It was a "Donkerslee kind of day"

It was a “Donkerslee kind of day”. . . . . . . .














I should explain. Donkerslee is the name of the road that goes down to Donkerslee Beach. How they came up with the name of “Donkerslee” I don’t know. I imagine they hired a new employee that just graduated out of a prestigious University with a degree in Town Planning and sat him at a desk and told him to name the streets. Picture this, he comes to work with a tie and a white shirt and starts naming the streets. Names like Birch, Fir, Maple, then when he runs out of trees he uses Victoria, Regina, Ottawa, Edmonton, you get the picture. By then it is casual Friday, and he comes to work in jeans and a tee-shirt. After about 6 months of naming streets, and quite a few of casual Fridays, he comes in to work one day and realizes, that he went to University for four years and is now reduced to a clerk that is “responsible” for naming streets. He has used up all the names in the Dictionary, all the names of the trees, all the names of the towns and Provinces, and he still needs more names. So, he decides to have a little fun. By this time he is a babbling kind of kook, and his hair is unkempt, and he always wears jeans and tee-shirts, and some of them had not been washed for some time, he is kind of a “Super Casual” kind of employee.


Nothing like a University Graduate should look like. Definitely not Supervisor material. So he comes to work and he is feeling really rotten and he thinks of all kinds of rotten names. One of them being “Donkerslee”. One day he gets fed up with the whole thing, and moves to Australia. The Government hired him sight unseen, because he had all the right qualifications. He is now in charge of naming everything in Australia and has a set of rules where a name has to have at least 6 vowels, and no more than four consonants.


Any name that is even half way normal gets rejected. Any name that you can pronounce but can not spell gets his full approval which he expresses by jumping up on his desk and dancing a jig while clapping his hands above his head. He is definitely having fun naming streets and towns. Go to Australia and you will see the result of his work. “Malooolabaa, Maroochydor” some of them are so hard to say and definitely not easy to remember the spelling. He is having the time of his life.



OK, back to Donkerslee Beach in Powell River.

We decide to have a family type time at the beach. We take the lawn chairs, the umbrellas, the buckets, the shovels, the kites, the boats, all the toys we can gather into the car. We pack a lunch and go looking for Donkerslee Road that goes down to Donkerslee Beach right on the Ocean. We get there and there is lots of sand so we pick our spot and settle in. Nice digger in the background Hey Ed?




Get the lunch out and start digging a few holes, and get the boats out and the lifejackets, and go for a little row. Oops, we put our clothes a little close to the water so we go back to move them up to dryer sand. While we are doing this we notice that the boats are drifting away because the tide is coming in. No problem. We go get the boats and move them up really high on to the beach. By this time the sand is a little less so I decide if I am going to fly the little 3Meter Boxer Kite I better do it now while we have some sandy area to move around in. Well, last time I unpacked the 3 Meter Boxer was at Harrison Lake, and I got the lines all tangled up. It took me hours to straighten them out when we got home. So, this time, I had the lines all bundled up neatly and they were going to be straight when I unraveled them. Doing it carefully as I can I laid them all out and staked them down with the trusty screwdriver. I went to the other end and started walking the lines to get them straight. Now everything was perfect. So I was attaching the lines to the handles, and I felt a little pull on the lines. I looked back and saw that the tide was coming in and mixing seaweed with my perfectly straight lines. Great, my lines are going to get all tangled up if I try to launch this thing, and by the time I get it flying I will be in 2 feet of water. So, I better pack it up and get the lines back in the bag before they become impossible to untangle. So, I meticulously start to wind the lines up so they don’t get too messed up. 27 Meters of line. It took me a while and by that time I noticed the boat was now floating away again. So, I finished packing the 3 Meter Kite up and got the trailer for the boat and packed up the boat too, and pulled it way up on the rocks so the tide couldn’t get it. By now the tide had come in and was almost up to where we had set up the lawn chairs, but no problem we were set up pretty good. So, I decide to get my little Super Store two line Kite out and try flying it. It is a little one with two lines, and is a kind of stunt kite. There was a nice breeze blowing and it was no problem to get it going. I had it going when I had about 15 feet of line out. Then I let out more line and moved back a bit. Problem was, that there was not much sand left and I was kind of in the rocks. My kite was going all kind of different directions, and I was trying to catch my balance on the rocks. I guess the kite got kind of close to where the lawn chairs were and people started screaming at me. So, I put that kite back in the pouch and by this time there was almost no sand left and we had to move the lawn chairs. So, we decided to pack up everything and go home.

Like I say, it was a “Donkerslee” kind of day.

Next time we go back to Donkerslee Beach I think we will pay more attention to the tides, that way we might have a more enjoyable time.

It was a very nice day at Donkerslee Beach, we will definitely go back there sometime.

Kind of reminds me of a guy at work that used to go over to Starbucks and sit out in the sunshine and drink his coffee and watch the world go by. He would say it was a “Starbucks kind of day”

How is your day going?

Is it a Donkerslee kind of day or a Starbucks kind of day?

Dadost