By and large the winds in the Strait of Georgia tend to blow up and down its length - that is to say from the Northwest or the Southeast. So far they had been blowing Southeast and that meant running downwind all the way to Lund. At this point in the trip we needed to continue north but cross to the west side of the strait, passing below Cortez Island and Marina Island and then continuing North to Read Island, our destination. This more westerly course meant having the wind more on our beam and a different kind of sailing.
As we headed across the wind the boat started to heel over, as is normally the case. The further out into the Strait we went, the stronger the wind blew and soon we were heeled well over and feeling that sense of riding the line between fun and panic. Every time the boat threatened to broach we looked over at one another with tight smiles and pretended to be loving it, making comments like "This is more like it!" in the most carefree tones we could muster. In reality we were both wishing for 5knots less wind or a different point of sail or both.
The basics of sail trim aren't too difficult to grasp but the finer points can take a lifetime to master. I had the mainsail more or less trimmed as it was supposed to be but I was pretty sure we weren't supposed to be heeled over this much. So with David and the helm I tried to recall the advice I've been given from more experienced sailors. First up, use the mainsheet and the boom vang (the lines that pulls downwards on the boom) to flatten the sail. They say that the more the sails balloon out, the more they resemble a wing and the more lift they create. This is good in light wind but in "heavy air" as sailers call it, you want to flatten the sail as much as possible by sheeting (tightening) in the mainsheet and vang. Next, someone told me to use the traveler as your throttle. The traveler is a track that allows the mainsail to swing out to either side. With the wind on your beam (side), the closer the main is to centre the more wind it will capture and the more you will heel. By letting the main out to leeward it spills the wind and reduces heel. Having flattened the sail I let the traveler out and immediately the boat levelled off to a more comfortable point. I could feel that we had lost speed in doing this but I was just as happy for the more comfortable ride. To my surprise when I checked the GPS we were still making 7 knots and the boat was no longer fighting us. So this was what a "well balanced" boat feels like. Feeling rather pleased with myself I looked over to David and gestured to the GPS speed but he was already grinning like a kid, feeling the same sense of accomplishment that I was.
All too soon we needed to make our turn North around Marina Island and for the next few hours we threaded our way among the smaller islands approaching our final stop. Soon we rounded a corner and in front of us was Read Island and Evans Bay. At the far end was the dock we were looking for. We had arrived. We quickly doused the sails and by the time we were done, David's friend Mike was on the dock directing us in.
No sooner had we tied up than two characters who could have been plucked out of a Herman Melville novel were walking down the ramp to greet us. John, who sported a huge if slightly unkempt silver beard offered a huge paw in greeting. We later learned that he was a mariner in the truest sense, having made his living on the sea in many ways, including on the infamous crab boats in Alaska. He pointed to a blue steel ketch that was bobbing on a mooring buoy a little bit off shore. This he explained was his boat. He then immediately advised us that we should untie from the dock and move another mooring buoy not far from his. His rationale was that the wind was going to blow in the night and that it might be a rough ride along side the dock for anyone sleeping on board. We thanked him politely for his advice and he moved on.
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| GeMara at the end of the dock at Read Island. Turned out tobe a bad place to tie up |
Once again it was time for the grand tour. Mike showed us his property including the new home he is building with the help of an Island friend named Tom. Up until now his island getaway had been just that - a getaway from life in the city. He had been living in an older cottage and slowly building his new home which is now complete enough for him to live in full time. Once again it was interesting to see how he designed systems to live off the grid, his being more industrial strength than the others we'd seen in order to support living full-time on the island. At the end of the tour he said he had one other thing he wanted to show us. He took us for a walk up his access road that led up the mountain behind behind his property. After a while we left the road and walked into the trees where, hidden beneath a newly constructed wooden shelter was a natural spring. From here he ran a pipe down the hill to his home. With only a simple filter in place at the mouth of the pipe he had created an elegant, gravity fed source of pristine water that is clean enough for drinking and ample enough for filling a bathtub.
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| Mike's cabin on Read Island |
Later that evening we accepted a generous invitation by a Mike and a young family that lives on the property to join them for dinner. John and his friend had caught some salmon the night before and so an impromptu barbecue was planned, with David and I as guests of honour. That night we feasted on huge slabs of delicious salmon and corn fresh from the garden.
After dinner we returned to the boat in the pitch dark. Unfortunately there was no stargazing that night as the sky was cloudy. Earlier, David and I had considered John's advice about moving the boat off the dock and over to the mooring buoy. We decided that the wind had mostly died off for the evening and it would be a pain to have to take the dinghy to the boat in the dark so we reinforced the knots in the dock lines, threw a couple of extra fenders over the side of the boat and retired for the night, confident there would be no issues. Just after midnight we both awoke to the boat rolling, sometimes violently, in the waves. As John had predicted, they were hitting us broadside given that we were tied up at the end of the dock and at times I thought I might get thrown right out of my bunk. David dressed and went outside to make sure all was secure but nothing further could be done. We spend a semi-sleepless night bouncing at the dock, vowing to listen to sage advice next time it came our way.
