After a week of gloriously sunny hot weather, it clouded over Thursday. Friday morning I winced at the weather forecast - wind warnings for the Queen Charlotte Islands (aka Haida Gwaii) and a swirly mass of low pressure system heading straight for us promising lotsa rain to go with the wind. I was out of the house all day running errands and then visiting and the most common comment of the day was "yep, typical music festival weather".

The annual "Edge of the World" music festival has to be the islands event most plagued by rotten weather. I can remember one nice day in total in all the festivals I've attended, which means there were about 11 wet to outright stormy days. To maximize the bad weather experience, it's held on an exposed field right by the sea, so when the wind picks up, you can be pelted with blown spume as the wind-whipped waves crash into the rip-rap barrier on the other side of the highway.

Fortunately, it also seems to be the event which attracts the most resilient spectators, with people (usually including me) huddling under the giant tent to hear act after act perform from Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon. They were down to a hardy core Friday evening when I dropped off a hitchhiker dressed in oilskins. The wind was gusting so fiercely it made driving more like sailing, as I was having to compensate for being blown sideways across the road. The rain was heavy enough to soak you through to your skin in minutes.

And Saturday the rain stopped and the sun came out. And has stayed out (apart from our brief midsummer night) right through to now, Sunday afternoon.

I didn't attend. It seemed disloyal somehow...