For reasons which must have held a compelling attraction for me at the time, most likely because it largely avoided my getting cold and wet, I used to view the underwater world on occasion by submerging only my face-mask and snorkel equipped head from the bow of a very small inflatable dinghy. The dinghy’s buoyancy tubes being of particularly small diameter enabling this procedure. (Said dinghy was, let’s say, inexpensive.) For the rest of my anatomy the dinghy provided a mostly dry, comfortable cushion on which to lounge prone. Hence the need to expend much effort as in swim was…

Read More

Booked to sing the national anthem at a Vancouver 86ers game, the precursor organization to the current Whitecaps, while waiting to perform I noticed a poster for a Canada v.s. Guatemala FIFA World Cup qualifier upcoming at the same stadium a couple of weeks out. I asked my 86ers contact if they had anybody lined up to sing the Guatemalan national anthem. They did not and were wondering where they might find someone. “I’ll do it” I said. “You know it?” he asked clearly surprised. “No I said but I have a Guatemalan friend who will teach it to me.…

Read More

Lazing in the summer sun warmed cockpit aboard our 30 foot sailboat Exodus, we were moored for the afternoon in the Union Steamship marina on Bowen Island in Howe Sound BC, Canada when the cockpit VHF radio repeater sprang to life on channel 16, the distress and calling frequency. Loud and clear came the call: “Port of Vancouver, Japanese warship”, “Port of Vancouver, Japanese warship”. We looked at the radio in some disbelief. It seemed and in an odd way felt like a sort of Mary Celeste, over the eternal ether sort of moment, not that the famed merchant brigantine would have had radio…

Read More

Air Canada flight 110 departed Toronto at 14:00 January 16, 2017 bound for Vancouver on what turned out to be one of the oddest, most intriguing and by any stretch of the imagination unlikely flights yet recorded by civil aviation of any flag. The weather was fair as the almost new Boeing 787 ‘Dreamliner’ climbed to its assigned cruising altitude of 32,000 feet. However some unusual flight deck/cabin crew interactions that occurred en-route coupled with a situation already extant that most people would consider unthinkable puts this flight firmly in the ‘how could this possibly happen’ category. With large airlines…

Read More