I guess that counts as winter storms…

Looking south from the Lighthouse.

We got some spicy winds and the temperature dropped out from January 30 – February 5th. With the storms came the California Sea Lions en masse: going from 58 the previous count to 168. The Jetty must be much nicer than wherever their feeding grounds are.

Temperature trends for the week.

Wind data in Km/hour. A little spicy.

I am pretty impressed with the tourism operators that visit Race Rocks: I would have assumed anything over 35 knots would make for a bad day to visit, but we maxed out with 6 tourism vessels visiting the Sea Lions and Birds of Race Rocks, even during the worse day of winds we got this week. We also got a visit by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, doing a patrol of the Ecological Preserve and ensuring the tourism vessels didn’t disturb the Sea Lions.

Wind and current working against each other can make for some lumpy wildlife viewing.

First time I’ve ever seen Sombrio Point visit Race Rocks.

Time to hide from the wind and waves.

As for Race Rocks proper things have been pretty chill. There isn’t much of a stockpile of firewood, so we’ve been scavenging any bits of wood on the island to keep warm when the winds blowing. Hopefully warm weather is coming, or we’d take some evil North wind to deliver us some new fire wood.

Scrounging for any wood to keep things from freezing.

Mammals:

• Stellar Sea lions: 70
• California Sea lion: 168
• Harbour Seal: 22
• Sea Otter: 1 (Ollie?)

Birds

• Gulls: 55
• Cormorants: 30
• Eagle: 4 Adult, 5 Juvenile
• Turnstones: 14
• Canada Geese: 8 – 4 breeding pairs trying to hunker down
• Oystercatcher: 25
• Pigeon Guillemots: 45

Boats

• Tourism: 6
• Private: 0
• Government: 1