd of deer.
I think the people in the house on the golf course is feeding the deer. My last few visits they have been in the same spot.
Hilariously, the deer barely moved as I wet up to hit my next shot. They sort of parted for me to hit the ball, but didn’t really go anywhere. The round was pretty good - a little soggy, but the course was playable. The weather was good, and it was a nice start to the day.
There are some big ponds on the course, and this time there was a beaver swimming around in the water.
As always in the winter, one of our major goals is to cut and burn as much broom as possible. We made some good progress the last time we were over, and started a new section this time. It resulted in some decent fires and another pretty good sized section cleared.
Star Link Update: With some of the recent satellite launches we’re getting very impressive speeds. It’s not been this good consistently, but it has been easily good enough to work at the cottage full time.
Projects on the Go…
This trip we were also tackling some projects that needed to be completed. The first one was quite a small one (even if I had been avoiding it), putting up the final corner flashings on the skirting around the bottom of the cottage. The builder had provided them to use a couple of months back, but the weather had not really cooperated. It ended up being pretty easy to get them installed, and they make a huge difference on the finishing.
The biggest (and most expensive) project this winter is a rainwater catchment system that we are installing. We’re increasing the size of the garden this year, and last year the irrigation we were doing caused us some issues with the well. As water will continue to be an issue going forward, we thought it best to make sure we’re harvesting as much rain water as possible. To that end, we’re installing two large tanks - one that collects the water off the roof of the cottage, and a second, much larger one that we pump to for storage. Over the winter, it should be very easy to fill the large one, and then we’ll use it for irrigation.
We cleared and leveled a 10’ x 10’ area for the large storage tank. We laid down a load of gravel to provide a solid base for the main storage tank.This tank provides us storage for 3,000 gallons.
The smaller 500 gallon tank will sit beside the cottage and be used as a reservoir for collection. Over the winter a pump with a float will pump water over until the big tank is filled.
We got broom cut and burned, the flashings up, tank pads created and a round of golf in. Not a bad start to the week.
When we headed over, we had high hopes for the week that we’d be spending on the island. Sadly, that did not work out. We ended up with a very strange week - mostly spent in the clouds. For most of the week, we could not see a thing. The low-lying clouds kept us socked in. Towards the end of the week, the clouds dropped below us and we got this amazing inversion that had us above them. It was so cool to see the clouds below us instead of the ocean. And as the clouds moved up and down, at times we got these amazing light shows as the sun tried to break through the clouds.
As the clouds dissipated, the temperature dropped and we got a really heavy frost. Made for some very cool sunrises, and some great pics.
From a work perspective, the week was quite busy. Combined with the still-early sunsets, it didn’t give us much time to do work in the evening. We did get a few odd jobs done each night, but we really needed to wait for the weekend to tackle anything major.
We had a load of gravel delivered for the tank project, but we know we have a bunch of other projects to use it on. One of them was to finish the path from the driveway, beside the main shed and back to shed #2. Another project completed!
It’s easy to see the new gravel path.
Much better out back. Now we have a clean and easy path to follow.
Closest I’ve been to a hole-in-one in a long time.
I got another round of golf in on the weekend as well. It had stayed dry, and I had one of my best shots in a long time!
The other thing we tackled was more broom cutting. We hadn’t planned on doing more, but we got into it on Sunday and once we got going, it was hard to stop.
We probably cut more broom that day than any other day previously. We ended up with a huge pile that we’ll have to burn on another trip back.
The other big project we’re working through is to fence in our orchard and expand the garden area. So the next weekend, we headed back to work on that project. We needed to dig 14 holes for the fence posts, so we rented an auger to (hopefully) make the project go a little more quickly. That was the theory anyway.
We got going at a decent time on Saturday morning. The first hole went kind of as we expected - I got a foot or so into the earth and hit a rock. Then we dug that out and kept going. It didn’t bode well if each hole took as long as the first.
Eventually we got into a pretty good rhythm - I’d go as far as I could with the auger, then Justine would get in with the hand tools to work out the various rocks. The I’d come back and push it deeper with the auger until I hit the next rock.
The auger ready to go - plus all the post holes marked and ready to be dug out.
We had only one good hole that went in the full 2 feet without issue. The rest we worked at over the next few hours. For most of them, we eventually hit a ma depth where the ground got so hard (solid clay) that even the auger would not make any progress. All of them got deep enough that we felt we were good. I think we managed to get all the holes dug by about 2:00. That was was quicker than we expected.
As we were heading back on Sunday evening, I had only bought 8 of the 14 posts that we needed. And initially, we had only planned to cement in the posts that we were adding the gate to. After seeing the size and depth of some of our holes, we decided to add cement to all of them. We had bought 4 bags of concrete with us, and so we got into setting our first 4 poles. That part went pretty quickly.
We decide to push on and get the other 4 posts into the ground. So we took a trip down to the hardware store and got more cement, as well as the roll of deer fencing that we were going to need. Then we got back and finished the posts, making it a very productive day.
One of Justine’s collages of the start of our project.
In hindsight, we could have bought all the posts and concrete and finished the project that weekend. That said, using the auger was pretty rough, and I was very tired and a bit beat up. So it wasn’t so bad to have a forced break in the project. We enjoyed the beer on the deck that evening.
Sunday, we decided to take it easy and try to have a more relaxing (non-work) day. It was another nice day, so we decide to go for a hike.
Our hike started by going out to the left in this image, and then we went down to the beach access point.
The hike started in the Mount Galiano parking lot.
