On our way

You don’t ever want to have an agenda on a boat.  We got whacked by an agenda the day after Marilyn’s sewing conference in 2012 – we knew better but we did it anyway.  We learned from that day though.  So yesterday when the weatherman was telling me that today would be calm and that the big storm blowing in from Japan wouldn’t get here until tomorrow at the earliest, we pushed our departure one day. 

In return we got a wonderful day at the dock yesterday, capped off by dinner with Bill and Donna on their boat.  Today I was up at 4:00 (which the goofball locals thought was 3:00) and at 7:00 we were untying lines in the dark.  We crept out through Cow Bay in the dark and fog with Marilyn standing guard on the bow.  We only came close to wrapping one crab float – we didn’t wrap it but it was a near thing.  Its really remarkable how fast I can stop this old girl if I need to.  By the time we got to Separation Point the sun was up enough to see what we were doing and the fog never really amounted to anything.

That’s looking west down Sansum Narrows just after sunrise.  By noon those clouds had cleared and it was a glorious sunny day for a Strait of Georgia crossing, maybe a little chilly but who cares, we were inside anyway. 

That’s the sun starting to light up the snowy tops of the mountains on the Island as the clouds started to break up.

These big buggers are parked literally everywhere.  We saw them tucked into little bays today where we’ve never seen them before.  That’s a by-product of the railways’ failure to move western grain to port this winter.  I don’t know what the solution to that is going to be but what we’ve got right now is clearly not working.  Part of the problem is that the railroads can make more money moving oil so they are acting logically.  Part of the problem is that we just don’t have enough rail capacity, let alone competition, to get anything, including grain, out of western Canada.  The solution will no doubt involve a lot of very expensive studies by know-it-alls with PhD after their name.  Part of the real solution no doubt will be to move some of our grain south to New Orleans but I’m sure the first step will be to waste millions of dollars studying the problem to death.

That’s looking back on English Bay as we approached the Granville Street Bridge.  Its hard to convey just how much of a parking lot English Bay is right now.  The ocean goers are literally lined up in three rows starting at the bridges and going right out past Point Atkinson.  We saw one loaded guy leaving so something is getting loaded but on top of the non-performance by the railroads, the local truckers are on some kind of strike as well so I don’t suppose much is happening at any of the terminals.