We’ve had several days of warm weather—though it still goes below freezing at night—and much of the ice has left the harbour. It’s been an odd spring. Because it’s warming so gradually (almost imperceptibly???) there has been no sudden melt, no great rush of ice. It’s just dissolved slowly. All that’s left now are a few patches of ice so thin they can’t support the weight of a Canada goose. Though they can hold a gull. Or two.

We’ve pulled our bubblers, scrubbed a winter’s worth of grunge off of them (fine, Chris scrubbed, I watched, but I think moral support counts for a lot). Although there are no buds on the trees yet, no signs of spring flowers (except the ones I’ve brought home from the grocery store), our list of boat chores has suddenly blossomed. Our biggest job this spring will be replacing the teak on the aft deck, then the whole deck will be as good as new. Better maybe. We’re gluing it down and screwing it, which is a lot of work, but I don’t think it will lift again. At least not anytime soon.

I’m also hoping to varnish the starboard cap rail before we head back to Toronto Island, but that may not happen. Before we leave Port Credit—in less than a month, we’re hoping, but we’ll see—I have to spring clean the boat from bow to stern, empty out every locker and get rid of a winter’s worth of things we’ve stashed away, replace our sweaters and parkas and boots with raincoats and running shoes. The list goes on and on.

But I’m not sure I’ll have time for any of this. Yesterday I bought myself an expensive pair of running shoes and some running pants (and socks) from Lulu Lemon. I am now financially committed to learning to run, which is something a person should just know how to do, but I’m hoping to figure out a way to run further than forty feet without gasping for breath.

The nice man at the running store said to run for a minute, walk for a minute, then when that became easy, run for two minutes, walk for a minute and so on. But how you run while looking at your watch is beyond me. Surely that’s a recipe for disaster. So I’ve measured out a route along the waterfront trail. I’ll walk for three lampposts, run for three, then build up my running time from there.

So check back here in a few weeks’ time. There might be a really nice pair of running shoes for sale.

There’s a bevy of redheads in the bay this morning. No, I’m not talking about buxom women—I’m talking about a raft of redhead ducks who have settled in the open water around the travel lift. They keep to themselves, want nothing to do with the Canada geese and mallards who hang out there, waiting for handouts from the nice marina guy who’s been slipping them birdseed all winter. I think the redheads are embarrassed by the way the resident waterfowl flock to the sound of the forklift he drives, follow it along the quay. What kind of behaviour is that?

No, the redheads cluster as far away from the Canada geese and mallards as they can get, sleep for the most part—I wonder how far they’ve flown?—though one of them always keeps a sharp lookout.

Redheads are uncommon in these parts, according to my Peterson guide, not like the scaup and buffleheads who pass through every spring. The longtails (don’t call them oldsquaw any more!) are back too. Their querulous call is unmistakable, and they do like to call to each other constantly. I heard them way out on the water before I saw them this year.

There’s another new bird around this morning, one I’m always happy to see. Bica and I were walking towards the river when I heard a deep, musical honking. It was a pair of trumpeter swans, just passing through, and they were warning the resident mute swans to stay away from their chick, if you can call a bird that’s almost a year old and almost fully grown that. But his dusky colouring gave him away, and the way he paddled along behind his parents, oblivious to any danger. The mute swans raised their wings and arched their necks but stayed a safe distance away.

Sorry I don’t have a picture of the tundra swans, or the redhead ducks. You just can’t take pictures of birds with an iPhone—or at least I can’t. I include here a fuzzy image of a flock of longtails just to confirm that fact.

I guess if I’m going to write about birds here, I’d better get a proper camera.

It’s spring!

Okay. Maybe not quite.

Fine: it’s not spring at all, but there are hopeful signs.

For one thing, the ice is receding a bit further every day now. There’s a large pool of open water around the boat—our whole slip is free of ice, actually. And we’ve turned off the bow bubbler, leaving only the stern bubbler on to discourage ice from floating into our slip rather than harmlessly out into the lake.

