The same week, past years

One morning’s sheet is one morning. The question a fisherman actually asks is whether this week is late or early, wet or dry, blown out or flat — and that is a comparison, not a reading. So here are the same seven days in each of the past 11 years, from the government’s own daily record. Columns are the coming week; read down for the pattern, across for the year.

What is missing, named. The column a fisherman wants most is the one with the catch in it — what came over the rail, on those days, in those gusts. There is no public record of that and I will not manufacture one. It exists only if someone who was on the water files it: the date, what you fished for, what the water was doing. Send it and it goes in dated, with your name on it, and the comparison starts to mean something.

And the honest caveat on the rows above: rain and temperature are measured, at the Environment Canada station at the airport, roughly 20 km up the valley from the China Creek float. That is the official record of the weather coming down the valley, which is the right thing to plan a day around, but it is not a gauge at the ramp. Wind and pressure are modelled at the marina coordinate, because that is the only place a continuous record exists; treat them as the weather that came through, not the gust on the water.

The station does record its own peak gust, but only on some days, and it writes “<31” when the gust stayed under 31 km/h — so I left that column out rather than hand you one full of holes. There was once a weather station at China Creek itself, station 1036207, on the books to February 1981. Nothing since.