Men's Choir sings O Canada at the Coy Cup

The Coy Cup is the BC Senior Men's Hockey Finals held in Williams Lake this year.  Only a small contingent came out as they had only one microphone to sing into.  But they still sounded pretty great. and I'm sure you'd agree if I could only figure out how to uploud the audio!

The Community Pep Band was invited back to play throughout the week, but a suitable spot for us to play was not found so we decided not to participate.

I have been keeping busy stitching repairs on our collapsible kayak.  This involves crawling inside the nose so only a foot or 2 gets done a day.

We bought a(nother) Kayak

We have been thinking about buying a folding kayak since our current boat is very long and heavy and awkward to load and carry on top of our truck.  Leo found a used Klepper kayak advertised on Kijiji so we made a spontaneous trip to the Island to check it out.

We managed to fit in a short visit and epic sushi feed with our friends Ken and Sue in Vancouver, and the next day we took the ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo.

We stayed with former Williams Lakers John and Janice in Comox and had a great visit.  Leo got to go for a trail run in the Cumberland Hills with John and the local running club.

The kayak turned out to be just 10 minutes down the road from where we were staying.  We decided to buy it and had immediate buyers remorse.  It's very old, from the early sixties we think and it has a natural rubber bottom that is showing its age.

But when we took it home and assembled it, it was in better shape than we thought.  There's  a few tears in the canvas we can easily repair.  The main job to be done is to restitch the seams attaching the sponsons to the canvas.  The sponsons are two long inflatable tubes that run along the side of the kayak. After the frame is inserted into the skin you blow up the sponsons to make the kayak rigid.  The seller was given a quote of $600 by an upholsterer to do the job, but I'm not prepared to spend that kind of money, so I will be hand stitching it on with a sailmaker's awl.  That's 2 x the 17 foot length and some of it will involve crawling inside the skin at either end to do the stitching.  Which seems appropriate, using 100+ year-old technology to repair a 100+ year old design of kayak.

It comes complete with a sail we'll probably never use and the original (rotting) blow up rubber seat cushions (imagine if you were still using the air mattress you had in 1965).  The frame is in perfect shape and we can always order a replacement skin. 

Leo enjoying the Cumberland trails.

Community Band Canada 15 (1) Concert and Workshop

Spot Connie's grey head on the far right rear.


Our community band got a grant last year for Canada's 150th anniversary to hold a concert of Canadian music.  It didn't happen last year but we put it on in late February.

We invited Canadian composer Robert Buckley to conduct us, and playred a number of his works and also Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen), a work by Oscar Peterson and our own local composer, Rocco Catalano.  Here's more on Robert Buckley in this article in the Tribune.

We invited the 100 Mile House community band and high school students from town and 100 Mile.  So we had a full band of 60 members with a full percussion section.  We workshopped all day, then put on a concert in the evening.

It was very inspiring to play such great music with all the parts covered.

Rocco has shared his recording of us playing his composition, The Way to Barclay Sound.  When I figure out how to put it up I will.