Three male mergansers are now sharing our slip with us, preening and fluffing themselves up, scrapping, each trying hard to chase the other two away. There are no females around that I can see. Maybe they come later, once the winner has been decided. Hey, look at this slip, baby. Nice, eh?? And it’s all mine. Well except obviously for this sailboat.

Plus five this morning, according to the weather network. But minus five with the wind chill—I must remember to look at that before we set out on our walk. I wore my spring coat today, which I’ll admit now was a mistake, and my running shoes. It was so nice to walk without heavy boots on. Bica shivered along beside me. Okay, maybe it was a bit early for her spring haircut, but she’s all ready for the warm weather when it comes.

We walked north along the waterfront, keeping the strong northwest winds at our back. The huge banks of snow that formed along the shoreline have diminished but not disappeared—they are smooth black lumps now, rotten looking, ugly. You’ll be glad I spared you a picture.

I had originally planned to walk all the way to Adamson Estate, which is several kilometres away, to help myself to some forsythia cuttings, if there was no-one around, but we only made it as far as Tall Oaks Park, which is much closer. One of the oaks is a little less tall this morning—it was damaged in the winter storms and now it’s gone. But there’s no danger of tripping over the stump… They’ve painted it a bright orange. I’m not sure that a missing tree is a hopeful thing but the fact that spring clean up has begun is promising.

We started back to the boat, walking briskly into the wind, my nose running, my eyes full of tears, Bica’s ears blowing straight up, which is cute but must be cold and certainly makes the world a lot louder. On the way we passed a bicycle which was also confused about the season. Is it Christmas? Valentine’s Day? It just wasn’t sure.

And now we’re back, and my fingers have more or less thawed out (I wore my spring gloves, also a mistake). The wind is picking up and the boat is rocking wildly. This just might be a read my book at Starbucks kind of day.

But spring is just around the corner.

Isn’t it?

When we’re away from the boat, I always picture it all by itself out at the end of the dock, lonely, missing us, waiting for us to come back. But when we returned to the boat this morning, there were clear signs that life goes on here when we’re away.

The first thing I noticed was a set of tracks coming across the ice from the breakwall behind us, skirting the open water around the boat, disappearing at the edge of the dock in front of the boat, reappearing on the other side, and wandering off to the next dock. The snow around the tracks had melted too much for me to make out whose they were, but I think it could only have been a coyote—they were too big for a mink or a fox and I don’t think someone’s dog would be wandering around on the ice. Coyotes visit the breakwall regularly in the spring, raiding the nests of the Canada Geese who lay their eggs there. Maybe I’m not the only one out here looking for signs of spring.

The coyote may have been drawn by the dead fish that has appeared on the ice beside the open water at our stern—minus its head. I’m thinking that’s probably the handiwork of the mink I’ve surprised on the dock a few times this winter. I don’t know why it only ate the head. The rest of it looks pretty good to me. But clearly the mink and the coyote know something I don’t.

There are signs of human activity out here too. Someone has carefully broken up the ice in front of the safety ladder. I’m grateful for this—once it really sets in, it’s impossible to break. Was it someone from the marina, I wonder? No. I haven’t seen a marina worker on the docks since before Christmas. I think they hibernate. One of our neighbours, then. It feels good to know someone is keeping an eye on things when we’re not here.

But here’s the most exciting thing that happened while we were away. The wind, the sun, and the rising temperatures combined forces to free the boat from the ice. We’re floating again! Well, I guess we were always floating, but we’re floating free now, not locked in the ice. We’re a boat again, not a cabin frozen against a dock.

As I write this, the wind is rocking the boat gently from side to side. The oil lamp above my head is swinging again, as it should, the lines are creaking, the fenders complaining about being squeezed between the boat and the dock.

All is right with the world.

It’s back down to minus 18 again this morning but there’s no wind to speak of and the sun is shining weakly through the clouds. Not a bad day for a walk. Since we came across that poor Canada goose, Bica and I have been walking the other way along the lakefront, avoiding the river where the geese huddle on—and sometimes in—the ice.

