Salt Spring Island Archives
| Accession Number | |||
| Date | 2015 | ||
| Media | digital recording | Audio | mp3 √ |
| duration | 30 min. |
324_Syde-Anderson_Sandwell_2015.mp3
otter.ai
12.02.2024
no
Outline
Speaker 1 0:02
Most interesting adventures was the acquisition of couple of large tanks to store rainwater. We live by rain we cut from the roof of the store to carry this over to the dry season the summer. We had some small things that my father in law had acquired, but they really weren't enough. The ones that we thought were the original ones. The Big House had a pretty good sized one was just under about 4000 US gallons. Being an old American, I'm in the wrong units. But the little house that we're moving into, had no real storage tanks that made any sense. There had been some plywood tanks and days of your and they had finally rotted out. Only pilot boxes were required. I found a 750 gallon septic tank that had never been used and collected water. But we were pretty short of real storage. So rather interesting individual on Saltspring has been everything from college professor to mercenary soldier and eventually was, was a director for the part of the politician has been difficult and if you talk to anybody on Saltspring, you must have heard about the future. And one of the big loosely incarnation was and he saw me in the ferry terminal, it's for today one time and said I'm getting rid of the ironmongery from a big farm on a Senate and they had a bunch of large tanks they used to mix nutrients they ran into the to the irrigation water for fertilizing the farm that I know how you live in. Would you be interested in one of these things? Well, how big are they? Well they're six feet in diameter and 12 feet long and they're made out of quarter inch plates. I calculate the hole just under 10,000 liters. So I call it Julian Boulder the price we discussed we decided by two. So then came the problems in my mind how many came home I sat down and calculated what they would weigh on the basis of that or dimensions and density of steel and decided they weren't right right around a ton.
Speaker 2 2:13
So that you won't really need out of again what would be made out of steel
Speaker 1 2:17
or steel plates or quarter inch thick steel plate system and so they weighed just about a Tony so we had a you know I sat down and decided how we could handle him in the in the water and if we get them placed into the water they would float on the head a manhole cutting the top side of each one was about 18 inches wide and two feet long with a shovel of nutrient and when they were using the farm and I concluded if I could keep up right so those things didn't ever turn down. We were able to tow them home a small boat so they could deliver them war and Fulford fisheries department maintains a small hand powered crane five ton capacity. So we've set up rigging and lifted them over the side into the into the sea I've had have as welded on to tie them together so they wouldn't roll relative to one another keep on top of a neighbor that a small sailboat offered told them. And so we slowly told them out for quite a while because he only had about a 20 horsepower on the sailboat and we're toying with two gigantic tanks. What fine.
Unknown Speaker 3:32
What time of year was it,
Unknown Speaker 3:34
Richard? I don't remember.
Unknown Speaker 3:37
Early spring,
Speaker 1 3:38
I would guess me. Me okay. Because it was lots of fun. Strawberry going when we roll. Yeah, so we pull up into the we did this high tide, pull them up in a little cold in front of the farmhouse and turn them sideways and waited for the tide to go down. And the tide went down, we put a line around each one who wished we had there. And a line that goes around something and it's pulled on top is called a car buckle. So we've carved off all them up onto the beach and gotten away from the sea. A visiting friend from Southern California came and helped move one of them up behind the house. So we had one we could use gravity to run down to it for our use and then one or we could transfer water to it from Brett by gravity one down by the so that we had to to in positions where gravity was helpful and we could pump other times we needed to move it and it saved our lives. I think first water was concerned they were a primary source of water. Did you worry about the chemicals? I took sale at first I washed them out. And I took samples to NB research over in Sydney which is a laboratory that does all kinds of analysis for people. I've heard everybody talking about a place for water water analysis, but they also do all kinds of of laboratory work. And I took some goes to them explain what the tanks had been and wanted to know if they were safe. And so the Kanwar came up when we came back to the mountain, talk to me a lot so all the tanks are perfectly safe. And one of my plans then was I was I should chlorinate the water because the water is collected from the roof and I was worried about birds and all he said oh no, wait a minute. Do we want to do that? I said well now I'm we're all people water off the roof. And he said, Well, you know, it's very difficult to chlorinated water. If organic materials in the water as he said, they will be the fragments of leaves and pollen, all that in the water. So if you chlorinate water like that, and he put any excessive chlorine in, it forms compounds that are carcinogenic. And he said, You have to think very carefully if you want to chlorinate oh my god, what am I gonna do? He said, the mammals and all mammals. Birds are worried about things or whoever on here is handled by mammals. He's if I were us as well, I asked him a specific question. If you were living the way we were we do and collecting water like this, would you chlorinated and he said no. So we didn't turn into water. So that water for you know, we look 15 years old with water. And we're having problems. So it was one of our it was a fascinating project to handle a couple of items weighing a ton with just a couple of people in hand power. It was an interesting project. Yeah, I found it kind of a fun thing to do. But at the time when I was working it out in the daytime say, well, she weighs a ton, but I got all these wishes and I got you know tackling rigging I can handle it. At night I wake up when I was running it in emotional multi. Oh my god, well.
