Memorial Day Weekend on the Oregon Coast

Memorial Day Weekend on the Oregon Coast

Marine Rescue Response

Today I had the opportunity to participate in a Washington State Ferries Marine Rescue Response exercise. The WSF puts on an exercise of this scale only once every four years as there is only one spare ferry in the fleet, and this takes two ferries to run. Basically the scenario is that one ferry breaks down or has some other emergency that requires its passengers to abandon ship. I volunteered as one of the passengers, although I was not one of the injured passengers. Some mannequins were even thrown in the water to serve as over board passengers.

Evacuating a ferry consists of the following simple steps. First, you assemble at the passenger assembly station. Then you lift up all the seats and find a life jacket. You put it on. Then you help the person next to you put theirs on, only to discover the problem is not that they are an idiot, but rather that the straps on their life vest are all messed up, so you need to find them a replacement life vest. Once that's all said and done, you are given a pencil. Then a zip tie. Then a form you fill out consisting of your name, address, medical history, boarding information, and emergency contacts. Once you fill that out, you zip tie it to yourself. But not your life vest, because that might be removed later, so to your clothing. Oh, right, and the boat you're on is still sinking.

So then you form a big conga line where you put your hand on the passenger in front of you. You wind down the stairs to the vehicle deck, and when it's your turn, you slide down the Marine Evacuation Slide (MES), which because the ferry you're on isn't actually sinking and is just part of an exercise, hasn't been loaded with cars and thus is riding much higher in the water than it otherwise would thus making the MES more like an MEC (Marine Evacuation Cliff).

Once you're in the life raft, hopefully you know how to make the self bailer work, because otherwise you need to hope the nice folks in the rescue boats have a bucket you can use to bail. They do? Great, pass it over! Oops. Quick, grab the bucket before it sinks. Oops, that sank pretty quickly. Anyone else have a bucket? Oh, you do? Great. Don't hand it over, toss it into the middle of the life raft. Clearly passing it is prone to user error, which results in an unrecoverable problem. Once you've started bailing the life raft, the rescue boats (one in front, one in back) will push (back) and pull (front) the life raft to the other ferry, where you'll re-board using a reboarding ladder (which gives you traction to climb up the MES).

On the way back to the ferry terminal after the exercise, we even got to see Orcas! Despite the bitter-sounding sarcasm above, today was incredibly fun, and a very valuable look at how a real shipboard emergency might play out. If you ever get the chance to do something like this, I highly recommend it! Thanks to the Washington State Ferries for inviting (or being desperate enough to invite?) King County Search and Rescue to participate in their training.

You can view all of my photos and videos, or you can take to the skies and see what the KIRO 7 TV helicopter saw [news article | video 1 | video 2]

Mariner's Game vs Detroit Tigers

Evacuating a ferry

Going on a heck of a ferry ride today!

Wishlist

It was pointed out to us that some period of time before major gift-giving occasions, we should post a link to the relevant wishlist(s) so that folks who are going to get us gifts anyway have a better idea of what to get. With that in mind, I spent some time this weekend updating my wishlist, and without further ado, I present to you: my wishlist.

Free Pizza!

Why? Because we rode ourbikes.

Our New Retaining Wall

Michal built it about two weeks ago to help level the front yard. It looks fabulous!

San Juan Islands

Lake Chelan

As alluded to in the previous post, last weekend we took a long weekend trip with our friends Ethan and Stefanie to Lake Chelan, somewhere none of us had ever been. It's known as a summer getaway for Seattlites because it's hot and has a lake you can swim in. Turns out that pretty much nothing is open until Memorial Day, so we primarily focused on wine tasting at the numerous wineries in the area. See all the photos.

The Spoils of War

Or perhaps just the spoils of a wine tasting trip to Lake Chelan.

Easter Basket Blessing

Mt baker easter egg hunt

Lazy Lap Dog Sunday

Olympics Wrapup

Today, Sunday March 21, is the first day of spring. It's also the date of the closing ceremonies of the 10th Paralympic Winter Games, and marks the end of a long journey for Vancouver (and for us as well -- the first round of tickets we bought were on October 31, 2008!).

