TIM BELFORD

Cold enough for ya?

We were having a discussion the other day in the office about cold.

You know the kind.

"Oh, it isn't as cold as it used to be. Global warming is playing havoc with winter. When I was a kid growing up in St-Cyrille de Twickenham things froze up in October and didn't thaw until May!"

The usual drivel.

Canadians like nothing better than to talk about the cold. Everyone has his or her horror story and everyone has a favourite cold spot.

I knew a fellow once that swore the poet Robert Service was right. Things are so cold in Dawson in the Yukon, he said, that you can actually yell at your neighbour in February and he won't hear you until June when the words thaw out.

Some people swear that the coldest spot in Canada day in and day out all winter long is the corner of Portage and Main in Winnipeg.

Others stand by Rene Levesque and Peel Street in Montreal when the wind rips off the St. Lawrence.

To be honest, I'd stack up the corner of Yonge and Front Streets in downtown Toronto when there's a 60 kilometre wind off Lake Ontario and the mercury is stuck at minus 10.

One of the coldest times I ever spent was delivering newspapers in Stamford, Ontario, just outside of Niagara Falls.

The wind was making a straight, unimpeded run from Windsor to the Honeymoon Capital of the World and the only thing in its way were my ears and nose.

The temperature was only around minus 7 but stuck between those two giant ice cubes, Lakes Ontario and Erie, it might as well have been absolute zero.

The upshot was that I froze both ears and my nose. To add insult to injury, rubbing my numb nose only bruised it. So when it thawed out it turned black and blue as if someone had delivered a healthy left jab.

My ears were no better. The ridge around the edge filled in with the swelling giving me a rather dumbo- like appearance for a couple of days.

Now, that time I froze a couple or three extremities.

Since then I've been to Skagway, Alaska, in the dead of winter. I've sailed the North Atlantic when the only way to warm your hands was to rub them on a passing iceberg. And I've even snomobiled along the Lower North Shore.

But the coldest I've ever been, bar none, was in Victoria, British Columbia!

That's right. La La Land. The Left Coast. Canada's answer to California. The one place in the country people flee to in order to avoid winter.

Now, I say Victoria which isn't entirely true. In fact, I could only see Victoria from where I was, which was on a 115 foot sailing vessel.

We were in the Straights of Juan de Fuca making a run from Seattle. And it was exactly thirty-four years ago this week.

The captain of HMCS Oriole - the pride of the Canadian navy's training squadron - didn't actually have a peg leg carved out of whale bone but he was the closest I've ever come to Herman Melville's Captain Ahab.

There was about an eight-foot swell and he had decided we would make the trip under sail. That is until he changed his mind and decided it would be good practice to take down the sails under storm conditions.

Everything went well until it came time to drop the jib.

To take it down we had to work our way along the netting under the 15-foot bow sprit and then, as the sail was lowered, unclip it from the fore stay.

Standing in the netting, the bow sprit was chest high and each time the bow dipped we found ourselves waist deep in the Pacific.

Worse, each time the bow rose we came out of the water and hit the December breeze.

It was like having an icicle shoved hard where you least wanted it.

It got so that plunging into the water on the down swing was a relief.

Well we got the sail down - in record time I might add - but it was a full two days before I really started feeling my toes and several other bits of my anatomy.

So, Winnipeg is cold. It's icy in Whitehorse in February. And you can't dress warm enough on the Grande Allée in March.

But for real cold try taking a bath in the Straights of Juan de Fuca in December.