As our print edition went to press, our regular columnist was part-way up the North American West Coast's "Inside Passage" on a bucket list yacht passage from Seattle to the Alaskan capital of Juneau, about 2000 kilometres to the north-west. In company with him on their 9.5 metre sloop Caro Babbo are his wife Jennifer and mother-in-law Hilary, who has Alzheimer's.
You can follow reports - most recently from Ketchikan - at www.carobabbo.com
The second ventilation fan just received enough sunlight to power up. At the end of each day, Jennifer pilots us into tiny pools of water that cannot be reached at low tide and which require me to stand on the bow looking for uncharted rocks.
We learned a few days ago that in some instances charts, to quote Jeffrey Rush, ''are more of a guideline,'' as we expected to drop an anchor in five metres of water instead of the 14 metres that were actually there.
The spinning up of the solar powered ventilation fans remind me that even though there is no cellular service and in many of these tiny inlets we are too far from anyone to receive weather reports or contact the coast guard, we are very dependent on technology.
Jennifer has learned to navigate, and she is the navigator, in the time of GPS. First by finding our GPS coördinates on a paper chart and now by video-game navigation on a tablet using $25 software from the Italian company Navionics.
Could I still do dead reckoning navigation? I like to think so.
In general, if we have wind, and there will always be wind, I can get us almost anywhere, except out of the tiny little inlets where Jennifer likes to spend the night. To get out of here, we need an engine, although I wonder if I could tow a five-ton boat in a rowboat... I've towed a two-ton boat. To prevent me from having to find out, I've brought along a three horsepower outboard for the dinghy, which will move a boat this size.
The moments when we are not sailing, or when I am not attending to our recalcitrant engine (hence the worry), I reflect upon our industry.
I still receive WAN/Ifra executive briefings, N&T and, of course GXPress, but now I receive them en masse whenever we get a cellular signal. The prognostications from people like me and others, when taken in a large dose, sound more like marketing than I like to admit; writers searching for a hook, something hot to get my attention.
Many of these start with something from a paper stating, as one I saw recently, that print will become the industry's saviour as young people turn away from digital presentation formats.
From a New Zealand company, I purchased an AIS transponder. (It is actually a transceiver, but the industry marketing people liked the word transponder better, so the name has taken hold).
The Automated Identification System allows boats to broadcast via VHF (and the web, interestingly) their location, speed, heading and other information. It makes small 9.5 metre boats like mine as visible to cruise ships as any other ship. Three days ago it stopped broadcasting - possibly the device has failed, possibly the antenna.
Our equal footing disappeared when our signal disappeared. Of course, like publishing on the web, which gives the illusion of equal footing, there isn't. The 250-metre Holland America cruise liner that rounded an island is not our equal, and the 'ColRegs' Collision Regulations recognise that, requiring us to get out of the way of any vessel over 20 metres.
Here in the wilds of British Columbia, we find newspapers, and like the industry person I am, I flip to the masthead right after looking at the layout, but before I start counting ad pages. Here, the papers I find are generally published by Black Press.
Black Press spans types with small newspapers in the Pacific Northwest, and larger papers like the Honolulu Advertiser. There are those that specialise in smallness, like Rust Communications, which only owns rural newspapers.
We spent a night at a dock in Shearwater, BC, population 96. We met Christophe at the fuel dock and asked him whether 'season' had started. He responded, ''You're here.''
He invited us to the evening's 'Siete de Mayo' celebration: ''The fifth was on Wednesday, so we'll have it tonight instead.''
The event was organised by the Denny Island Social-Club Organisation, DISCO. (There is also the Denny Island Ladies Dance Organisation, which organises dances.)
By my count, about half the island was there. Beers were five dollars apiece, contributions for food were voluntary.
I sat next to Ingmar, a very good-looking man, who rather than being middle forties, as his appearance indicated, was 54.
Ingmar had travelled extensively in Asia and India, initially when he was a teenager, striking out on his own with a backpack, and then again several years ago when his spouse was awarded a commonwealth scholarship for graduate school in India. The stipend was enough to take the family for the 18-month programme.
Ingmar was in ''building'' when he and I spoke. He'd just finished some small, but long term projects in the area. I would say he was a tree planter by profession.
Every island here in BC has the mange-like appearance of having been logged, but it turns out that much of what we see has not been... they do enviro-logging, which to a large extent appears to be logging where the cruise ships can't see it!
Loggers pay a 'stump fee'. The province uses the fees to re-plant. Ingmar believes he has personally planted more than one million trees, and overseen the planting of ten million. The work follows the spring, starting in Victoria as early as January and moves north with the warmth.
These thoughts turn me to the morality of newsprint with a duty cycle of hours, and direct mail pieces with a duty cycle measured in seconds.
Ingmar has a 20-year old son, and a three-year old son. Ingmar said he and his spouse had planned to home school their older child, but he preferred to go to a public school. Their son is currently attending university in Victoria. ''I let him know that if he didn't want to go that route, that was okay... They turn out nothing but capitalist consumers.''
He continued, ''Quality of life isn't about being a consumer. You can live well off the grid. What are we doing? These forests are going to be gone. We replant and in three hundred years they'll be like they were. Is this the legacy I want to leave?''
There are many ways to live life, just like there are many ways for a newspaper to achieve success. Here, where Jennifer, Hilary and I are sailing, tourists like us pass on their way to Alaska. People live here because they want to live here. None of the other boaters who docked that evening showed up at the celebration. Each was content to eat in the restaurant and continue their rush to see nature in Glacier Bay.
• Contact John at John@JJCS.com, http://CaroBabbo.com but be prepared to wait for a reply!
Comments