I've always enjoyed by-the-numbers summaries, so that's what I'll do here. Because I went to a Paralympic event on March 20th, the world "Olympics" will include the Paralympics as well.

10,429 - photos taken during the Olympics. This ranged from 196 curling photos to 2,067 short track speed skating photos.
2,285 - photos deleted for blurriness or other problems (22%). This ranged from 54 Paralympic super combined photos to 472 Olympic ski jump and skeleton photos.
270 - number of minutes it generally took to get to Whistler from Seattle during the Olympics, including a drive to Squamish and a bus from there to Whistler (about 30 miles further North).
240 - distance, in miles, between Seattle and Whistler.
188 - photos from the Olympics which I thought best represented the experience. See them here.
48 - the number of tickets I originally ordered in the Phase 1 ticket lottery to 24 different events (the maximum allowed). It took me 14 days to plan this order, which sought to gain tickets to at least one of each different sport discipline and see at least one event in every Olympic venue.
16 - the number of tickets I received from my initial Phase 1 lottery order (for 8 different events) or just 25% of my request.
15 - the number of different sports disciplines appearing in the Olympics.
11 - the number of competitions I attended.
10 - the number of days I was in Canada during the Olympics.
10 - the number of lanes open at Canadian customers.
9 - the number of different venues hosting Olympic competitions
9 - the number of different sports disciplines I attended (60%).
8 - the number of round-trips to Canada which I made during the Olympics.
6 - the number of venues in which I saw competitions held. I did not visit the Richmond Olympic Oval (venue for speed skating), Canada Hockey Place (venue for men's ice hockey and ice hockey finals), nor Cypress Mountain (venue for snowboard and freestyle skiing events). However, I did volunteer in February 2009 for the freestyle skiing world cup events at Cypress Mountain, so I think I have a pretty good idea what it would have been like.
6 - the number of tickets I ordered in Phase 2 (which wasn't a lottery) to augment my initial purchase, for a total of 3 more events.
5 - different people, including Sarah, who attended at least one event with me. (7 if you count people who independently bought tickets to events we attended; 9 if you also count people who used my tickets to see an event we were not able to attend because we were at another event at the same time; 13 if you could people who used my tickets to see events).
3 - nights spent in Canada, all of which were in the trailer. 2 people around us turned around and wanted to know where we found such cheap lodging when a survey-taker in Whistler asked us how much we were paying to spend the night ($100).
2 - the number of medals I could touch (both bronze).
1 - pair general admission tickets that I had were canceled due to lack of snow (at Cypress Mountain). Not coincidentally, CoSport has yet to refund the purchase price of the same 1 pair of tickets. (Boo CoSport, boo!)
1 - ticket on which I lost money (I did not recoup fees as I had to sell last-minute at face value)
1 - event on which I made money by selling the pair of tickets (biathlon on February 14th) for about twice what I had paid. I would have love to have gone, but the schedule just didn't work out.
1 - new world records I personally witnessed (possibly more, but I just wasn't paying attention to the scoreboards all the time!)
0 - tickets that I had which went to waste. If I couldn't go to an event or if I had extra tickets, I was always able to sell the ticket or find a friend to go with me.

See a set of the best photos from the Olympics, along with descriptive captions.

Paralympics: Men and Women's Super Combined

On Saturday, March 20th I decided I wanted to see a bit of the Paralympics while I could, so without a ticket I hopped in my car at 6am, and by 10am I had driven all the way to Whistler, parked my car across the main street from the venue, and had purchased a ticket. (Category A tickets were sold out, but general admission seemed pretty available). I didn't really know what the event was, but it turned out that due to the poor weather forecast for Sunday, all Super Combined events would take place on Saturday. This included three categories for each of men and women (visually impaired, sitting, and standing) and both sports (Super-G and Slalom). See all the photos from the super combined.

