Arrival at the Cape

Another chapter from Carl's memoirs:

We were underway leaving Queen Charlotte early on Wednesday morning May 29th. The Skidegate proceeded down the east side of Moresby Island servicing buoys and beacons along the way.

It must have been around 6:00 PM when we rounded Lyman Point on Kunghit Island and I got my first glimpse of the Cape – a tiny little rock sitting in the middle of the ocean in the middle of nowhere! My heart sank to my boots as I felt like we were literally approaching the end of the World! I must have stood up on the bridge for the entire time watching the Cape getting closer and closer as the civilized world got farther and farther from me.

As I think back to that time, it seems that the whole trip to the Cape was a long one to enable me to gradually adjust from the hectic pace of city living to the slower pace on the “Rock”.

The captain called the Cape on the radio and the first words I heard from the Cape was a request to send the mail ashore with the first load. My first thought was that they must really be anxious to see the mail because they receive it only once a month. Actually the reason was for the fellow going out to pick up anything addressed to him before he left.

We had to anchor offshore and send everything to shore on the work boat. I went over the side of the ship down the Jacob’s Ladder to board the work boat which was rising and falling with the waves. It was even trickier to jump off the workboat at the right moment to scramble up the cement staircase to the wharf.

All three of the “inmates” were there on the wharf. Pete Kociuba the OIC, Al Friesen and W.K. Richardson who was leaving. I gave him his airporter bus pass to use in Prince Rupert. I was put to work right away to help unload the supplies being hauled off the workboat with the crane mounted to the wharf.

Pete informed me that I would be going straight on to night shift – a long time tradition for initiating techs when they first arrived at Cape St. James.

Once the work boat had made its last trip to shore and Richardson was aboard the Skidegate the ship wasted no time getting underway for its return voyage to Prince Rupert. There was too much work to do for me to watch the ship sail away.

Al went up the hill to operate the winch that pulled the cart up the tramway by cable. I remained at the wharf with Pete loading supplies and mail aboard the cart. I’m not sure how many loads were required – it couldn’t have been any more than one or two. After loading the cart Pete and I climbed the 138 steps up the staircase that took us to the duplex about halfway up the hill. Our living quarters were in the duplex so Pete showed me to my bedroom where I dropped off my suitcases and guitar.

Pete and I stepped on board the cart and we got to ride the rest of the way to the top of the hill where the operations building was located. Pete said that people were not supposed to be riding the cart but what Regional Office didn’t know did not matter.

One of the first things that I learned was that the station operated on Standard Time year round so I had to reset my watch – that meant that the coming night shift was going to last an hour longer for me.

I handed over my M.O. (Movement of Official) forms to Pete, which was routine for every transfer. Pete looked at the forms and found some sort of error made by my previous OIC when he filled them in. What wouldn’t I have given right then to point out that error to the perfectionist Gil Smith after all of my errors pointed out to me while I was stationed at Victoria Gonzales.

Since my first shift was familiarization, Pete stayed up with me to show me the routine.

After being stationed at Victoria Gonzales for over a year with its proliferation of visibility markers in all directions I had to learn to live with very few at the Cape. Beyond the immediate vicinity of 2 or 3 miles there was nothing but open ocean in most directions. The only landmarks were on Kunghit Island to the north and the most distant was Lyman Point about 10 miles away.

Back in the 1960s the light beacons at lighthouses were turned off during the day. When it started getting dark I learned that my duty as “lightkeeper” was to go downstairs to the basement of the operations building and flip a switch in the circuit breaker panel to turn on the light. The dome on top of the lighthouse had been removed ten years earlier so the tower looked like some strange Oriental temple to me. The original access from the inside had been sealed with cement and a ladder was mounted to the exterior of the light tower. There was a glass container with two high power light bulbs inside. When one bulb burned out, the other bulb would turn on automatically and a red warning light came on to advise us to change the old bulb. There were two Fresnel lens that revolved inside the glass container to create a concentrated light beam to sweep the ocean.

When I transmitted my first weather observation to Bull Harbour my precise use of radio operator procedures marked me as a beginner. I would say “over” and the end of each transmission and conclude with “Bull Harbour Radio, this is Cape St. James out.” I quickly learned that the radio procedures that I had studied for my exam were seldom used in the real world.

Being the only immediate contact with the outside world, the radio operators at Bull Harbour Marine Radio had friendly conversations with us over the air. Kerry Kronholm was on duty at Bull Harbour during my first shift. Kerry would always say “Roger, roger, Carl, copy all OK!” I got the impression that he might be Chinese when I first heard him but he was actually from Sointula and was of Finnish descent.

There was no radiotelephone at that time that permitted us to make personal phone calls through the regular telephone system. All communications were sent out on the lighthouse channel to the Marine Radio stations at Bull Harbour and Prince Rupert. The only personal communication available was by telegram. DOT personnel were given a special rate for “night letters” – 90 cents for fifty words. Outgoing messages were written or typed up on green DOT message forms and filed after transmission with the date and time entered.

