Last night we were the featured attraction at Sidney North Saanich’s Speaker’s Night. The speaker’s night is one of the staples in our yacht club’s winter social activities for members. We volunteered to do it over a year ago now and its finally behind us.
It’s hard to tell how those things go. There were over 70 people in the room. 60+ reserved for supper and more arrived to hear the goofs from the prairies that like to winter cruise. The dining room is more than maxed out at 60. Very few of them came up afterward to say anything so probably that was a bad sign. Our topic was “Winter Cruising to Alaska – What were we thinking?” The guy who introduced us changed that slightly to “What the hell were they thinking?”
We untied at Cow Bay around 10:00 yesterday morning and had an uneventful trip over to the yacht club reciprocal dock. Uneventful is the goal on all our trips but particularly so when the boat has been sitting for as long as it has this time. All the electronics fired up (which always surprises me) and the engines seemed to be keeping their vital fluids inside them for the most part. We haven’t really exercised the generator yet – we’re on 15 amp power here at the reciprocal dock which isn’t quite enough but is enough that it doesn’t seem worthwhile starting the noisemaker.
We’re not sure where we’re going from here. Marilyn has an important phone call this afternoon so we want to stay on good cellular and internet coverage until she is finished. Our next door neighbour from Buchanan is wintering just north of us in Nanaimo so we’ll likely go more or less directly from here up to Nanaimo to visit him. We’ve also got some Mexican friends north of that in Comox so we’ll probably also stop there as we work our way north. I’d like to get back up into the Broughton Islands and maybe even into Seymoure/Belize Inlets but right now we don’t have anything even close to an agenda.
Wikipedia can be a notoriously poor resource but there’s no political reason to file false information in this case. Wikipedia claims that Nakwakto Rapids, which lie in Slingsby Channel at the entrance to Seymour & Belize Inlets, holds the strongest current in the world. Even if its number 2 or 3 its likely to be pretty impressive but more importantly, the cruising ground behind that kind of protection is going to be more or less undiscovered. Until very recently (within the last 10 years) that area was effectively uncharted because the cartography for the region dated to the late 1800’s or early 1900’s. Several people whose advice we trust have told us that its a very special spot so we’re excited to explore it.
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