Five members of the club - Ralph, Jay, Jim, Deme and Eric - set up a portable station at Brockton Point in Stanley park and activated the lighthouse in the annual Christmas Lights Lighthouse Party. This was our first time in the Christmas event and as it coincided with the RAC winter Contest we were looking forward to making a good number of contacts.

We arrived on side around 10:30 to over cast skies but it was dry though a bit breezy and cool. There was a TV crew taping some footage on the walk next to the lighthouse , but otherwise the place had only a few people around. We selected a spot by some benches in the grassy area just behind the lighthouse. It took only a few minutes for Jay to get his IC-706 operating with a small whip antenna. The real action started once Ralph finished setting up his buddy-pole for 20m. Our first two contacts were from the maritime provinces! Quite a good start to the day. We continued making RAC contacts for a while and then started calling CQ for the lighthouse event near 14.270. We had one station answering specifically for the contact. So that was fun knowing that at-least one person was interested in our location.

After some time on phone we switched to CW and made a few more contacts. At this time the battery we were using - Jay's portable unit - had run down enough to cause the radio to splatter across part of the band. It was bad enough that we got a phone call from an observer in San Francisco warning us about the problem. By then we had switched to Ralph's larger battery and all was fine again. By around 1:30 the contacts had slowed down and the wind had picked up making us colder. So we started to close down and finished just beofre 2pm.
It was a lovely event and all of us had a good time setting up and operating in the field location. A few visitors came over to chat and see what we were up to. They seemed to find the activity interesting and somewhat impressed with our ability to talk directly to the east coast.