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The Trip Home
The next morning we invited Mike down to the boat for a hearty bacon and eggs breakfast. With our bellies full we said our goodbyes and motored away in light rain. The bad weather had held off until this point but now we were expecting intermittent rain, at times heavy, all the way home. Also, the southeast winds that blew us north so quickly were persisting so we now needed to head directly into them. A sailboat can sail in almost any direction but directly into the wind or within about 45 degrees off the wind. In order to proceed directly into the wind the only option is to A) use the engine or B) tack broadly back and forth under sail, taking a very indirect path to the destination. We had to be home in 3 days - 1 day less than we took to get here - so didn't have the luxury of tacking.
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| At the helm in full foul weather gear. It wasn't so bad. |
And so we fell into a different sort of routine going home. One of us would be at the helm, dressed from head to toe in foul weather gear and the other would stay below, organizing, washing dishes, cooking or just relaxing with a book. We spelled each other off at regular intervals and it became a rather pleasant cycle. Even the times up top in the rain were not so bad. There is something very comforting about being in adverse conditions with excellent gear. I have a Goretex sailing jacket with a hood and Goretex pants, along with rubber sailing boots. Even as the heaviest rain pelted down on us I was impervious to it. Unfortunately David was not so well equipped. He had an excellent sailing jacket but it is getting a little long in the tooth and proved to be less then waterproof. He did have good Goretex pants - at home in the closet. The rain pants he did bring were simple nylon and were waterproof but somewhat uncomfortable. I'm pretty sure he is out buying better rain gear even as I write this.
We decided to more or less reverse the course that we used to come north but we would stop in different places seeing as we needed to make better time. We bypassed Lund and made our first stop Grief Point Marina in Powell River. Once again we would need to cross the strait and get back to the mainland on the eastern side. However this time we would stay on the western side and head south until we passed Savary Island and then head East. it was slow going out in the strait, pounding into the wind and waves under power. In our boat we can often sail faster than we can motor and we were down to less than 3 knots at times, fighting wind, waves and current. But finally we passed the reef off of Savary and made our turn eastward. For what turned out to be the last time this trip we raised the sails and had a brisk ride across the wind toward the mainland. Once again were were verging on being overpowered and were heeled way over. But with few adjustments as described earlier the boat settled down and we had an excellent sail across. We made such good speed sailing that we compensated for the slow going earlier and arrived at Grief Point in good time.
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| Rainbow at Grief Point |
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| Sunrise over the breakwater at Grief Point |
The next morning we were off again, chugging down the Malaspina Strait. The day passed in much the same way as the previous one, except this time there would be no fun sailing - it was straight south into the wind. The weather in the distance looked ominous and heavy rain was forecast. Fortunately the skies looked worse than the weather turned out to be.
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| Ominous clouds ahead of us. |
As we retraced our route home and passed familiar landmarks I could tell David was getting restless. When you spend a lot of time on a boat with another person you learn about their little eccentricities. One of Davids is that when a trip draws close to completion and he smells home he can't get there fast enough, even if there is ample time in the plan. I could see he was thinking and he kept running below studying the charts and making calculations. After a while he returned to the cockpit and declared that if we pushed really hard we could make Gibsons by dinner time. "Just in time for Oysters at Smitty's" he added as an enticement. David hates oysters. This was a thinly veiled attempt to charge farther than planned for that day in order to satisfy his need to make progress towards home. On the other hand, I wanted to stop at a pretty little anchorage called Smugglers Cove that I have heard a great deal about. I was about to protest when David placed his Ace on the table: Smugglers Cove sits at the north end of Welcome Passage. After all his scouring of charts and tides he had deduced that if we continued south past Smugglers we would have the tide and current with us through the passage - the same one that pushed us to close to 10 knots when we were heading north. "And," he paused for effect before the final blow, "if we stay in Smugglers Cove we will be against the current the next morning." With this he sat back and said nothing more, knowing his argument was rock solid.
I stewed over this for some time, trying to pick holes in his logic but alas there were none. Getting through the passage with the tide made perfect sense. But I still couldn't abide passing up the chance to drop the hook in a beautiful anchorage and instead tie up at a marina that is both familiar and unremarkable to me. So I played the only card I had. I explained that my vacation wasn't over for two days yet and that tide or no tide I had a right to enjoy it rather than blasting home at full speed. Smugglers Cove is one of the premier anchorages on the Sunshine Coast and it would be dumb to speed right by it, even if it was raining. Now it was my turn to be silent.
