Sorry – I haven’t posted for a while. We’ve been busy.
We got tossed around pretty good at Prevost Harbour. So badly tossed that when I got up the next morning the dish was missing. It had dived overboard off the dock in the wind. Fortunately it was tethered to the dock and also attached to the coax so we didn’t lose it entirely. I’m sure it didn’t do it any good but I got it set up again and it still worked.
On Friday we crossed back into Canada, arriving at the Canada Customs dock in Sidney around noon. Checking into Canada has always consisted of phoning customs and them giving us a clearance number. Unlike the Americans, the Canadians have yet to come to the dock, let alone the boat. This time was no different although they did ding me for GST on the haulout charges. That took an inordinate amount of time to process because the dipshit I was dealing with couldn’t make our postal code work in her computer. I’m not sure what she was doing and it doesn’t really matter – she was stupid and she wasn’t getting the job done. After about a half an hour she got it figured out, collected her $264 and issued my clearance number. Then we moved over to the yacht club reciprocal dock. In the following photo you can see us tied up on the reciprocal dock and a major wreck on the other side of the breakwater.
The boat in the foreground is about a 26 foot day sailer. Behind it is somebody’s float home. Evidently the sailboat broke loose a few days ago and dashed itself to bits on the rocks. I thought it had likely happened in the big storm the day after we got to Port Angeles but apparently it was a more recent occurrence.
It looks to me like it was probably a pretty nice little boat a couple of weeks ago. The rigging looks in really good condition and the parts of the hull that haven’t been bashed to bits on the rocks look good but overall it’s a sick mess. Nobody seemed to know what the story was on the float home.
We stayed a couple of nights on the reciprocal dock so that we could help out with the volunteer spring cleaning day at the club. We would have stopped to catch some prawns on the way home but SWMBO couldn’t persuade DFO’s website to accept her credit card so she couldn’t get licensed to fish on Sunday. In lieu of fishing Marilyn drove the boat out of the yacht club dock and most of the way home. I think I could get to like sitting on the couch, watching out the window as we travel.
Today one of our dock neighbours hauled his Grand Banks woody. He was really nervous about getting it into the ways and had asked me to come along with him so we did that this afternoon.
Malcolm’s boat was seriously in need of bottom cleaning. It was literally covered with 1/2” to 2” mussels over the entire bottom and all the running gear.
Seeing the growth on Malcolm’s boat made me appreciate how good of condition Gray Hawk was in. She was cleaner when we pulled her than Malcolm’s hull was after three people scraped all afternoon and then pressure washed the entire hull. There were a few small barnacles (less than 3/8”) on our shafts and props but nothing on the hull itself and nothing even close to the growth I saw today.
2 comments:
So do you feel the harmony of the harmonized GST? Boy leave the country to get some work done and then a tax to get back in. I guess we're no different when it comes to governments wanting money.
Glad you made it through the ruff weather.
Cleaned and fresh paint, nice, that should get you another .25 knots ;)
Later
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I'm not quite sure why but we escaped the BC-Raping, AKA harmonized tax so all we paid was 5%. I think mainly what was happened was that her perf review includes a section on how much revenue she has collected. Perhaps she was under her quota or maybe she just recently had a bad review.
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