Mon 29th April 2019
I got to work early, emptied out the lazarette locker all over the cockpit and dived below to dismantle the steering system. Back in the cockpit, I fully dismantled the wheel , sprocket and all the other bits, it seemed sensible to check everything while it was in bits. One thing I spotted when I took it all apart was that the key, which is actually just a block of metal, was missing from the wheel shaft, it locks the wheel to the sprocket and without it all the force of the steering is transferred to a small bolt used to stop the wheel sliding out.
I looked around in case it had fallen out, but I wasn’t surprised it was missing, that explained the extra play in the steering I wanted to eliminate. It was worrying that the bolt could have snapped at any moment we had any rough weather and the steering got heavy. If the bolt snapped, I would be spinning the wheel with no effect, worse if I pulled back the wheel would have popped out of the pedestal all together, and whilst making a great photo opportunity, it might have been a bit upsetting for whoever was on the helm. Whilst relieved it hadn’t been a problem, I decided to get a key made from the workshop.
It turns out, that the worst case scenario for the sheave failure played out with another member of the baba group who tells me they lost all steering and if they hadn’t had an emergency tiller handy, they may well have ended up on the rocks!
I had removed all the bits on the pedestal including the fold up table which I now started to strip the varnish off, along with the main cabin hatch screens.
Tuesday arrived and I took the broken sheaves up to the local workshop for welding, ordered a new bit of key to be cut, and cycled on into town (town being the other end of the only main road with the co-op and baker as the only shops) for supplies, I climbed back into the lazarette and removed the quadrant from the rudder as it was looking a bit rough, I gave the inside a good cleaning and replaced some of the earthing wires that had corroded. I also checked all the sea cocks and hoses for any sign of wear.
Wednesday, I was crippled, crawling around upside down, inside out, in the locker, is really more of a job for houdini than me, so did some gentle varnishing instead. I have half a tin of very high quality Epiphanes varnish, but it’s over a year since I last opened that tin, and for some reason it doesn’t seem to keep well. But I’m too mean to throw it away, instead I filter the lumps out with a sieve, then add thinner to bring it back to life. It seems to be working well after that.
In the office I help Randy and his wife out getting openCPN running on their macbook, it seems to work well for them. Later Randy calls round with a bag of giant prawns for me.
The thing is they’re still all alive and wriggling around in the plastic carrier bag. This is not something I’m used too, and although I know how to snap their heads off and peel the shell, even de-veining is easy, I’m not keen on doing it while they are looking at me, or watching me kill their mate looking up from the bag. So I put dinner off to a bit later and put the bag in the sink. All the time I can hear them climbing over each other, and I’m working but thinking Im going to have to man up at some point and do the deed. I wait a little longer, and fortunately they seem to have gone to sleep. Just as well, as ten minutes later they are lovely pink lumps of flesh frying in garlic butter, very tasty too.
Thursday, I popped back to the workshop and collected the sheaves. The welding is just fine and the new key looked great, I noticed a sailboat similar to mine hauled up on the trolley at the workshop and realised that they can haul me out here if needed, that gives me more fleibility
I had to file the key down a little to make it fit, but now it’s very snug. and I felt smug for fixing a major defect!
Ron, over the water on the next pontoon, who had promised me a properly cooked crab shouted over that he would take me out fishing in a few days if I wanted to learn. Even as a master fisherman already, with two catches over the last ten years, I thought it would be rude to say no, so I’m looking forward to that.
I also popped into the post office and found a letter for me had just arrived, it was my AT&T sim card I had ordered, not sure if it would work or be a dud like the last one I ordered online ,I was keen to try it out. I had to hand over the dosh for the first month online before I would find out, and the unlimited data on 4g anywhere in Canada/USA & Mexico for $65 / month sounded like a good deal. It would be a good deal, but they dont allow tethering/hot-spot outside of the USA, that’s buried in the small print. So I have lots of data, but only on the phone, so it’s not that great. However I should be able to do lots of skype/facetime stuff now without any worries about running out of data.
At some point in the week a house motored on into the harbour and starting filling its hull ( basement?) with lumber. So I have seen planes and houses tie up to the same dock as me now, what a place!
I did find out today that Newfoundland is 3:30 behind UTC/GMT. I can never understand why anyone would do this, do they know how much of a pain this is for their computer programmers, if they have any left. I couldn’t cope with that. I had wondered why they kept saying 0n cbc, and the news is at news at 11, or 11:30 in Newfoundland, I wondered why theirs was always later, silly me.