But this morning we came across another creature in distress. I was ambling along, looking out over the lake at the big ice pack on the horizon, at the flock of buffleheads in the open water just off shore, when Bica came to an abrupt halt.

“Come on,” I said, giving her leash a tug.

But she wouldn’t move. She was looking at a ball of fur huddled at the base of a tree. I stepped between her and the creature, leaned over for a closer look. A head popped up, grey face with a black mask. A raccoon. It had been chewing its right front paw, stared at me for a moment, then went back to work. Frostbite? What should I do? It looked skinny, and sick, actually—it’s fur all disheveled.

“Excuse me…”

I turned around. On the street behind me was a white van with blue paw prints on the side. Animal Services. A woman in a blue uniform was calling to me.

“Is there a raccoon there?

“Yes,” I said. She opened the side of the van, pulled out a wire cage, a blanket, a snare attached to a long pole.

“I was wondering who to call. I didn’t know you came out for wild animals.”

“Yep. Just call 311.”

She set down the cage on the path, arranged newspapers in the bottom of it, then approached the raccoon. It looked up at her but didn’t make any attempt to run away. Slowly, carefully, she started to slide the snare over the raccoon’s head. That got its attention. It tried to climb the tree, but it was so lethargic she had the snare around its middle before it got very far. Gently she removed it from the tree and dropped it in the cage, which had an ingenious sort of lid that allowed her to close it before removing the snare from the animal.

She tucked her shoulder-length blonde hair behind her ears and leaned over to have a look at it.

“What do you think?”

“Distemper,” she said. “Crusty eyes, runny nose. We’re seeing a lot of it. This guy’s really sick.”

I backed up a few steps. Bica is vaccinated, of course, but still. She covered the cage with a blanket, picked it up.

“Is there anything you can do?”

“We can make sure he doesn’t suffer and doesn’t spread the infection. Distemper is almost always fatal.”

I understand. They’ll euthanize him. Which seems a lot better than chewing your own paw off.

“Thanks,” I say. And I mean it.

You probably wish I had taken a picture of the raccoon, the Animal Services worker, the whole procedure. But I couldn’t bring myself to pull my phone out of my pocket. It seemed disrespectful somehow, to the raccoon, to the woman. I feel sorry for the raccoon, who has probably been euthanized by now. And a little relieved.

But mostly I feel grateful to the woman for taking care of him.

We came back from a weekend away to find the boat frozen in at the stern. We knew this would happen—the stern bubbler stopped working just before we left and we unplugged it, just to be safe. The bow bubbler was struggling to keep the ice away, but in this kind of cold, it’s a losing battle. Ice is creeping along the side of the boat, closer and closer to the solid ice at the stern. Many more days of this cold and we’ll be able to skate around the boat.

But we’re not the only ones. Many boats in the marina are completely frozen in, which is a concern for fibreglass boats, which could be crushed, I think, less of a concern for steel boats. In fact, there’s a steel boat here that doesn’t bother with bubblers, just freezes in every winter, and so far, no harm done.

I wonder how they stand the stillness. It’s strange to me to not be rocking with the wind. The oil lamp above the table remains perfectly still, no matter how strong the gusts. This winter, 20-knot winds have not been unusual, from the north, for the most part, with gusts to 30. That must be what was happening when we froze in—we are heeled over to port. Way over. I’ve had to latch the lockers on the starboard side or they hang wide open. It’s like we’re frozen in time.

And we are, in a way. There’s no end to this cold in sight. I scroll ahead through the weather forecast, nothing above freezing as far as the forecast goes. You know it’s a tough winter when you’re excited to see minus single digits. Balmy by comparison to the minus 30s we saw on the weekend, the minus 18 we’ll wake up to tomorrow morning when this warm spell (it’s minus 8 right now!) passes.

This morning Bica and I came across a Canada Goose frozen into the ice under the bridge. Its companions had all flown to the safety of the open water at the mouth of the river for the day, but this one’s feet are frozen into the ice. How does that happen, I wonder? And why doesn’t it happen more often? Some kind soul had thrown a piece of bread on the ice so it would have something to eat, but I think the more merciful thing to do is leave it in peace. There’s no way it’s going to be able to free itself. It’s already weak from struggling, barely able to raise its head and hiss at us as we pass. I hope a coyote gets it—surely that’s better than a long slow death from starvation. Though maybe freezing to death in the night is a little gentler.

