15 Aug 21

Yet another beautiful day in paradise. After yesterday’s long run, we slept in a bit, but were up by 08:30. It was a fine morning with a light SE breeze and we spent the morning lazing about, although the girls did go to the island for a morning walk and search for cell signal. About 10:00, John announced that he was going to have to run his engine to charge batteries, whereas we were already nearly fully charged up. We attempted to charge “Massilia” by running his charge cord from our inverter to his 120V AC shore power connection, but his breaker kept tripping; after investigation, I found that our inverter does not have a ground connection, so “Massilia’s” breaker was tripping out on ground fault protection. I will have to get this corrected over the winter. After a late lunch, John and I rowed out to the bay - he to collect his trap set yesterday on the way in and re-set it, and I to set my trap, with bait borrowed from John. He collected 1 prawn and I, in the process of setting mine, got the prawn oil (used to prime the bait) all over the floor of the dinghy and me; it took an hour to satisfactorily clean the dinghy and me. After we got back, I rowed ashore to walk over to find a cell signal, primarily so I could respond to the Canadian government’s daily update on the Admiral’s Covid-19 symptoms; no idea why we have to do this every day, but there is obviously a glitch in their system. I had a quick, refreshing swim upon my return and a very nice solar shower. After dinner, we had another nice sing-along.

16 Aug 21

It rained off and on all night long. When we got up in the morning, it was still cloudy with the occasional shower and the wind had gone around to the NW, so the front is coming through. The girls went off for a long walk and search for cell coverage at 10:00 and John started his engine to charge batteries, so I went to collect my prawn trap. It was a bit blustery out in the bay, but I found the trap without any trouble, although I nearly swamped the boat trying to grab the float. Once I hauled in the trap, using my new Thomas puller, I had 61 fat prawns, which I brought back and boiled up immediately. John’s trap had a few holes in it, so he only collected 6 prawns. In the late afternoon, I went for a long walk around the island, but still got back in time for a late Captain’s Hour. I finally finished “The Mountain Shadow” (sequel to “Shantaram”, by Gregory David Roberts; 865 pages. Tomorrow, we are headed for Nanaimo.

17 Aug 21

The wind got up a bit from the NW just after 22:00 last night, which was right on the beam for us, as we had a shore line to a ring on the cliff. For the first half hour of 15 knot gusts, we seemed to be alright although our anchor neighbor bugged out almost immediately and 3 or 4 of the other boats were obviously having issues. About 23:00, I realized that our anchor was dragging a bit and we were in serious trouble as we were so close to the lee shore at the head of the bay. John and I set “Massilia’s” anchor using his dinghy and when he took the strain, that helped to stabilize us, We were a bit concerned with the weight of two boats hanging onto his smaller anchor, so I pulled in some of my chain to share the load more evenly, but our anchor just came completely up on the roller with very little resistance. So, I rowed out the old 35# CQR anchor with 50 ft of chain and 150 ft of rode and set it. My new spotlight got a lot of use looking at the rocks, my positioning transit and helping the other boats find secondary shore line tie-up spots. After that, we were fine, although it took until 02:00 to get all of this sorted out. We had a medicinal whiskey and went to bed.

John woke us up at 06:00, pulling in both the anchor lines because “Massilia” was within a couple of feet of the rocks on the north side of the bay. I did not really go back to sleep after that. We finally got up about 08:45 and got ready to go to Nanaimo. We fired up the engine at 10:40 and let “Massilia” go. When we let go the shore line, we immediately swung into the south shore and ran aground before I could pull in any of the anchor line. We had to re-establish the shore line to pull us off the rock. Then, because of the wind direction and where we had set the CQR in the night, we were unable to simply drive up to the anchor to retrieve it because the wind kept pushing us into or very near to the cliff on the south side of the bay.  We eventually had to run shore lines from the bow to two point forward of the boat on opposite sides of the bay and cross haul the boat to get close to the anchor point, while still holding the boat off the cliff. Since the CQR was on the secondary roller and the primary anchor and chain were on the windlass, I had to pull up the chain and anchor by hand, which was seriously hard work. I was completely blown by the time we finally had it on board. With all of this, it was 11:45 before we finally had the anchor aweigh and were able to depart the bay.

On the way out, we collected the prawn trap, which had 24 fat striped prawns in it. These were boiled up before we left Bull Passage. South of Bull Passage, the wind was blowing NW 17, so we had an excellent sail to Nanaimo, skirting the western and southern edges of military area Whisky Golf, which was active. The Canadian Navy was busy escorting ignorant boaters out of the area. We made it into Nanaimo Harbor, sailing all the way down Newcastle Island Passage, at 16:45. After Captain’s Hour and showers, we walked up to The Nest Bistro for an excellent dinner. Early to bed after an exhausting 24 hours.

49-10.015’N, 123-56.048’W; Log = 23.3, Sum (2021) = 339.3 N-m; Eng. hr. = 4.8, Sum = 2798.2