Friday, put all the steering system together and was feeling good about things, when I decided to clean more of the lazarette area. the eberspacher (diesel fired cabin heater) exhaust pipe had a soot mark behind it on the hull, in the area I had repaired back in Borneo. I tried to pull the pipe away from the hull to look at it and it crumbled in my hand with black soot and chunks of sooty matter going everywhere. Not good. There’s also an asbestossy looking material lagging the pipe inside an outer plastic casing. I’m hoping that’s ok. So after an hour of cleaning up and cutting the pipe back, I’m in need of a new exhaust pipe, which may not be easy to get here, before I can use the heater. Not to worry I have the electric one, oh I forgot, they’re shutting off the power to the marina over the next few days. Let’s hope this promise of warmer weather comes through.
Saturday, walk downtown to the shop and buy a fresh sourdough loaf.
More varnishing, and realise I forgot a clip in the steering brake, so take it all apart again. I try to connect the throttle up and it is out by an inch from where the coupling should be, realise I put a bracket securing the cable in upside down (in fact I put it in the right way, they wanted it to be put in upside down, but that’s a small point 😉 ) So more stripping down and putting it back together. I think it’s almost done now, just need to get the block of wood under the compass varnished.
The battery charger stopped working, so I have been using the solar panels for the last few days. I decided to fix it today and noticed the cables had corroded off. I’m very confused, this is the second time in a year they have corroded off at the switch panel, I wonder if this fine malaysian cable has some problem. Once I had repaired the connections to the switch panel, it wouldn’t power up, I remember it did this before, after a while it started working, it’s like it’s sulky and will only work when it wants to.
So I think I’m close to starting on the engine work, however I went looking for the cooling pump repair kit and I can’t find it. This is the only real fault on the boat, and it’s the reason I bought this as soon as I got home in October, I packed it as soon as it arrived and I can’t remember unpacking it a few weeks ago when I arrived back at the boat. This really is a case of ‘you had one job’ I’m mad about this, did I unpack it and put it ‘somewhere safe’ here, it’s not that big a boat, but I have searched it stem to stern, twice now.
I know as soon as I order a replacement it will turn up. Such a nuisance. I may have wrapped it up inside a tee shirt for extra protection, and it will fall out when we hit tee-shirt weather, losing my memory is one thing I’m not happy about at all. On the plus side, I did find loads of great stuff I had forgot we had hidden in odd places all over the boat, however I can’t remember what they where a day later 🙁
Leaving the cockpit yesterday I tripped and bashed my knee hard, I realised I had to tidy up, and so moved a lot of crap out of the cockpit and threw a lot away. Underneath all the crap in the area where I had left the steering wheel, I found the original key for the wheel. ! Oh well.
Paul Collister
This is the steam powered clock in the city’s Gas district on the waterfront.
And these guys must make most Canadians groan in the way I do whenever an American film on the UK has the obligatory red bus/ telephone box and beat bobby. There’s no shortages of tourist gift stores in this area, much like every city we have ever visited. However a lot of the gifts were high quality and if I was richer, everyone might have got Vancouver branded clothing for christmas.
So we had a pleasant dinner in a grand railway station building at the Waterfront station then headed off to the airport where we got a budget flight home on Air Transat. The 9 hour flight went quite quickly and we were soon back in dreary Manchester on the train home to Liverpool.
The pump cleaned up ok, but it took a while to find the correct pump in the workshop manual as there are two different types used depending on age.
Further inspection revealed that I didn’t have any spares, even though I couldn’t see any wear on the rubber o-ring that was in there, and the diagram didn’t show any other seals. I filled the chamber with water and nothing dripped out. I wondered if perhaps the pipes feeding/taking water to the pump were leaking at the join and the water being squirted to the back of the pump. Unlikely, but it was my only hope for a quick repair.
After our trip to Princess Louisa Inlet we returned to Egmont, this time to the public wharf where I messed up the mooring, I had assumed that as the tide was flooding I would be pushed away from the boat we were rafting to, so got really close, as it turned out the tide was running the other way, so my bow was pushed onto the boats quarter, and my stern was soon pushed onto the boat behind him. How embarrassing, I thought I was getting better at this. However the tide wasn’t strong and we pushed off, the fenders prevented any damage, but as always some part of my boat wanted to leave me for the other boat, and in this case it was the barbeque that was trying to merge with some steelwork on the other boat. A good push and we were all sorted. The reason the current was the opposite to what I expected was due to it reversing direction near the shore, I should have considered this especially given the name of the marina next door ‘BackEddy Marina’.
The next day we headed off to Teakerne Arm, Captain Vancouver spent two weeks anchored here recuperating from the horrendous time he was having in Desolation Sound, he gave it that name more because of his mental state at the time, we thought it was a fantastic place, but it was sunny for us, he was there in storms, and couldn’t find anywhere to anchor, eventually getting into Teakerne Arm. My main reason for for visiting this Arm was simply because if he spent so long here, it can’t have been that bad. As it turned out it was a great spot with wonderful waterfalls at the head.
