A double adventure in Chilliwack

J im and I had been planning on activating the Island 22 park in Chilliwack for a few weeks. Our first planned date was thwarted by a virus that decided I needed to heed its demands. Once that was dealt with, I was ready to join Jim on our adventure to Chilliwack. Jim came by my place with his truck at 10am and I loaded my gear into it and we set off for the Island Park. I enjoyed not being the driver on this trip, it gave me time to enjoy the countryside as we made our way. Unfortunately, 16th Ave was a bit slow with large trucks but we still made reasonable time to the park.

Island 22 Regional Park is situated on an island that was formed by the Fraser River. Today it is not much of an island,  it has the river on the north and west, a narrow partial slough on the south and east separates it from the main portion of the valley. A narrow section of land connects it to the next island which forms much of Chilliwack. On arrival we did a short tour of the parking area and selected a nice parking stall facing north where there is a grassy picnic area. That allowed us to raise the antenna mast that is supported by a bracket attached to the front of Jim’s truck. This allows us to quickly deploy and then to sit in his cab to operate. A nice warm spot for the colder winter months. While Jim was raising the mast I wandered the local area and gathered a few photos, scenes of the river provide lots of interesting views.

Once set up, we scanned the bands and found nothing on 10m that we could hear, moving to the 15m band we were able to work three other park activators – Texas, Arizona and Wyoming. We decided that 15m was good and we selected a frequency and began calling. Very quickly we were called by a station in Pennsylvania, followed by California and Wisconsin. The band was working well and for the next half hour we completed 35 contacts. It was a good activation and we enjoyed reaching out to operators in Florida to New Brunswick and across to California. We could have continued but we had more than needed and we wanted to get to the second park. Packing up was fast and we were soon on the road to the Fairfield Park which was quite close by.

Fairfield is a recreation park; it is mostly ball fields. The parking lot is in a couple of segments and once we drove around it we chose a stall facing east this time and following the same pattern we used at Island 22 we stretched out the antenna. The ground was quite frozen here and we were unable to get the stake into the dirt on the south side. Fortunately lying the stake on the ground where it can hold the antenna wire out from the mast is sufficient for what we do. This time we stayed on 15m and worked a few other operators from this location and then we began our calling. Responses came in quite quickly as before. It was a good day on the bands and we made 32 contacts in short order. We finished by scanning the 20m band where we found a pair of operators doing a three-park activation (three overlying parks). We contacted them and between all the combinations of their 3 parks two operators and the two of us we got credit for 6 contacts each!

Done with radio for the day we packed away our gear and set out for the Cottonwood mall in Sardis. There we decided to visit Earls for lunch. We both ordered a burger and quite enjoyed our meals. They make quite a decent burger. Done with lunch we set out for home. 16th was again running slowly but it gave us extra time to chat and think about the state of the world and how we would fix it. The day was a great success, two new parks for me bringing my total now to 130. We plan to visit another two later in February.