I think I’ll walk somewhere else tomorrow morning.

Stale bread, sure, but French toast? This morning someone left a pile of French toast under the bridge for the pigeons. How did that happen? A Sunday brunch gone sadly wrong?? Family get-togethers can be like that.

The pigeons are happy, though. As Bica and I rounded the corner, a big flock of them, more than I’ve ever seen there, flew up from the path under the bridge and perched on the steel girder, waiting for us to pass so they could get back to their breakfast. And they weren’t the only ones enjoying it—a big male mallard was sleeping it off in the middle of the path, too full of French toast to take flight, I think. He waddled away.

It’s still quite cold, but it’s a beautiful sunny day, which makes all the difference. Bica and I went for a long walk along the river, keeping to the path, for the most part—Bica can’t manage the deep snow any more. But she still wants me to throw snowballs for her. I lob one into the field beside the path, she bounds as far as she can, gets stuck, I wade out and extract her. Again? Again?

We disturb the pigeons again on the way back. Bica could chase snowballs forever but I have to tend to the boat. The ice is creeping towards the hull, the pool of water the bubblers makes is getting smaller and smaller. I borrow a two by four from one of our neighbours, plant my feet firmly on the dock and break up as much ice as I can reach, being careful not to reach out too far. I’m not supposed to do this when I’m here alone, in case the two by four slips and I fall in, but I’m very careful. Funny, if I caught Chris doing this when he was here by himself, I’d give him hell. But I’m much more willing than he is to sacrifice a two by four, if necessary, even a borrowed one.

That task completed, I return the two by four and grab a shovel. Yesterday I cleared the dock as far as the boat. Today I’ll clear to the end of the dock, in case we need to adjust our lines. Our life ring hangs on the electrical pole at the stern of the boat. It looks funny there—the water around the end of the dock is frozen solid. If someone fell of the dock, they could just stand up and step back on. I clear the lines, and the life ring, check that our electrical cords are firmly plugged in, now that I can get to them. All good.

But I’m hungry now. Maybe I’ll make myself some French toast.

So the Canada Geese huddled in the shelter of the harbour here yesterday morning were half right. We did get a storm, but not as much snow as I had feared. And the wind is more north than northwest, so it’s pinning us against the dock, the fenders squealing in protest.

Bica and I had a very short walk this morning—we went only as far as the end of the quay, staying in the shelter of the marina building as much as possible. The snow has stopped but the temperature has plummeted—it’s minus 10 this morning, but with the wind chill, it feels like minus 20. My cheeks were frozen by the time we got back.

Despite the cold, I shovelled the dock in front of the boat, being extra careful to clear the safety ladder. If someone went in, I don’t know if they’d be able to get to the ladder. The shock of the cold water, they say, stops your heart. May I never find out.

Back inside now, warm again, just made myself a cup of coffee. The sun has found its way through a break in the clouds and is streaming in through the portholes, picking out the pot of purple hyacinths above the sink, the jars of coffee and tea on the shelf behind the stove, the oven… Hmm…sun should never shine directly into an oven.

I could, I suppose, clean the oven. I should make an attempt to straighten out the V-berth. My niece is coming to stay with us for a couple of nights next week—I don’t think she’d appreciate sleeping with our shower bags and the laundry basket and our new heat exchanger and a pile of books I must figure out how to get rid of.

Maybe after I’ve finished my coffee. Wouldn’t want it to get cold.

I’d like to say I know there’s a storm coming because I’ve studied the lowering clouds, sensed the wind picking up, felt the change in temperature. But actually the geese gave it away. When I left the boat this morning to take Bica for her walk, the inner bay here at the marina was thick with Canada Geese. They only gather here in bad weather.

