Man Day - Canuck Chronicles Day 17

7.31.10


I don’t know why I bother trying to think ahead or bother planning for anything specific around here if it isn’t research related. It gives a false sense of security. And the funny thing is, I’m not saying that in frustration. I’ve come to grips with it and on most occasions I actually enjoy the rush of it because I’m already abysmal at planning ahead for anything.

This morning was not exactly one of those moments. Here I was taking the words “four days off” after the volunteers leaving as nice slow time to catch up on my research data entry, organize my thoughts, and catch up on sleep. How naïve I was back then. Last night William (head researcher) asked if I’d come out to Tofino with him and our mechanical engineer on staff to help him try to fix up his truck. What time would we be leaving? Five in the morning. To be fair, I agreed to the whole thing, wanting to take every opportunity to go into town for free. I didn’t feel that way when five a.m. rolled around, however, but I woke up soon enough once we had the wind in our face flying the boat down the channel at 20 nauts.

We had to drop off another two members of our little family in town as they were headed north to do a whale transect for William, after which Will, Taylor (mech. Engineer) and I went out for a quick and early breakfast before setting out to fix the truck that William had parked in town. The problem (putting it lightly) was with the front left suspension. Now I don’t know much about cars at all, so I was trying to soak up as much as I could while acting as errand boy for the two who actually knew what they were doing. I won’t lie, I didn’t feel very useful, but I did what I could. We knew it should only be a two hour job replacing the parts we had to, but we estimated ahead knowing our own skills and planned for a five hour job. But with these kinds of things, as I said at the beginning of this entry, planning much of anything around here is a futile effort. We started work on the truck at 8ish and didn’t finish until about 5. The most impressive of our trials and tribulations was that once we finally worked around all the rusted screws, nuts and other crap just to get to the shock, we spent about two hours trying to make the new one fit before someone had the bright realization that we had the wrong shock entirely. The fact that we had successfully replaced other parts of that side suspension was the welcome reminder that the day wasn’t a total loss. We did some shopping (mostly for alcohol) and made it home by a well-earned 6:30 pm.

But of course that wasn’t the end of the day. Tyler and I have been planning a session with his semi-automatic shotgun for some time, and I was not going to let a long day under a busted truck stop me from seeing that plan through. Sure enough our timing was perfect since we were able to eat real quick and hit the trail up to the canyon by seven, gun, ammo and clays in tow. We made it a big staff event and there was plenty of daylight until seven pm so we had a blast (literally). I’d never shot anything else besides a boy scout b.b. gun or an airsoft gun, so I was a little anxious as to how it would go. Can I even shoot it? Can I shoot it accurately? Is the recoil going to break my nose? But surprisingly it came pretty easy. I followed Tyler’s safety lesson and stance as best as I knew how, and in the end I did pretty well. The recoil was pretty weak as the semi-automatic takes most of the energy from the recoil to load another round, and after only six rounds, I was already hitting flying targets. It was some of the most focused and serious fun I’ve ever had, and once again (as has been the norm since I arrived) was an experience that will no doubt have a deep impression for the rest of my days.

So all in all, today I rode in a boat, helped fix a truck, bought booze and meat, and had a damn good first shotgun session. I think I see a couple more hairs on my chest.

Smooth sailing, straight shooting, and always make sure you have the right parts for the job.