I awoke with a start this morning. We were due to get up at 6am to cross the Straight of Georgia. I rolled over and looked at my watch. It said noon. Eeek! Dave starts laughing. Its not noon! It’s 6am. You reading that thing upside down?! Nope – turns out my watch died. I took that as a good sign and stopped wearing my watch. Funny I haven’t missed it.
Scurrying about the deck getting ready to depart, I hadn’t bothered to put on my shoes. Bad choice. Whacked my foot on a “block” – a pulley like assembly on the deck. Ouch, ouch, ouch. Wow – I’m surprised it’s not bleeding! Ah well, keep scurrying.
We headed out of Nanaimo before anyone else was even awake. We figured our best chance of being able to make the crossing was before the wind kicked up in the afternoon when the air heats up. 4 hour crossing. Slow going in 4 ft seas. Not a cloud in the sky though. I spent the whole trip asking Dave questions like – how high can the seas get before it’s a problem (6 feet apparently). And will we make it across (yes he promised). Dave kept smiling so I figured we were going to live through it. Though everything in the cabin that wasn’t in a cupboard went flying. I made Dave promise to drive the boat from the inside steering controls, not up on deck. My worst nightmare was the idea of him falling overboard. We made it safe and sound. When we got to the other side, and the adrenalin wore off, Melissa promptly fell back asleep – never having bothered to get out of her PJs and get dressed anyway.
One of the Canadian torpedo testing grounds was “active” so we had to go out and around it on our way across. There was a giant war ship on patrol. Came over to check us out and make sure we weren’t going to cross the boarder into the testing area. We got some great pictures of the ship. Listening to channel 16 it became apparent there were some folks not paying attention however. And guess what? Surprise, surprise… those who didn’t know where they were going weren’t monitoring channel 16 so the war ship had to go intercept them. Oh, and on our way across another 2 accidents occurred in Nanaimo harbor – 2 ships run aground calling for the Coast Guard. Both on well marked reefs. Coast Guard never even had to send anyone as the private towing vessels beat them to it.
When I got up from my nap we were almost to PenderHarbor. Quaint little place. We found an awesome anchorage in GardenBay. I could have spent a couple of days there watching the boats come and go. Lots of little pubs all around the harbor. It’s clearly the place to stop on the way to PrincessLouiseInlet. I was sort of sad to leave it the next day.
We had chicken pasta salad with basil, tomatoes, balsamic vinaigrette. Yum.