Another installment from Carl - station routine

At Cape St. James I had to quickly "grow up". I had never cooked before because I had been living at boarding houses since leaving home. I had never done my own laundry because I had taken it home with me for my mother to do on my days off or dropped it off at commercial laundries. Now I had to learn to do these things.

I had to learn to cook for the crew because cooking dinner was the duty of the tech whose day off it was. Pete gave me cooking lessons for the first few meals I had to prepare.

There was no automatic washer or dryer so I had to learn to use an old-fashioned wringer washer and hang up the laundry on racks in the basement of the duplex for drying. With the winds at the Cape a clothesline was impractical.

The shift schedule was rather strange. Each shift was 12 hours. The two techs each did 8 night shifts, 3 day shifts and 3 days off over a two week period. The OIC did 4 observing shifts and one maintenance shift each week. Working all of these 12 hour shifts meant that the built-in overtime effectively doubled one's income. Isolation allowance covered room & board which were deducted from the paycheque.

At that time any extra duties performed on one's day off was considered "casual labour" at the rate of $2.65/hr. rather than counted as "overtime". Federal civil servants had just got collective bargaining rights the previous year and we didn't yet have our first contract.

Each tech (not the OIC) took turns doing seawater observations for a few months at a time. The observation had to be done one hour before high tide. Cape St. James tides were not given in the Tide book but there was a calculation made based on the times of the tides at Tofino. I received a separate cheque for about $15 each month that was mailed directly to me at the Cape so that I had a batch of these cheques when I went out.

I'd go down to the wharf and take a rubber bucket attached to a rope down the staircase as close to the water as possible and toss it out into the water. After a minute I'd pull the bucket in then stir a thermometer in the water long enough for temperature equalization. The time and temperature was entered on a form. At that time a seawater sample was taken for salinity tests. A small bottle was filled with the water sample and the data was written down on the label: Date, time and temperature. The bottles were kept in a custom built wooden box that was shipped out to the Pacific Oceanographic Institute in Departure Bay. If there was a big storm with huge waves making it too risky to take the observation, it was cancelled and duly noted on the form. Once a week a message was sent to Harry Hollister of the Pacific Oceanographic Institute reporting the seawater temperatures taken during the week.

The winch used to pull the cable for the tramcart was an old Wisconsin engine that had to be started with a hand crank like those vintage automobiles of the early 20th century. There were paint marks on the cable to indicate the location of the cart -- duplex, helicopter pad, etc. A lever was used as a brake to control the speed of the cart when it was going down the hill.

The radiobeacon was in the basement of the obs building. The transmit frequency was 292 kHz and at that time the morse code identifier was " C C C" I think there were two transmitters that were alternately used. A ground rod with a long insulated handle was used to short out the contacts to discharge the filter capacitors after one transmitter was turned off. Even without the power on these capacitors had enough voltage stored up to deliver a lethal shock so they had to be discharged. I sure remember the big sparks and crackling when I'd short out the contacts. The proximity of the beacon resulted in a series of harmonics up the radio spectrum which obliterated any reception on certain frequencies.

The station gun was a .22 caliber rifle used primarily for shooting rats. There were plenty of rats on the island in those days before there were station cats. The rats sometimes feasted on barfbirds or other birds that had the misfortune of being blinded by the lighthouse beam and crashing into the side of the building. After landing on the ground stunned, they were easy prey for the hungry rats.

In those days when Meteorological services were part of the Department of Transport before the creation of Environment Canada, a rather poor method of garbage disposal was practiced at the Cape. Garbage was simply dumped over a steep cliff near the helicopter pad.

There is a group of small islands to the south of St. James Island called the Kerouard Islets. There was a sea lion colony on one of these islets about 2 miles to the south of us. When the seas were not too loud and the wind was blowing the right direction, the sea lions could be heard roaring and barking. There was one islet that was 50 feet high and it would be completely engulfed by huge waves during a big storm.

Of course, Cape St. James has the reputation of experiencing strong winds. I was appalled with the primitive wind measuring equipment installed at the Cape at that time. The 45B system was used that had a flashing light indicator and a step recorder. The speed was determined by counting the number of times the light flashed in 60 seconds and divided by two. You can imagine trying to count when the wind speed was something like 80 mph or greater!

There was a local telephone system linking the ops building, winch house, the two sides of the duplex, boathouse and powerhouse. Crank phones were used and the number of rings were used to determine the location you were calling.

A radiation recorder was set up with the sensor (eppley) mounted on the top of the lighthouse and a graph recorder set up in the ops building. In addition a digital reading was printed out on the LAT hour. There was a sound emitted during this printout which was at a time convenient to alert us to ob. time.

The official ob. time at the Cape was actually 5 minutes before the hour. That was necessary to allow time for Bull Harbour to call us on lighthouse frequency. Since Bull Harbour was not directly connected to the meteorological teletype circuits, they had to relay our weather on their own circuit to Alert Bay where it was transferred to the met circuit.

There was no reliable TV reception at the Cape. An old 17" set had been sent to the Cape to "experiment with" and a channel 6 yagi was mounted on one of the radio masts pointed towards Prince Rupert. We could sometimes make out shadowy images in the snow that indicated we could pick up a very weak signal from the Prince Rupert station. I had fun during the summer months when a phenomenon known as "sporadic E skip" would enable high frequency radio signals to be reflected off the E layer of the ionosphere and sometimes the signals were high enough in frequency to enable TV signals to come in from thousands of miles away. Sometimes the pictures would come in clear as a bell but they would fade in and out so the reception never lasted long enough to watch a complete program.

Our main source of "video" entertainment was a 16mm sound movie projector we had on the station and a box full of films would be loaned to us by the National Film Board for two or three months at a time.

We would also receive a box from the Open Shelf Library in Victoria containing a selection of various books for us to read. The books were randomly picked out for us so it was a matter of luck whether there would be something that would be interesting to read.

There was a station "library" which was a collection of books brought in by workmen or previous met techs and left behind for others to read. I think the Cape must have had the entire collection of Readers Digest Condensed Books on our bookshelves both in the ops building and the duplex. These books did keep me entertained on those long night shifts. Of course there was the usual collection of Playboy magazines and such that would be left at the Cape so we single men wouldn't forget what women looked like.