We start off early. Melissa was still snoozing when Dave pulled away from the dock. A short while later she hears “thunk” and realizes we hit something. She jumps out of bed, only to find that the gang realized they forgot to return the marina key and we had returned to the dock.
We left early because the plan is to catch the outbound tide from Puget Sound into the Straights of Juan De Fuca, and then catch the inbound tide from the Straights into the Canadian Gulf Islands. “Downhill the whole way”. It will be a long day – 10 hours underway to make 74 nautical miles. Apsaras travels at between 6 and 7 knots under power or sail on her own through the water. But at one point, Dave saw 11.2 knots speed over ground. So that’s a huge speed advantage!
Breakfast was eggs benedict and mimosas. It took two cooks – Jim to make the hollandaise from scratch, and Melissa to poach the eggs, heat the Canadian bacon, and toast the muffins. I think we used nearly every pan in the kitchen – one to poach the eggs, one for the bacon, and three for the hollandaise. The aftermath in the kitchen was so epic that Dave yelped when he saw it. But Margaret (who is on dish duty) said it was worth it.
Along the way we consumed some beer and wine because we had the goal to be “legal” crossing the border into Canada. The weather was gorgeous the whole way – sunny and warm. No wind to speak of so the water was glassy smooth – even across the Straights. This makes me happy, and bums Dave out because there isn’t enough wind to sail. One small heart stopping moment when we knew the prop had hit something. Turned out to be kelp – which had twisted around the prop pretty good. A hard-reverse thrust cleared it out. We did see one Coast Guard cutter returning to Seattle.
Shortly before reaching our destination, the tide turned against us, and we were down to about two knots over ground – barely making headway. Oh well, given the current advantage we had most of the day, that’s ok.
We reached Bedwell Harbor and cleared customs without blinking. They have rebuilt the docks and they are much easier to get in and out of now. We then went to anchor – but much to our surprise, the anchor drug. Weird. We can count on one hand the number of times amongst hundreds of anchoring’s where we didn’t stick first time. And we’ve anchored here numerous times. Dave decided that was an excuse to move across the bay to anchor at the quieter medicine beach side. We’ve not anchored here before, but we like it!
Yesterday, Melissa discovered that the life line pelican (name for the gadget that allows you to open/close the life lines) had come apart and one of the parts fell in the water. So MacGyver invented a new way to open and close it. Which is actually easier than the "real" mechanism. And involved solely a zip tie!
While Dave continues to hunt the spiders with the vacuum cleaner, Melissa starts to try to kill the fruit flies that came in with the food. They seem particularly facinated by the heirloom tomatoes. We set out a bowl of vinegar with a drop of soap (supposed to break the surface tension so they drown more easily). But that didn't work. So we tried Dave's method with the vacuum cleaner and that worked!
We had planned to have dinner ashore at Poet’s Cove Resort. But there was a crazy looking costume party and loud music. So we changed our minds and had BBQ’ed lamb with rosemary and garlic, with a side of veggie skewers. We discovered that the BBQ had a couple of issues. First it hadn’t been cleaned in a while. Jim turned off the propane and cooked the lamb on just the grease at the bottom of the BBQ. Second, the heat shield had all but deteriorated away. I ordered a new one, but of course we won’t be able to get it till we return.
Upside is that I had saved one bottle of good red wine that was given to us by a mutual friend Amit. It was perfect with the lamb!
Before heading to bed, we opened the murder mystery game that Melissa had brought along. <Spoiler Alert - I blog about some parts of how we eventually solve this.> We read through a few of the materials and identified some of the puzzles, but didn’t start working it that night because we decided to watch “6 Days 7 Nights” instead.