Speaker 2 6:45
That's great. So still, with all this amount of water, you still couldn't. This is still just for your own personal use. You can like a garden.
Speaker 1 6:55
Thanks for reserved for white garden water and one was used for our water. But a garden consumes an awful lot of water. It's up to the gardener, he'll find she planted things that were in their prime when it was raining. And a lot of things just grew on the rainwater. And then they survived by what little water she could give them over the summer. We had a great water collection system, the toilet water and the sink before some water from it to the septic tank, and the shower in the hand basin and the dish rinsing water went to a collection system and that was also quite as hard. So
Unknown Speaker 7:31
that would that go to tank. So
Speaker 1 7:35
that went to a standard old steel drum, collected it. And periodically we pumped it into a couple of older tanks that we've had. So
Speaker 2 7:45
So you had you put in a septic tank?
Speaker 1 7:48
No, it was a septic tank. They're the family that developed the island. It's all inside plumbing. Sometimes it's shortly before the Second World War. Harry Roberts tells us that he'd come out here to stay his his grandmother still and I guess it was would say that the Kota was reserved for her he had to go outside the interior, and we use the same septic tank, the leach field finally plugged up on us when they lead to new lease fields and proofreading large plastic. But the septic tanks still work. We've cleaned it out. It's been cleaned out a couple of times that I know have been bailed out. And all the sediment removed but still work fine. No problem.
Speaker 2 8:35
That's good. You did mention one problem. You had the second Christmas around Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1 8:43
Okay, we we live in a large house and there are two houses. And so the idea was that I would overhaul a small house and make it more more livable since it could be better, better for winter. The large house was really built as a summer home and no one planned to live in it over the winter. But we did. Well it took me an excessively long time to overhaul the house. So the first winter we were there we were very fortunate. It was as I say El Nino conditions like we're having now. And when it was very warm. Hardly anything frozen wasn't dangerous. But a week or two before Christmas of the second Christmas, we were there we got there, the first of October so it was a year and then a couple of months to the next Christmas. We had the first real cold snap we never experienced and the we understood the problems, not how you dealt with them. With pipes we drain the all the water supply pipes. Water was acquired by siphoning it out of the system or was collected into the house and brought it in. But the big problem was always about toilets. So we decided that we would minimize the use of the toilets as much as we could. There was an outhouse that was done for the picnic site we use it last night you know you don't want to go out in the snow and freezing. So we kept a bucket of water on hand just pour down the toilet. That wasn't a good plan. pipe running from that bathroom to where the septic tank was, was out in the open. Each time I pour a bucket of water down it, it froze a little bit on the enzyme. Some days before Christmas, it froze up thought we could not run water too late that'd be difficult for a few days. And we desperately prayed for thaw and on Christmas Eve we got the bed we woke up and the side come and we have gurgle. gurgle gurgle gurgle from the like he was one of our restaurants whose presence here might finally opening
Unknown Speaker 10:51
because have foundations
Speaker 1 10:54
or big houses built on the post and beam house and where each vertical post comes down to the ground as the foundation is made by digging a hole in the ground setting ice cream drum you know these round ice cream drums are about 18 inches diameter foot one or two of those filled with concrete so they made a pedestal that raised posts off the ground. So each post that comes out sits on one of these concrete pedestals was made on site. So make up water from the ground and rockets the folks
Speaker 2 11:29
so that's a little house I didn't take a look at that is it the same
Speaker 1 11:34
had no foundation under it at the time that my father in law bought the place. And how had things had rotted in the house of way out of true and basically
Speaker 3 11:45
have just stolen and would support Saturday.
