Oh dear

Normally when you look at the Environment Canada marine weather there’s mostly blue water around Vancouver Island.  Often there will be a red zone off shore or maybe one of the Georgia Strait zones will be red but this morning its red all over.  That’s not good.  The forecast for Haro Strait tonight is over 45 MPH winds.  Fortunately we had planned to stay put here anyway.

“Here” in this case being the same marine park we stayed at just over a year ago when Kim and Steve were escorting us back to Canada.  I got the dish set up on the dock and it seems to be working.  The dock moves around a bit but evidently not enough to through the dish off signal.  We move 10 or 12 feet vertically with the tides but that’s such an insignificant amount compared to the roughly 30,000 miles out to the satellite that it doesn’t matter.  I figured it out yesterday just for the hell of it – the tan of the change angle is something like 0.00000008.  I didn’t bother looking up the corresponding angle but its going to be a very small angle.  The flopping dock on the other hand is a very real angle change but evidently the software can handle that.  We’re pretty sheltered in here but I’ll be surprised if it can handle 45 MPH winds.

We had a rolly night at anchor the night before last and we were both feeling a bit off yesterday morning.  I don’t get puking sick but I can tell that my judgement is affected & I have to think carefully to make sure that I’m not letting my altered judgement impact my decisions.  We left Sucia Island around 11:00 expecting some rough water outside the bay but also expecting a fairly sheltered run over here to Stuart Island.  That’s exactly how it turned out – it was a very pleasant 2-1/2 hour trip.  Our original plan had been to go north to Vancouver sometime this week but the extended forecast is just pure crap.  There’s a low anchored out here and it is sucking systems in every day.  The run to Vancouver is a long day and its really exposed so we decided to take the coward’s way out and head through the islands back to Sidney.  We’ll still go up the Island and over to Vancouver but maybe by then the weather will have smartened up.  If not the trip north along the east side of the Island is well sheltered and its only a 2 or 3 hour crossing direct to Vancouver from Nanaimo.

We could have crossed back to Sidney this morning before the wind got up but its no hardship staying here a few nights.  Its such a pretty spot and the bay we’re in is on the NW end of the island so its pretty well sheltered from the prevailing S and SE winds.  Its also a bit more reasonably priced than the dock at the last place – we’re paying $22.50 per night here so we figured that was worthwhile in order to have a place to set up the dish.