July 10th

Bowled SAcotch Pairs in am, and in the Findlay tourney at Vic West. Lost both games. Bottled wine at the wine makers. Pretty well have to keep most of it under thouse as the garage gets too hot during the day.
Another nice day though and now it is 20C and more sun.

RIVERBOAT

It was the fall of 1954; I had spent the summer cruising timber with my friend Steve but had been reassigned to pair up with Gerry Magee. At first this hadn’t set to well with me as Steve and I had become good friends and  - well I just didn’t want to have a new cruiser companion.

However Gerry turned out to be a good sort, perhaps a bit too methodical for my liking but then having just turned twenty perhaps I was in need of some steadying influence.

Gerry and I had carried out a half dozen cruise together in the Fort Fraser area when we were sent to Fort St. James to do an over-due cruise up Stuart Lake. The word was  - get it done before snow flies.

We reported to the Ranger District and made our selves known to the Ranger – Ken Northrup. We studied the maps together and with his knowledge of the area decided that rather than tenting it on the timber sale area, we would stay in an old abandoned Hudson Bay Company building on an island across the mouth of the Tachie River from the Tachie Reserve. We rationalized that living in a cabin with a wood stove and sleeping on safari cots was better than setting up a tent in October on the side of a steep rising side hill. We would only be about a three quarter hour run each way and we would benefit by having a decent place to stay.

We calculated it would take a week to ten days to complete the cruise and bought groceries accordingly. We were assigned a twenty foot open river boat powered by a  twenty-two and a half horse power Johnson outboard motor. Estimating gas and oil quantities for the outboard was difficult as neither Gerry nor I had ever used one before and Ranger Northrup used a thirty foot launch for his lake bound duties.  We finally decided that forty gallons of gas would do the trick, the motor had a three gallon tank that was supposed to last close to two hours of running time; the forty gallons would give us about twenty six hours.

Now perhaps a twenty foot boat sounds pretty big but river boats of that era were built long with a maximum bottom width of about five feet, they had flat bottoms and were all wood construction. Our outboard was a two cylinder straight drive, no reverse thing weighing about two hundred pounds. The gas tank was mounted at the rear of the motor above the plugs which necessitated the motor to be shut down when refueling. But those motors were the ‘workhorse’ of the day and providing the gas and oil mix was correct would perform well.