Speaker 1 11:49
I think someone were on stones. I didn't see how it was then of course that was before my time. But I understand that some of the problem was it some of the woods came down where it had rotted off and then it just crushed because they didn't have any strength. So they got some big jacks and a transparent garden hose to use as a level they don't even hold up the to the marks are and jacked up the house and put all kinds of various and sundry posts that are all on the concrete to support it. The house never was really true. You know, you could drop a ball on the Florida roll in the kitchen. I think it was sort of having a flu Foundation, which is not a super handy one, but it seems to be quite satisfactory. House doesn't seem to be getting any worse. At that degree has provided stability home. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 12:51
There was another story Richard was pretty tell me about the young. Yeah,
Speaker 1 12:57
we had a fearsome storm. Seems it was in in November. I can't remember the year right now. I have been to Victoria the day shortly before the storm really hit and was pretty exciting trip on the ferry coming back and I managed to get home because the island provides the lead from the director. But the wind got higher and higher if that was the night that it broke up the the Marina at Fulford the ferry finally laid there to provide shit with his engines running in in gear to provide a backwash to protect the marina. They felt somebody would have completely gone on. They were all just woken up in the morning. It was a very strong storm. And also it was a very unfortunate direction that made it so bad. But our experiences revolve around a boat, what's called a Thunderbird there are 26 foot research cruises available. It's very nice. That had been moored over at periods island somewhere. We didn't know anything about this until one day, someone who lives a day or so after the storm. Someone was fishing in a small boat around to deal with a sailboat on the west end of your island. We didn't know we didn't. He didn't say exactly where it was. So Dooley took off walking around the periphery from the north side and I went around the periphery from the south side she found it and what happens is that there's a small code that has his ledge of rock that's quite sharp the rock is not level but nearly so and then there's a set of a couple of feet high and then goes up we'll see. This boat had had mooring over by piers and the direction the wind was such that we were the first thing downwind from peers and vote apparently this along going along quite rapidly before the for the wind came into that coal and Thunderbirds have a have a fin keel Want to hit on that ledge. Heel is instead of a big, long wide thing that the whole width of the whole length of the boat thing healed is a sheet of in this case, cast iron that is probably three and a half feet long and three feet deep. And it's bolted into the structural members of the boat. So there's this big rectangle, it's now two and a half feet, the square looking down in the middle of the boat. It makes the boat very agile, you can turn them very sharp and the reason why that's important. And it also has what's called a spade rudder, rudder is self supporting, it just sticks out on that particular one on a piece of inch and a quarter diameter diameter stainless steel rod. So it's separate from that. So it will become very maneuverable that way. At any rate, the boat came in and it struck. It was a float, that main part of the hall, but the keel struck the lead. And this force is great enough, it pulled it right out of bottom. It just completely tore up the inside of the boat that pulled the keel out, both typical and was thrown up on this little rocky ledge on its side. The boat actually look like it was intolerable good condition. So but it was being on the side, it took a beating from the sea. So we really ought to get it upright. The problem was, don't get to it was at low tide. And low tide was at about 1130 at night that night. So we accumulated appropriate tools and ladders and all and whatnot and decided that we took the the mask out and removed the rudder, then we could probably if the necktie tying it back up right again. So we did that. I was interested that the runner stock is inch and a quarter diameter stainless steel rod that's a pretty positive thing. It was bad. And some fooling around we got the remaining shrouds and hits, they also were able to pull a mast out. One of the things I thought was kind of interesting was it in its traditional in both construction to place a coin under the heel of the mast and what's called the mast step. We that's been going on since Roman times. And I claimed it and sure enough, was Canadian somewhat thrown in Canadian diamonds out. I'll get back to that in a minute. And so we went back to the house, the next day went down with the thought perhaps of trying to toy around onto a week once it was up right it was still a tolerably good see running, and I was unable to handle it with the outboard in the boat we had but once it was upright, we could see that the port side it's a dotting anthropologist to hell, I mean it was a it hits from drowned on the way on on the rock. And so the child in the shear had this great opening couple inches wide and 10 feet long, something like that
Speaker 2 18:03
you can see in these photographs, and it's in a sense, like somebody's been chewing on. So
Speaker 1 18:10
we tighten it up and try to keep it there. Eventually the insurance company from the mat from the owners to men own surance company contracted with boatyard in Sydney to come out yet. So they came up with the workboat and great blocks of floatation training that they used to put under under piers a while and fill the whole cabin with full taken so it was full high enough in the water and then the toilet and they towed it home. And I called the but this time I found the name of the owner and I called him up and told him that I had the coin and was interested if he had any of the cells important wanted him but he couldn't be less interested. So I still have the coins as a memory of the last days of his book called Maelstrom was kind of sad.