David is nothing if not a reasonable man and I could see him struggling to parry. But after only a moment he turned and agreed with my point and the matter was settled. Thankfully this turned out to be a decision we would be both be happy about.
Not long after we crept into Smugglers Cove with one eye on the water and one eye on our chart. This is a very safe anchorage but there is a rather narrow entrance and only one path to follow that is deep enough for a sailboat. Once inside we surveyed the cozy little cove and picked a spot for ourselves in between two other boats. In small anchorages like this, you generally need to stern tie. This involves dropping the anchor, backing towards the shore and then one person gets in the dinghy and pulls a long line from the stern to shore, securing it to a tree or rock and bringing it back to the boat. Once this line is pulled tight the boat will not swing at anchor and in this way quite a few boats can fit in a small area. Smugglers Cove is a provincial marine park so there are even iron rings pounded into the rocks to help with stern tying.
This was our first time attempting this type of anchor. I went out in the dinghy and David let out the line. I went ashore and ran the line through the ring and started rowing back, only to be jerked to a stop. David had let out what he thought was enough line and then cleated it off. It wasn't enough. I yelled for him to give me more line and this he did, once again cleating it off when he estimated there was enough. I rowed further toward the boat and once again was jerked short. At this point I directed a few comments at David that the people with kids next door probably didn't appreciate. As it turned out, neither did David but there was no shortage of line to get back to the boat after that.
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| Stern tying in Smugglers Cove |
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| GeMara from the dinghy is Smugglers Cove |
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| The view further into the Smugglers Cove from the boat. |
We passed a very enjoyable late afternoon and evening exploring the cove in the dinghy and chatting with our boat neighbours. The water was pristine and the low tide revealed impossible numbers of starfish and other marine fauna. The kids from the boat next to us were preoccupied watching a baby seal that was frolicking near shore. Later in the evening we ate our last dinner of the trip which could best be described as a mixed plate. We were nearing the end of our provisions and had enjoyed t-bone steak, rack of lamb and other opulent meals. Tonight we cobbled together a dinner of potatoes and onions, Libby's beans and barbecued smokies.
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| Starfish everywhere |
Once the dishes were clean we sat in the cockpit with a single malt and enjoyed the sounds of the night from shore in the pitch dark. We then retired below and sat in the warm glow of the cabin lights savouring both our scotch and our last night on the boat. As we sat I looked over and noticed, not for the first time, that David had his bed in the V-berth all prepared and ready to go. He had left a light on in there and it looked positively cozy. Maybe it was the dim lights in the cabin but I thought I saw a fluffy down duvet in there and maybe a few candles burning. By contrast, my berth is beneath the cockpit and smells of diesel. It is so cramped to get in and out of that it reminds me of getting into a lunar module. Because of this I elected to use that berth for storage and instead fold down the dining table every night into a bed. As David regarded the last drops of scotch in his glass I could tell he was getting ready to retire to his little Hilton on the Sea. On the other hand I had still to make up my makeshift bunk and for a moment I was a little irked. I may have made a lame protest as David trundled off to bed but as I lay in my own bunk moments later I remembered again that co-owning a boat is all about compromise and that there are far more benefits than drawbacks to this arrangement. As the beans we had for dinner started to kick in and sound of flatulence started emanating from the V-berth I reasoned that my little cave and the smell of diesel may not be so bad after all.
Postscript
We woke up to a gentle rain falling on our quiet little anchorage. After perking some coffee we sat under the dodger and quietly soaked in the morning ambiance, contemplating everything we had done. We were both ready to head home now and soon we began making preparations to leave.
This last motor home held no surprises. We knew the weather would be wet and socked in, albeit reasonably warm. When you're standing at the wheel in the pouring rain there isn't much to do but look forward to going below to take your turn for lunch. I went down first and enjoyed chicken soup and a grilled cheese sandwich - a new boat favourite. Later David came below to have his lunch and I took my turn at the wheel with full rain gear and CBC radio streaming "The Debaters" to keep my mind occupied.
As we entered English Bay the visibility was so poor that we couldn't even see the city. Dark brooding clouds obscured our view and the VHF radio was alive with Coast Guard notices advising of poor visibility. For us, however it was just a touch of final drama for our return home and soon we passed under the bridge and turned towards Coal Harbour Marina. David expertly brought the boat into her slip and while nothing was said, I think we were both contemplating how much we've learned since bringing GeMara home in January. Down below we had our ritual of toasting a successful sail. As we savoured the mouthful of scotch and considered the past week I realized were also toasting a successful partnership. We had made it back without cracking up the boat or cracking each other's skulls out of frustration. And that was something truly worth toasting.