I have a feeling my afternoon exercise will take the form of shoveling snow off the dock, so I took Bica for an extra-long walk. Once I’d finished my commute, of course. Each morning Chris heads off to catch the 6:40 GO train into the city, his book and a thermos of coffee in his briefcase, and I take my thermos and book back to bed and read until it gets light enough to venture out. Twice when I’ve gone out before it’s fully light, Bica and I have encountered coyotes on our walk, urban coyotes who trot past you on the path without glancing sideways at you. Which should make them less scary, but doesn’t. They’re wild looking things. People say a dog Bica’s size is safe, but I don’t want to find out. I keep her on her leash. Well, most of the time, anyway.

This morning I took her to the playing fields behind the arena, a wide open space where I can see if there are any coyotes lurking around, and threw her ball for her for a while. A long while. I always tire of the game before she does. On the way back to the boat, we came across a fresh kill, a pigeon under the bridge that crosses the river. A coyote getting ready for the storm? I looked around nervously, but the coyote was long gone. All that was left was a pile of feathers. Some kind person puts cheerios on a ledge under the bridge for the birds, not realizing that they are actually luring them to their death.

By the time we got back to the boat, snow had started to fall and the wind was rising steadily. Fortunately, it’s from the northwest so it slices between the boat and the dock, pushing us off rather than slamming us against the fenders with every gust. I think Bica and I will weather the storm quite comfortably. At least as comfortably as that coyote curled up in its den with a full belly. And certainly more comfortably than those poor geese.

I don’t know why I think they are fox tracks. Maybe it’s the way they wander along beside the river, sometimes following the trail, more often not. They circle a clump of weeds, looking for mice maybe? I imagine that I can see places where a furry tail has brushed the new-fallen snow. Then I find a place where the tracks plunge down the bank and, avoiding the patches of open water, meander to the other side. I don’t think a dog would do that.

Bica is very interested in these tracks, whatever made them. She sniffs them carefully, backs away. Hmm. Maybe they are coyote tracks. I scan the woods around us just in case. Sometimes, when the river is frozen like this, they cross to our side. We hear them at night, hunting in the woods behind the townhouse, or at least we hear the screams of rabbits. But the woods, the frozen river, the flats on the other side are deserted. Bica and I are alone, as far as I can see.

Yes, it’s well into January and we are still in Waterloo, where we spend Christmas each year. But this year, I was laid low by the flu, I’m still as weak as a kitten. We decided to stay in the warmth and comfort of the townhouse for an extra week. Which means we’ve been away from the boat for more than two weeks. Chris has been back a couple times, to check the lines, to make sure the bubblers are keeping ice from forming around the hull. All is well, he reports. There is a wistfulness in his voice. He prefers the boat to any sort of dirt dwelling, as he calls them, even in the dead of winter.

And it is proper winter now. Bica romps along the path ahead of me, burying her muzzle in the snow from time to time, looking back to make sure I’m still coming. Why are you so slow? Not that she is particularly fast these days. She drags her back leg now, I can see the funny track she makes in the snow—three clear paw prints then a long smudge. A couple of times her bad leg gives out on her, she falls over, but gets right back up as if nothing has happened. I meant to do that.

I scan the flat grey sky, looking for eagles. I think a pair is wintering here. I’ve seen them several times since I’ve been well enough to creep along the river, a little further each day. Would an eagle take a dog, I wonder? A lame dog, maybe. I call Bica back, keep her closer to me. She looks up at me as she trots along beside me. What?

The ferocity of this flu took me by surprise. Christmas Day I was fine, then I was flat on my back in bed, didn’t rise again for almost a week. I didn’t think this could happen. I’m never sick, not even a cold. How did this happen?

And if this can happen, what else can?

A cold gust of wind sweeps down through the woods, out across the river, snow whirls ahead of it, is whisked high into the sky. The patches of open water are black and oily, the river boils up briefly, then is forced back under the ice. A fox wouldn’t have a chance. Or a dog. Or me, least of all.

But I am getting stronger each day. Tomorrow we will move back to the boat. Only three more months of winter. If we’re lucky.