Alpine skiing competition has four primary events. In all events, the goal is to get down the hill faster than your competitors while not missing any gates. Downhill is the classic, with the fastest speeds and the fewest gates. Slalom is the most technical, and slowest. It has so many gates there's not even room for the gates, so all they do is put up blue and red poles which the competitors must go around. In between these two extremes are two other events: the Giant Slalom and the Super-G. The giant slalom has less gates than slalom, and the super-G has even fewer gates (but both have more gates -- and thus turns -- than the downhill). Super combined simply combines one run of slalom with one run of super-G. The shorted combined time wins.

I'm really glad I went to a Paralympic event, and I'm disappointed in myself that I didn't go to more. These athletes deserve the same -- if not more -- respect as traditional Olympic athletes. There were definitely fewer of them -- for instance, only six women in the visually impaired category. But skiing blind with a guide is something that is very difficult to overcome and takes a tremendous amount of courage to do. I'm very glad that the Paralympics exist in the first place -- it's a wonderful aspect of society as a whole that we recognize these athletes. However, the events are much smaller, and I'm thankful the Paralympics are attached to the Olympics and as such get to use the same venues which would otherwise never be built to the same scale just for the Paralympics.

Among the many differences between the Olympics and Paralympics the first that's noticeable is the logo. Instead of the Olympic rings we have the three Paralympic swooshes. The existing Olympic logos were covered up everywhere from the backs of the volunteer smurf outfits to the giant sheet covering the Olympic rings on the alpine hillside. The Paralympics have much less interest in them from the media -- I wasn't able to find a single broadcast on TV locally. There's also less interest from the public -- I didn't see any scalpers, and traffic restrictions were entirely gone. I drove myself to Whistler and had no problems parking a five minute walk away from the venue. Security entering the venue was also non-existent. Sure, they checked the ticket, but for the Olympics there were careful bag searches and x-ray machines. Nothing of the sort entering the Paralympics. Another difference is the Panasonic name on many of the banners and the finish line posts -- the Olympics were a bit less commercial in that respect. Additionally, I didn't attend an Olympic alpine skiing event, but in the events I did attend at the Olympics, the commentators did not provide running commentary during the competition like that which you expect on TV (ie, the athlete's history and descriptions of the action) while the Paralympic commentators did just that.

Other differences stemmed from simply being at the end of the Games. Excess maps were being put to use as headwear for the volunteers left and right. With daylight savings time, daylight lasted until 7:30pm. The atmosphere was more relaxed as well -- maybe it was less pressure from the world's media or perhaps just the knowledge that everything was drawing to a close. Of course there weren't the big Victory Ceremonies of the Olympics with A-list bands nor were any of the athletes really celebrities. There were fewer athletes as well, and the differences between them were often measured in seconds and not hundredths of seconds. The Paralympics also had more of a focus on disabled spectators -- more accessible seating and ramps were built over the two week gap from the Olympics.

If I had to pick one, I'm not sure if I prefer the Olympics or the Paralympics. Perhaps I'd just rather think of them as one global sporting event where all kinds of athletes come together from all kinds of countries to compete. It's been absolutely wonderful having both of these events so close to my home that I've been able to experience as much as I have over the past month. More than anything, I'd like to thank all of the athletes -- especially those who didn't get a medal -- who put in so much hard work and dedication because in the end, it wouldn't have been possible without you.

Bonus! Paralympics!

Now That Is a Happy Cat

The seriously sunny weather here is making more than just the humans happy.

Powder Day at Crystal Mountain

Absolutely great skiing on top of 20 or so inches of powder!

Short Track Speed Skating

On Friday, February 26 Sarah and I went to the Pacific Coliseum to see the only city-based (ie, not in Whistler) Olympic event we would attend together. Apolo Anton Ohno was a very classy athlete, applauding his competitors as they were announced and shaking hands with everyone after the race. Held at the same venue as the figure skating, it had by far the most comfortable seating we had yet experienced. And to top off the entire experience, not only did Apolo get his 8th medal, but one of his relay team ran into the stands and gave his mother the Bronze medal, and she was gracious enough to allow us to pose with it! (And it is surprisingly heavy!) See all the photos from the day.