We’re still anchored at the end of False Creek, in the basin where the Olympic Village was in 1986. Marilyn arrived very late last night. For a while I thought the bastards were going to strand her in Calgary but it turned out that the plane she was on from Regina to Calgary was the same plane that was going from Calgary to Vancouver. For some reason they didn’t call it a continuation so she got two boarding passes and had to deplane in Calgary but there was no doubt that she was going to make the connection in Calgary once she figured out that they were going to re-use her plane for the balance of the trip.
She arrived in Vancouver some time after midnight and then caught the skytrain into the city. We were texting back and forth so that I knew when to leave the boat to meet the train. That all worked out well other than that it was the middle of the damn night, cold and wet.
This is such a pretty spot its hard to believe we mostly have it to ourselves.
There are a few derelict boats in the basin as well. That last shot is of the VPD putting a seizure notice on one of them. The way they control derelicts at anchor here is by means of an anchoring permit. The permits are free – as they should be – anchoring is supposed to be free. What they’ve done though is limit the length of stay by means of the permit. Effectively in the winter you can be in the anchorage about 1/2 of your time for 3 weeks at a stretch and in the summer I think its more like 2 weeks out of two months. That seems like a sensible solution to a very popular location that could easily become filled up with garbage boats. And evidently that is exactly the problem they were faced with until they instituted the permit system. And its a far better solution than the one they use at Nanaimo where they have polluted a good anchorage with mooring buoys that they then charge you for tying up to.
Today was rainy – no surprises there – its Raincouver after all. We slept in very late and then took the dinghy up to Granville just because. Neither of us had anything in particular that we needed but we enjoy wandering through the market and we ended up buying lunch in the food court before we came back home, still in the rain. The new dinghy/motor combo is performing reasonably well although its still a bear to start. I bought a can of injector cleaner and dumped that in the tank and I think that has been helping. Right now I think there’s likely an idle jet that is either completely or partially plugged but every time I run it I’m happier with the way it runs. When I bought it there was no way I could get it to idle. Now it still won’t idle cold but after it gets warmed up it idles not too bad.
Yesterday the Vancouver cops spotted that the numbers on my motor are 110 which could be interpreted to mean 11 HP. Transport Canada requires registration on all vessels with 10 HP or more power so one of the cops was getting officious about that “deficiency”. I wasn’t around but my neighbour Bruce was taking it on the chin for me. Its all a load of crap. The 10 HP cutoff was put in place sometime in the 70’s or 80’s and all the outboard manufacturers immediately relabelled anything they had close to 10 HP as 9.9 or 9.8 HP. That’s exactly what happened with our “110” – the same engine got re-labelled as a 9.8 and continued in production for 10 or 15 years, with identical components to what used to be a Model 110. More importantly the whole registration process is a crock of shit perpetrated by Transport Canada to grab revenue from unsuspecting boaters.
There’s no attempt made to monitor whether buyers of used boats ever identify themselves to Transport Canada and most (all??) of them never do. So the new buyers get on the list at the time of purchase but even in that case I doubt that failure to pay the renewal ever results in any followup. In theory if the boat is registered then the numbers will identify it in the event it is stolen but that too is a bunch of crap because any thief with 1/2 a brain could just scratch the numbers off. Its a revenue grab pure and simple. And for us its a revenue grab that we would only be required to participate in by virtue of the fact that our motor is too old to be exempt. If it had been built 3 or 5 years later it would have been labelled as a 9.8 and therefore exempt. So that is precisely what is about to happen. Thanks to some striping tape and white numbers from Ukrainian Tire our engine is about to become a 9.8. I won’t do it right under the noses of the VPD but by the next time we come here they will have forgotten about us and our dinghy motor will be all nice and legal again. With a bit of luck it will be running better by then too.
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