On our way

I know – I said we were on our way a while ago but now it feels like its for real.  Yesterday we left Burrard Yacht Club after a leisurely breakfast, left a wake under First Narrows Bridge and moved to Plumper Cove.  This little marine park is one of our favourite spots in lower Georgia Strait.  The forecast was crap – wind and heavy rain - for today so we never planned to go any further.  Getting as far as Pender Harbour yesterday might have been theoretically possible but we’re not in any panic.  I  don’t mind spending another night close to parts sources while we test the generator.  (which seems to be just fine now)

There was a particularly large pile of sulphur on the north shore when we were leaving Burrard Inlet.  There’s always sulphur piled there.  Its a byproduct of oil refining – they scrub out the sulphur dioxide and elemental sulphur is one of the results.  Another byproduct of scrubbing it out is that we no longer have acid rain which in turn means that we need to add sulphur containing fertilizer to our soils. 

I spent today hooking up our new GPS “mushroom”.  We’ve been using a GPS puck for our main nav software but I’m not 100% happy with it because it has a lot of position inaccuracy.  The new Garmin multi-function unit uses a mushroom that was already on the boat.  I tried that source on the nav software and it was much more stable.  The one I just installed however is giving me some grief.  I have to bring the data in through a COM to USB adapter which I believe is causing trouble.  I’ve got two identical adapters on that computer now and I’m not sure that was a good idea.  We’ll run it for a while before I make any drastic changes but I won’t be getting rid of the puck in the short term anyway.  I hate serial communications.

That’s not much of a picture because its absolutely pissing rain right now and the boat was a long ways off but that’s the SAR hovercraft passing the park.  It put on a real show for us a couple of days ago when we were leaving Vancouver with Grace & Al onboard.  There was a jumper on First Narrows bridge (actually UNDER First Narrows bridge by the time these guys showed up).  We had been following the conversations on the radio as the police responded and vessel traffic control asked for other assistance.  All of a sudden these guys came roaring in from the port side (left) and then spun a 180 directly in front of us and buggered off as fast as they had arrived. 

There was a big hullaballoo out here a year or so ago when the feds closed Coast Guard Station Kitsilano.  I think the remaining station is up the Fraser a bit and I assume that’s where these guys came from.  I also assume that whatever emergency they were responding to was over before they got there.  I don’t know for sure it was the jumper but it seems logical.  I commented to my crew that it was hard to imagine how someone could think their day was that bad when we were simultaneously having as much fun as we were having.