There was a special typewriter mounted at the desk next to the radio panel that typed only capital letters – a leftover from the days when Radio Operators were stationed at the Cape. There was a continuous folded sheet with perforations at the folds to separate the pages and had two carbon copies fed into the typewriter from a box mounted underneath the desk. This was for the official station radio log because we typed the time each weather observation was transmitted as well as the text of all incoming messages.

“Lighthouse Frequency” was a split channel in those days so we could hear only the coast stations but not the lighthouses. 2200 kHz was the frequency that Bull Harbour and Prince Rupert transmitted on and our receiving frequency. We transmitted on 2274 kHz. I’d sometimes tune in on 2274 with the HRO “floater” receiver so I could hear the locals from the other lighthouses.

I had to learn how to do the “local” marine observations. A “local” gave sky condition, visibility, weather, barometric pressure in inches(same as the altimeter setting on our aviation surface observation) and sea condition (waves and swells). Being about 300 feet above the ocean, I had to learn to estimate wave size and swell from that distance. At that time the actual size of the waves in feet was not given; the terms rippled, choppy, moderate and rough were used. The direction of the swell was given with the qualifying terms low, moderate and heavy.

Locals were not done at equal 3 hour intervals in those days. They were timed to fit the Marine broadcast schedule over 1630 kHz. They were not always done right on the hour either. Some were at 20 or 30 minutes after the hour. We were doing two sets of locals to fit the broadcast schedules of Bull Harbour and Prince Rupert and the observation times did not always coincide for both stations.

Since Cape St. James didn’t do “specials” -- that is unscheduled observations made necessary by certain changes in the weather – the section of the observing form 2322 normally used for that purpose was used for our marine locals.

The general coverage “floater” receiver was an old pre-WWII National HRO that used plug-in coils for the different bands. There was no direct frequency readout so the setting on the large calibrated knob had to be written down on a sheet so one knew where to tune in a particular radio station. The sheet was posted with the settings corresponding to the frequencies of AM broadcast stations. Trouble was that there was no coil for receiving the lower part of the AM broadcast band below 1000 kHz. That meant that we could not listen to the two “local” stations in Prince Rupert. It seems to me that there was a little leeway at the “edge” of the tuning range of each coil so that we were able to tune down to receive CKNW at 980 kHz.

At that time there were two rows of fluorescent lights along the length of the ceiling of the main room of the operations building so the room was brightly illuminated at night which meant that it took longer to adjust one’s eyes to the darkness when it was time to go outside to do a weather observation.

That didn’t really make much difference because the night sky was usually a dark void except whether you could see stars or not. There wasn’t even a ceiling projector at that time. There were no visibility markers to see in the dark and one could not even see the clouds unless there was a bright moon out. The last twilight ob before nightfall was used as a basis for guesswork for nighttime observations. How often was there a drastic change in sky and visibility reported in the first morning observations when it started to get light?

An hour or so after dark I heard a couple of thumps or thuds that seemed to come from outside. “Those are just barf-birds,” said Pete. Seabirds that flew at night were attracted to the beam of the lighthouse and the blinding light would disorient them. This often resulted in collisions with the outside walls of the ops building. I went outside with Pete to see a few grey birds a little larger than robins on the ground. In bird-watching terms they were fork-tailed storm petrels who fed their young by partially digesting food and regurgitating it. These birds would regurgitate this orange vomit after hitting the building or if you picked them up off the ground. The result was their nickname “barf-birds” or “puke-pidgins”. They most frequently showed up on foggy nights and they looked like oversized moths flying through the lighthouse beam.

The petrels were not the only species of night flyers attracted to the lighthouse. Auklets were seen more frequently than petrels. The auklet was a strangely built bird with its legs too far back to be able to get airborne from the ground. Being a sea bird, the auklet was designed to fly from the crest of an ocean wave. Auklets are about the same size as petrels but are a darker grey and have straighter beaks.

There were two bedrooms in the ops building and Pete let me sleep a couple of hours until it was time to do the synoptic weather at 1200Z (4:00 AM PST) Morning finally came and I couldn’t wait until my last observation was finished so I could turn in for a good day’s sleep. Unfortunately, I learned that there was one more duty for the night shift person to do before going to bed.

We had to go down to the powerhouse located at sea level close to the wharf. The powerhouse check consisted of reading the various gauges, checking oil and fuel, etc. and making the entries in the powerhouse log. In those days, there were no protective ear covers so I had to endure the loud noise made by the diesel engines. There were three Dorman diesel generators that were run for a certain number of hours before switching generators. An oil change was required during switch over which was a major operation.

After the powerhouse check there was that long climb up the 138 steps to the duplex and by that time I was ready to sleep for many hours.