February 18th - Discovery Island (#12)

Dan, Rob and I went out to the Islands on a relatively calm and lightly rainy day. There was a bit of a building ebb, but not too bad. We ran into Lanny out near the boat house and paddled with him until we got to Jemmy Jones. We were treated to a nice view of the wolf in Rudlin Bay. He made no attempt to try to hide from us and did a bit of barking and howling after a while. The howls echoed around the bay! He still looks to be in great shape. We saw the Songhees patrol boat with Ian at the helm speeding along in between the islands and also a group from the Songhees that appeared to be looking at some midden deposits at the NW end of west Chatham.

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15 km, YTD 115 km.

February 8th - Cadboro Bay with Gordon Brown (#11)

I joined a group of SISKA paddlers for a intermediate paddling skills clinic with Gordon Brown of Skyak Adventures . The day was cold, windy and snowy so we tended to hunker down in the NW corner of the bay as we practiced and learned our sweeps and draws Gordon is a wonderful teacher and we all came away with things to practice and work on. It was a good experience to work on a skills clinic in less that ideal conditions!

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6 km, YTD 100 km

February 5th - Discovery island (#10)

Rob and I went for an early morning paddle around the islands - left at 0830 and were back before 1100. Conditions were great - little current and little wind. The tide was very high sowe were able to go through a few "passes" that we usually can't clear. Saw a few groups of long-tailed duck, scoters, buffleheads, mergansers, cormorants, eagles, and there were about 20 great blue herons around the lagoon on west Chatham. No sign of the wolf today, though I heard he had a seal in Rudlin Bay last weekend.

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16 km, YTD 94 km

Feb 2nd - Jemmy Jones (#9)

I went out for a quick, late afternoon, paddle - realized that I had not been out in almost 2 weeks! Conditions were cool but not too windy. Managed to maintain a moving average of 8.5 kph on the surf ski, so it was a good work out. A few birds around, surf scoters, buffleheads, a great blue heron and cormorants.

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5 km, YTD 78 km.