Speaker 2 18:56
So how did you find them to do the interview?
Speaker 1 19:00
Well, I have a friend who is very interested in boats and he's an old Canadian and is famous for his knowledge and his father's knowledge as a sailboat. Probably very part of the century. So I called him and said This boat is drifted up on us. And by that I think it says he hears it one way or another we knew it had something to do with pure dial. So he said oh well the guy you talked to on periods island about boats is nothing so so I called the guy at Parris Island explained where we were and went to that underneath it Oh, yeah. Well, another thing he knew the name of the person who had lost the boat. So this is calling around and off who originally a knowledgeable bold type got in contact with CRM, the the owners where they were, you know, active cruisers, but they weren't the traditional types of worried about themselves ever coin from under the mask
Speaker 2 19:58
Okay, thank you You know, one of the things you were mentioning to me, Richard, I've been asking you about all these things that have to do with island life and being not in the central systems. And you were mentioning some problems that you had some particular problems you had with your electrical generator. Yeah. So yeah.
Speaker 1 20:20
The Big House, each house has a has a small electric plant. The Big House has a 10 kilowatt, three cylinder 18 horsepower, lifter, that turns a Kohler 10 Kw generator. And it's an older model that has brushes and suffering and all that in it.
Unknown Speaker 20:40
It's a gasoline,
Speaker 1 20:41
diesel, both electric passerbys. That, I think safer from a fuel standpoint and all that, I suppose is dubious as to which one is the most polluting. But in the past, it used to be thought that diesels are less polluted turns out they make more particulate matter and less gas. And so they still have problems. But anyway, that's not the electric plant is a variety that produces the power on the part of the rotating and and the power has to be taken off of that by sliding carbon brushes that slide on on brass rings. Every now and then I discovered that for the spring that held the carbon brush down against the slip ring was broken. And more I fooled around with it or tried to figure out more rapidly it broke the spring, I finally bought some like bulk from the core dealer in Vancouver, before I finally figure out what's going on. And it turns out that the ring, this is a brush slides on it's a brass ring about three or four inches by four inches in diameter, I guess. And it's attachment had broken loose and it was gradually becoming eccentric. So each revolution pushed the brush up and down in the brush. And it got finally got for eccentric type of detective, I could see that measure was measuring the boundaries. And so it was clear that something had to be done to fix that. So I called the the core distributor in Vancouver and said what I found and asked him what I should do. And so he said, Well, you got to get the armature out of the thing until machine shop. And if I told him I was he gave me the name of love electrically oriented machine shop Emery electric in this final that will do it. And he also told me some tricks about getting the thing apart because some some difficulties in disassembling it. That he tricks he told me, and I'm glad he told me I would have had difficulty part without them. So I called up Mr. Electric and told him the problem. And they said, well, they could repair it. And I said, Well, I lived out in the sticks, I'm getting it in to them and then back for a multi day thing was a real problem. Was there any way they could do it in one day? And they said yes, we can't guarantee when we will do it during the day. But if you'll get it to us the time we open in the morning, which is about seven o'clock or something like that, we will guarantee to get back to you on the day that you know we can work out. Okay, fine. I will do that. Well, part of the problem was I hadn't had surgery on an ankle shortly before this. And my ankle, my right ankle had been repaired by our orthopedic surgeon in Victoria. And I wasn't in particular pain or anything, but I still had this big plaster thing on my foot. I was played where I had to operate on crutches. But I had to cast and what's called a cast of Neanderthal sandals in this How long was welcome.
Speaker 2 23:43
Can I help you? First of all is the generator just for those people who haven't actually seen a generator, particular
Speaker 1 23:49
electric plant is probably the top of the engine is 350 Hi, I suppose the the engine block itself is 10 inches or 12 inches thick. The crankcase is probably 15 or 18 inches in diameter. And the engine and of the generator itself. The electrical part of the generator is around sort of Pan shaped thing that is probably a couple feet in diameter. The whole thing is about four and a half five feet long. You think Billy I don't know what it weighs a whole bunch civils. So there was no way to take the whole mechanism. And so the thing was, was to disassemble it enough to remove the origin which weighed somewhere. If I would get around 100 pounds, it was just about all I could handle in and out of boats. So I got it apart. whenever it was, I think the only time we lived on five or 630 ferries, for sure. I ran into friends on it. This was in the spring and I ran into friends who are on the ferry and said so you guys do this every day don't do and they said yes in the winter makes it feel really ridiculous to get to work in the day. All right. But anyway, I got electric and they repaired it. And I got it back. And I managed to do it all without breaking up my, my cats dropping my phone or anything like that. And it all worked has been running ever since. But what's kind of an interesting problem that would happen at the same time that I had problems with myself?
