Anachron 27 – Saltery Bay Clock, British Columbia 1947

 

It says much for my dear wife’s organisational skills that from 2,000 miles away she had arranged for our guide, Mr Girard, to meet us off the boat from Vancouver with umbrellas. Without her relentless attention to detail, I doubted our Anachron adventure would have progressed nearly as smoothly as it has! As for Mr Girard, I found him to be a most agreeable, if somewhat overly talkative host. Indeed, within an hour of arriving, Mr Girard had talked Captain Ellis and I all the way around the bay to where Anachron 27 glowed spectrally in the cold Pacific Ocean.

Salt-burned and damaged by a ferry collision in 1947, the Saltery Clock was still an impressive 231-yard Anachron weighing in at an excess of seven thousand tonnes. The alarm hammer alone would feed a foundry for a week and the crystal cover was 4 feet thick! Ever observant, Captain Ellis remarked privately that the yellow-green hue of the radium dial was an exact match to the porch light on Mr Girard’s fishing lodge across the bay. Of this, Mr Girard made no mention.

With the day quickly falling to night, I ascended precariously by rope ladder to the top deck, as Mr Girard called it. The view from the vast metal carapace, riven by deep fissures like those found in the northern ice fields, repaid my exertion seven fold. I peered into one such crack and became momentarily preoccupied with the hollow whump and whistle of trapped air and the creak of springs and wheels. Here was a thing alive!

Mr Girard, savouring the visit of a fellow Anachronist (for he clearly enjoyed little by way of support from the local population), marked the occasion by opening a parcel of boeuf fumé! And there we stood, under the cathedral-like domes of the bells, enjoying the delicacy like it was a normal everyday occurrence. We ended with a toast to the colossus of the Sunshine Coast and I sincerely thanked Mr Girard for his stewardship; an endorsement that made the dear fellow swell with pride.

We remained in Saltery Bay for two more days taking measurements and recording the commentaries of the locals. There is little to report here of such discussions aside from the unexplained disappearance of a local fur trapper and the discovery of a dismembered grizzly bear.

Footnote
It behoves me to report I received a telegram from Mr Girard, not six months following my visit, stating that his beloved clock had crumpled into the sea. Those parts that could be salvaged were taken by barge ship to a breaker east of Vancouver Island.