Long time --- no typing.

….. but blame it on Doug and Jo.  We were having so much fun this last week that I just didn’t bother. 

Doug and Joanne arrived in Sidney last Friday and we were sitting on the dock at Sidney North Saanich Yacht club waiting for them.  We spent their first night aboard on the dock because the big question going into this adventure was how well Jo was going to handle the motion of the ocean.  That turned out to be a complete non-issue thanks in large part to the wonders of modern medicine in the form of gravol patches.

I pretty well had to fight Doug for every minute of helm time except when I wanted him to do the docking in Nanaimo.  If you look close in the picture above you will see that George II was keeping a close eye on the new skipper.  When it came time to dock Marilyn cracked the whip and kept Doug busy handling lines.  Actually now that I think about it they probably won’t ever want to come back because we worked Doug too hard.

That picture of Joanne isn’t really fair because she took over cleanup duties in the galley.  She’s likely just recovering from cleaning up one of my galley messes.  We ate really well because we showed up in Sidney with a huge haul of prawns and then dropped the traps outside Ladysmith and got another batch of the little buggers.  Marilyn even caught some crabs off the dock in Nanaimo but none of them were big enough to keep.  They did provide some added entertainment for our guests, particularly the aggressive one that locked himself onto Marilyn’s finger and bruised her through her glove.

We made a loop through Vancouver, back over to Nanaimo and returning to Cow Bay.  When we got back to “the bay” there was a crew in the midst of changing out the docks at Pier 66, the neighbouring marina, so Doug and I spent some time sidewalk supervising that project.

We finished the trip with one last night on the dock at SNSYC so that it would be easy to get Doug and Jo to their early morning flight out of Sidney.  We managed to get both the truck and the boat down to Sidney which meant that I got to singlehand Gray Hawk back home from Sidney.  Last night when I got back to Cow Bay the West Coast Workboat Association had taken over the government wharf behind us for their spring rendez-vous. 

There’s some beautiful old workboats that have been given a new lease on life thanks to a recreational conversion.  I have managed to leave my tax return to the eleventh hour so I promised myself that I wouldn’t go walk that dock until I had my taxes done.  I think I’m far enough down that trail that I can go drool over the workboats today.