April 23, 2022
We raised anchor with the plans to head to Nanaimo to work for the week before attending MIST with the Blue Water Cruising association. To get into the Straight of Georgia we’ve got to cross a shoal that allegedly can get very shallow in the wrong spots. We’ve crossed it before in other boats, just not ours so I was a bit nervous. We crossed it without incident and headed into a windless Straight enroute to Nanaimo. We still tried to sail with the light breeze, but the sails just flapped. We relented and motored.
About halfway across we caught some wind and had a great sail right up to the mouth of Nanaimo’s harbour. We were cruising on a nice beam/close reach in the mid-teens with the fulls sails out. It was a perfect three hours of sailing. I wanted to put a reef in, but we hadn’t actually rigged the reefing lines yet. We’ll get that sorted before sailing again.
NM Sailed: 25
The Long Commute and Poop Problems
April 25, 2022
The joys of working remotely at anchor is finding your way into the office from another City. One of the reasons we always choose to go to Nanaimo is that it’s relatively easy (and cheap) to get back to the City for work. It just makes for a long day. Up at 5 am, dinghy the 2 miles from the anchorage to the city, take a taxi to the ferry, and take a bus to get downtown Vancouver by 9 am. Work all day and then reverse the process. The day starts at 5 am, ends somewhere around 8 back at the boat. Mark and I both had days to be in the office, so we knew we had a couple of long days coming up this week. But that’s just the small price to pay for being out cruising.
Honestly, aside from being easy access to get back to the City, I’ve got a love/hate with the anchorage. Each time we come to Nanaimo, something pops up. Last time we got Covid (okay, not Nanaimo’s fault) and the boat ran out of power. This time, the holding tank clogged and filled (surprisingly quick). There’s no way to access the clog without going under the boat thanks to all the existing openings being seized. After a long battle with everything, Mark decides to cut an access port into the full holding tank and snake the drain hose….Cue all of the grossness ever.
On top of the poop problems, the wind picks up every afternoon like clockwork. It howls through the rigging and I get nervous that the mooring will break and the boat will go shooting onto the shore.
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