Theft in the marina!!!

I’ve taken to having coffee for an hour or so every morning.  Right at the head of our ramp there’s a chandlery with a porch that serves as a coffee room.  Every morning 10 to 20 locals gather to discuss everything from the earthquake in Tokyo to goatman who lives at the head of our dock.  I’ve always wanted to be a coffee regular but never could get past the effort required to become one.  It takes a while to get to the point where you can go away and still be a regular when you get back but I think I’m there now.

This morning one of the regulars came in with a gloomy puss and immediately announced that he had been robbed.  He recently purchased two plastic kayaks – shortly before we arrived – and has been enjoying an afternoon paddle pretty well every day.  He was obviously shaken up by the theft and once he had tracked down a phone number for the RCMP he reported the theft.  Then everybody started offering advice about where they were likely to be based on the most likely profile of the offending parties. 

A couple of search parties were organized to walk the docks.  Barry (the theftee) and Curry set out to launch Curry’s dinghy to do a water search.  As they were leaving I was thinking to myself that I should have said something about the youths I saw on the dock late in the day yesterday.  At the time I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to them – I certainly couldn’t have provided any descriptions but apparently Marilyn had paid closer attention.  When Barry and Curry arrived back on the dock they ended up talking to her and she was able to provide a description of the perpetrators.

This is where the story gets weird.  It turns out that Barry (who is clearly a borderline dingbat) had told two stoners that he met on the street that they were welcome to use his kayaks.  He likely expected that they would say something prior to taking the kayaks or that he would at least be on the boat and know what was happening.  As I said, they were stoners so any such assumptions about normal human behaviour were at best silly.

Someone else in the marina had been scanning the shoreline on the north side of Cow Bay with his binoculars.  Eventually he spotted the missing kayaks abandoned on the shore directly north of our dock, probably about a mile away across the bay.  As the story eventually unfolded the two stoners had showed up just before dark and taken off across the bay with some idiotic plan to climb the mountain on the north side.  All of us liveaboards on this end of the dock were in the pub for 1/2 price wing night and Barry didn’t notice the missing kayaks when he got home.

With the kayaks located Curry launched his dinghy and then Barry and I headed across the bay in pursuit of the errant kayaks.  On our way back we stopped at the derelict hulk that the two stoners were living on to return the lifejackets that they had left in the kayaks.  Based on their responses at that point I can safely say that they learned exactly nothing from their experience.

This afternoon we got our zincs checked.  I was anxious to get that done as soon as possible after our move here and it turns out it was good that we did.  Our bow thruster zinc was totally consumed.  It was still in place but as soon as the diver touched it with his wire brush it fell off in his hand.  Fortunately I had a spare that he could put on.  A couple of the shaft zincs were pretty far gone as well but we have two zincs on each shaft and they are deliberately at different ages in the hope that we won’t ever completely lose our shaft protection so the newer ones were still in good shape.

So now we’re re-zinced and Barry’s kayaks are back on his boat.  All things considered a very good day.