July 6th through 9th Sidney to Campbell River

June 6^th through 8^th Sidney to the Secretaries to Henry Bay, Denman Island

I will need to add photos sometime when we have enough bandwidth to do it.  

We are headed out to one of our favorite anchorages, a little nook between the two small Secretary Islands in the Gulf group.  We anchor, all to ourselves, and deploy the trusty dinghy, ET.  ET takes us to shore with clam buckets and our oyster shell clam diggers.  We’re clamming in the rain, we’re clamming in the rain, what a wonderful feeling we’re clamming again…..we easily get plenty of manila clams and oysters which are there for the picking.  Carl has checked the Canada Fisheries and Ocean notices to make sure they are not in a toxic area.  These go into our ‘live well,’ a five gallon bucket full of holes that we dangle off the stern, keeping all such creatures hydrated until they are to be consumed.  

A second sailboat, with two lassies aboard from the Canadian Forces Sailing Association anchors nearby and they are surprised to find out that yes, we really did come up from Portland.  Last year we moored at their dock which is located in Esquimalt under the watchful eye of Her Majesty’s forces.

July 7^th We await the slack of the current through Porlier Pass with a lazy departure around 1330.  Carl spots Orca whales between us and the Pass, the first we have seen this year.  The resident Orca were two months late returning to this area this year.  We anchor 36 miles up the Strait of Georgia in Nuttal Bay.  While this is not the scenic route, we do still enjoy deer frolicking in the front yards of the houses dotting the Nuttal Bay shoreline, and we pass many small tree studded islands along the way.

We have chosen what they call the express route to Johnstone Strait.  Our goal is to get through Seymour Narrows, Discovery Passage and Johnstone Strait before the northwesterly winds set in.  We look to the wind gods Anemoi and hope for fare winds as we need south southeast wind to make it through Johnstone on the ebb current. 

Keeping with our express route we depart at 0800 on Carl’s birthday, July 8^th.  Happy Birthday Carl!  We travel another 33 miles, drop the anchor in Henry Bay, Denman Island, and Carl is already happily fishing off the side of the boat.  First catch of the day, a pesky Dog Fish, a member of the shark family with a nasty sting from its tail if you let it get close enough.  Our son Zach encountered this last year  and purchased a new set of needle nose pliers for the boat as the other set went to the deep when he was trying to get the shark loose.  “You didn’t say it was a shark” we seem to remember him saying.

July 9, 2019  0900 (an hour later each day) we are off to Campbell River, just inside Discovery Passage.  We share the Comox Bar crossing with two of Her Majesty’s war ships, HMS 57 and 58 “Caribou.”    The shallows on either side make it necessary to stay the course, Caribou slows a bit to keep from running us over and we all make it through just fine. 

The day passes uneventfully.  We are riding the current up the edge of the Georgia Strait.  We cross the boundary where ebbs now flow north and floods flow south and our speed increases dramatically putting us up to 9.8 nautical miles per hour, a tad higher than our boat’s normal hull speed average of 6.     We tie up to the Campbell River Discovery Marina fuel dock, easy in, easy out, lots of room.  Then it is off the slip I-09, the same slip we were in a couple of years ago.

This is a very convenient marina as it borders a shopping center with a gigantic “tire” store that is a hardware and department store in hiding.  On our list is a second “water heater” wrench as it has the appropriate size mouth to fit on the two nuts that we need to reposition in our drip shaft area.  Or better put, it allows two nuts lying on their bellies to try to squeeze one arm each into a tiny opening to adequately get enough opposing force on two wrenches, each on a separate, large tightening nut.  And people ask what we do with our time!

Tonight we are each pouring over current tables, weather, guide books and charts.  We will each come up with a plan and if they jive enough, we will be headed towards Seymour Narrows tomorrow morning.