Speaker 2 25:23
So were you able to, by the time you went and got it repaired? Are you able to use it at all? Or was it just not totally
Speaker 1 25:30
unusable? Yeah, we didn't really need power for everyday use. The generator had a couple of assumptions. First, it charged batteries, there were some battery life. And we could even live without the battery life. But the ultimate thing, we didn't really want to lose it the telephone. We only sold on the island was a cellular phone, and it had had power supplies. And so in the event of an emergency or something you'd like to do a little harder. And so we wanted to keep that going. The other thing was that the engine was absolutely necessary for laundry because it ran the washing machine in the dryer. And so we had to have it fixed before we've been doing laundry or worse, to take the laundry into Ganges, I suppose. And that hadn't been done on occasion. But yeah, but we didn't really want to get it and we could have lived without it for some considerable time. We ran nothing but the phone and the Phone could run for a couple weeks on that because the batteries, but we didn't want to have it back together. Did
Speaker 2 26:32
you use the did you use electric lights in the evening?
Speaker 1 26:37
We did on occasion. That house had 110 volt AC wire wiring in it like a house in the city. But we had our own generator, they were like the lights with it. So we did laundry at night. Because that way we would have the for the rest of the time we ran the oil lights. So we had quite bright oil lights of the Aladdin, which is Vera. Man, like making the kind of light almost as bright and light is guessing Latin and not quite. But they don't have the pressure where the hits and all. The light is slightly lower than that. We lived on kerosene for years incremental, but they're about the only ones out there that you've been read by. And so they're quite right. So we had the literal each had readings, there were big readers. And how do you get one of these lights that are at the sides of our chairs, and we had breaker wick type oil light scattered around the house and could walk around without walking into things. And we had a bed lamp and each of our on the side of the bed was reflectors by him that were just regular pipeline. So it was the Read Dead. And so yeah, we ran on kerosene for quite a number of years. Took a bit too long because it took me so long to overhaul another house. When we moved into the other house it was we learned a whole lot of things. We're gonna make all new mistakes and find out different ways to live. So that house is wired with total lighting throughout enormous batteries, solar panels, charging them and all that so the little house had pretty good lights. They weren't they weren't as big as the kind of like you might have in a city house but they were quite satisfactory. The bedroom the kitchen the bathroom all had small fluorescent fixtures as of right of using motorhomes and boats on the living room house, regular chandeliered with small boats that hadn't been everyday, all kinds of cool stuff. So
Speaker 2 28:38
would you in the little house and would you normally have the lights on in the evening
Speaker 1 28:48
that's up by that time we we found out what we want to do for lights and there's a firm in Victoria called soltec Sol, hyphen TK, and they are solar panel and total system specialists. They install systems and remote things for telephone repeaters in late houses and all active with commercial things as well as homes and boats in the light. And we bought all the equipment from them. It had another benefit in that the batteries were large enough that we could drop a lot of current for short periods. We had the charger, which we bought from from the same firm was a device that if the generator ran, it became a charger to charge the batteries because the generator was not running. It could take the cold water and convert it back into 120 volts AC for the house. So the there were outlets around the house because the regular house plug variety and if you plug something into it and the generator was running, they were supplied by the generator. If you plug something into the generator wasn't running, you were supplied by the battery. This meant that if you had a load that didn't draw very much current like A computer, you could run it for a long time. If you had a load to draw a lot of current, but you weren't gonna run right along like a microwave oven, you could have that and we did have dual use a hairdryer. But you know, you couldn't heat a bathroom with a with an electric heater, because that's a lot of current for a long time. The time power product is what kills you for a long time and low power or short term and high power which you couldn't have a long time of high power. But a work
Speaker 2 30:23
was needed just with a wood stove in the kitchen.
Speaker 3 30:26
It was just yeah, that was the only heat except we used an additional little kerosene space here for the cold spells and when we've been gone and needed to get the house back up to some decent temperature quickly
Speaker 1 30:41
gone away to living in winter. That was pretty cool. There's no thermostat that comes
