Longing for Long Bay on Gambier Island

Well the fund raiser is over. The blackberry cobbler by some miracle turned out great. Our team worked from early in the morning till almost one o'clock in the morning and I was dead tired. Worse was the pain in my back, legs and ankle that kept me awake for most of the night. Working with Bob, Brenda, Ray, Lynda, Janis & Carla was a real treat. They were real troopers and I am grateful to everyone of them for all the laughs and fun that they each in their own way created that made the work go faster and easier. Not to mention that little bit of private stock that Bob always keeps in the kitchen frig for us workers.
Today I worked on finishing up the photo's of our trip to Long Bay. It made me long for the quiet island life that the Gambier Island Sea Ranch affords the people who live there or, like us, are lucky enough to get an invitation to visit.
Gambier Island is about 15 minutes from Sunset Marina where the Apadoca the water taxi picks us up. The trip over is very beautiful and only Lucy gets a little upset, however this time she got very brave about the whole thing and even stood up on the back deck to have a look around while I took some photo's.
Life on the GISR is really ideal for those who have homes there. The ranch is a working farm. Every year they buy sheep, pigs and turkeys. They raise them and sell the meat to the people who live there. As well, there are chickens for fresh eggs (delicious) and horses for riding, although I have never seen these horses do anything but eat in the pasture!
The island has a lot of deer on it and we were not off the boat for two hours before I snapped a doe watching me walk the road around the bay. A few minutes later Lucy spied and chased a buck that leaped the nearest fence with little or no effort leaving Lucy in his dust. We were also warned that a cougar had been sighted and our friends daughter had seen signs of bear on the trail to Brigade Bay something else we would have to watch out for especially with Lucy. As well we were told that the ranch caretaker had shot and killed a wolf trying to kill the lambs this summer!
The cabin (yeah right!) that we stayed in looks right down onto the wharf and boat dock. It has terraced decks on the front and on the back with a home made wood burning hot tub on the top deck that we sat in every evening and looked over the bay and watched the stars sparkle over head while listening to the rhythmic sounds of the water in the bay. In the morning we drank our coffee on the front deck while watching the tide come in and the sun rise over the bay.
Bob left us each a fishing rod and every evening before dinner we would go down on the docks and fish. Karen had not done that since she was a little girl and she fell in love with it. I was the only person who caught anything and that was a small flounder that my daughter declared was too ugly to keep so we tossed him back to live another day. The fun was really in the fishing not the catching anyways! To add to our fun of fishing the same cranes would show up every night and watch us from the dock railings before screeching their way across the bay.
We also collected oysters from the bay in the morning and dropped a crab trap off the dock in hopes of having a seafood feast for dinner. I cooked the oysters on the half shell covered with bacon and cheese and just a drop of hot sauce - delicious ! The crab traps however never produced anything big enough to cook and eat.
Even as I write this I can taste the salt in the air and smell the sweetness of fresh clean air.
Because I took almost three hundred photo's I culled them down to about a hundred and fifty I have broken them into sets and put up the first set.
Next post I will put of more pictures of parts of the island.
Picture Collection can now be seen at Catz Photo page at Flickr