Lazy day

Watching the islands float by, from the middle of the channel. Just a bit of green and blue scenery.

Cloud shadows on the mountain.

Mostly blues. Looking towards Cortes Island, I think.

Those rocks ahead, underwater at high tide, are where we saw the seals.

Ferry to Whaletown, Cortes Island. The Tachek, named for the Babine Lake community in central BC. She carries up to 26 cars.

Trail left by our ferry, heading home from Quadra Is. to Campbell River. She's the Powell River Queen, twice the size of the Tachek, but still a small boat.

We circled around, between the islands approximately in that pinkish circle.

A Skywatch post.

Blue, so blue

Water pics. The view from our shores.

Brown's Bay, the marina and restaurant, with the tide coming in.

Reflections, Brown's Bay marina.

Rocks and blues. The view from the boat launch south of Willow Point, where I collect water for my aquarium.

An older photo, from the same location, in mid-winter.

"There's a kingfisher on the piling," a man told me. "Go on up close; he won't be spooked." He was. Oyster Bay.

Remembering blue

Raining again. Whitecaps on the water. Grey skies, grey water, grey mountains, grey-green leaves. And just a week ago, this:

View from two blocks up the hill, looking over to Quadra Island. Leftover pumpkins to firmly place this in mid-November.

From a bit further down the street. The lighthouse on Quadra Island.

Blues, greens, warm light. Oh, the changeable, fickle BC weather!

How very blue

My granddaughter reminded me, the other day, of this poem by Clive Barker:

Life is short
And pleasures few*
And holed the ship
And drowned the crew
But o! But o!
How very blue
the sea is.

A needed reminder in these troubling moments, to stop and look around, to celebrate the world we live in, even as it slowly cooks.

It's raining here again, and the sea and sky and distant mountains are back to their normal winter shades of grey, but there's blue sea on my hard drive.

Off Tyee Spit, last August.

Shades of blue, with multicoloured boxes. September, 2016.

I never know whether to shudder or laugh at this photo, a typical fall view of the Discovery Passage while the ocean rests between tide changes. It is a major shipping route, the most protected ("inside") way north, and barges pass by, loaded with consumer goods, several times daily. But the colours do jar.

* I don't quite agree with that "pleasures few" bit. Sea and sky and trees and lichen and birds and cats and ... and ... and. Not to forget fresh coffee and the first bite into an apple. Doesn't add up to "few".

Homeward bound

The north end of Vancouver island tends to the vertical. Rocky cliffs spring straight up from the shore, as if we were halfway up the mountainsides already. Which, if you consider the height from the nearby sea floor, up to a kilometre underwater, we are.

Even Campbell River, with its rushing rivers bringing down silt to lay out beaches along our shore, is mostly built on the hillside. The lower highway runs close to the beach; streets leading off it climb steeply. From a couple of blocks inland, we can see (on sunny days) across the low islands of the Discovery Passage to the mountains of the mainland.

Typical street view.Two blocks up.

I live on the first block above the highway, so that coming home at the end of the day, I'm usually curving down a side hill, watching the sweep of the strait below me. It's a good feeling, even when sea and sky are grey. And when the sun is shining, I almost hate to get home.

Looking across the Georgia Strait towards Powell River on the mainland. Mitlenatch Island dead centre ahead.

Lighthouse, Quadra Island

The opposite shore, and the mountains of the mainland. (With fresh snow.)

A Wikipedia map might be helpful here. We are at the junction of Discovery Passage and the Georgia Strait, which stretches on down to the Lower Mainland, and the beaches we used to frequent on the border.

Discovery Passage is 1.7 km wide between Campbell River and Quadra Island. (The view in the photo above.)

A Skywatch post.

Oh, so blue!

When I set my photo processing program to the sunlight setting, it adds a yellow or reddish tinge to everything. Why, then, when the sun shines brightly, are we surrounded by blue?

Taking the dog for a paddle. Saratoga Beach

I switch back to "as shot". Sea and sky play with blue. The reds and yellows can stay on dry land.

Bare rock mini-islet somewhere out in the channel.

The sun sends us white light, a blend of wavelengths, visible and invisible (to our eyes; birds and bugs see things we can't.) The gas molecules in the atmosphere ignore the long wavelength rays, like red and yellow, letting them pass by on their way to land, and grab onto the blues and bounce them all over the sky. So we see the blue everywhere when we look at the sky.

Just before sunset, last February.

Near the horizon the light has travelled further to reach us, and some of the blue has been scattered off in other directions, so the sky looks paler. At sunset, pollutants and salt crystals (over the ocean) filter out even more of the blue.

Quadra Island lighthouse, July. The mountains in the distance are blue, too.

I always thought the sea just reflected the sky. Or vice-versa, maybe. I was wrong. The sea processes light differently. The water absorbs the warmer colours, and rejects the blue, bouncing it back into our eyes.

Rainy day over Tyee Spit. What little warmth arrived in the light that has percolated through the clouds highlights the dry grass.

The evergreens that cover our hills produce aromatic terpenes that form small particles in the atmosphere, and these also scatter blue light, seen better from a distance. (Up close, the trees are green.)

Saratoga Beach, with distant kayakers. Blue sky, blue mountains, blue water. Red kayaks.

Kite, over Tyee Spit last week. Looking almost straight up, the sky becomes deep, deep blue.

Something to ponder: when I look at the water, from the docks, for example, it is usually blue or blue-silver. But if I'm looking straight down into the water, it is often a deep green. Why is that?

A helpful article on this topic is "Why is the Sky Blue?" by Philip Gibbs. Also, see a briefer explanation on Scientific American.

A Skywatch post.