I attended the Soundwave Electronic Music Festival at Mussel Beach near Ucluelet, BC. Unfortunately, there’s a big music festival in Australia with the same name, so it’s not googleable.

We left Victoria Friday morning but our critical path included waiting for the Ucluelet liquor store to open at 10am. Next time we’ll be sure to buy our alcohol well in advance.

The logging road to Mussel Beach was recently graded and probably the easiest logging road drive I’ve ever been on. Parking was accomplished by a routing volunteer at every intersection, which struck me as a clever way to use manpower to avoid a difficult signage problem.

When we got there, there was still lots of space in Tent City West. We chose Tent City because there’s less wind than on the beach, and it’s close to washrooms, the Renegade Stage and the centre area.

I was really impressed with the food options:

• Fat Daddy’s BBQ serves good eggy breakfasts and pulled-pork made on-site.
• Rice Burners is decent when you feel like a big pile of white rice and veggies.
• Bliss Cafe’s (rebranded “Juice Monkey” to cook eggs and use disposable cups) juice, sweets and soup of the moment provided a lot of diversity and you could pretend it was healthy. They were serving Level Ground drip coffee, but it wasn’t consistently available.

There was good cell coverage (EDGE), but nowhere obvious to recharge phones, so iPhones were effectively out of commission. We had to do pre-mobile-style planning (“meet you at point A in 30 minutes”), although it was common to run into people and not impossible to track people down.

There was effectively no Twittering for Soundwave, but I think it has potential if the organizers gave out incentives to stop partying long enough to tweet. I’d love to be able to whip out my phone to find the music and party of the moment.