Anchoring was fun, three boat lengths from the shore it is 60m deep, two boat lengths off it’s 20m. so we dropped the hook in 30m and reversed until the anchor gripped the side of the near vertical wall below us. We ran a stern tie ashore, tightened up on the chain and the anchor seemed happy. 
In a small cove beside the waterfall we spotted a house that seemed to be in trouble.
The following morning we pushed on to Blind Channel, this was slightly challenging as we had to pass through three sets of rapids, Yaculta, Gillard & Dent, each about 2 miles apart. We were going against a flood tide, so to make the first rapid at slack water meant we would be 30 minutes late for the last rapid. So we aimed to get to the first on the end of the ebb, and race through arriving at the middle rapids just before slack and the final and most dangerous rapids at Dent at slack water. I spent an hour working out tides and passage planning, we ended up having to leave at 07:30 and we arrived just 15 minutes early at 11:38, we dawdled for 10 minutes then went for it. Everything went well right up until the last set of rapids, Dent, featuring the scarily named ‘Devils Hole whirlpool’, which the pilot says “Those who have looked into the Devils hole won’t ever want to revisit it”. Just as we approached I saw a tug emerging but couldn’t yet see its tow. The tugs rarely are pointing, or even travelling in the same direction as their tow, and require a very wide berth. I had to steer to starboard a lot to miss him and that put our course directly over ‘Devils Hole’, looking through the binoculars I couldn’t see any holes in the water so we pushed on, I was soon able to scoot around the back of the tow and hugged the coast, just missing the hole, which just looked like flat water to me. 
Yet again, my timing worked out well, except for the fact we had another 2 hours of sailing to go, and when I looked on the chart 2 hours later, I saw Greene Point rapids coming up in a few minutes. I hadn’t even realised they were there. Kathy took the helm, slowed us down, while I scanned the pilot books and found out they can be quite dangerous on spring tides, and we were bang on the highest tides and arriving at maximum flood, the worst time. I couldn’t quite understand what all the fuss was about as we approached and decided we should give it a whirl anyway, we turned into the turbulent waters and headed for the resort we could see in the distance. Everything worked out well, besides one bit of a shove and a splash of waves on the boat we were through. It was only later that I worked out the chart was wrong and the rapids were over to our starboard side as we turned to port, missing the worst of it.
A walk along the beach revealed this old winch, again used for logging.
A trip through the forest led to a 600 year old cedar tree.
I sent a postcard to an old friend from here, and the very next day the postman turned up in their plane to collect the mail and deliver new mail. We really are in the middle of nowhere here, It’s a big island, but has no electric, water or telephone. Electricity comes from a generator and a water powered turbine that makes use of the strong currents here. Water from a brook. Amazingly the internet is very good, but I think that is via satellite.
I had wondered how you tie up a plane to a dock?
It seems a round turn and one half hitch is all that’s needed!
After two days in Sidney, a town with a lot of book shops, we had to leave as the marina was booked up for a regata, we had gone there to have a break and enjoy Kathy’s birthday, we had hoped to find a good Indian restaurant, but the only one there had closed down. So we had to move along the coast to Van Isle marina which was also quite a posh affair, but a few miles out of the main town. It did have a lot of marinas and boat repair yards, I wandered around and found two chandleries, one with a load of Sikaflex (Marine Sealant) at a silly low price, I had to buy two tubes, even though I don’t think I can use them before their ‘use by date’
The main reason for going to Pirates cove was that it was just an hour from Dodd Narrows, as I mentioned before, a quite scary pass where the currents run fast and dangerous. we needed to pass through around 9am so this was a great spot to leave from. As it turned out, there was no drama, passing through at slack water makes life very easy.
Early the next morning we were on the move again, Lasqueti is about half way across the Strait of Georgia and we needed to get right over to the North eastern side in order to visit Desolation sound and the other back channels that we had heard so much about. Around this time I asked Kathy to check out if there was anywhere she really wanted to see, or could find any ‘must see’ places on the net, she quickly came up with the idea to visit Prince Louisa Inlet, a small inlet of outstanding beauty with a giant waterfall at the head called Chatterbox Falls. Looking at the chart, this was an easy diversion from here, so we headed north and cut through the Agamemnon channel up to Jervis Inlet which lead to our inlet.
As we passed under the cables they just seemed to get lower and lower, I really don’t think I could ever do the intercoastal waterway up the eastern side of the USA as so many of the bridges there are just a little bigger than my mast and I think I would freak at each one. 
However we passed through and looking back felt a bit silly as for some reason now they seemed to be about a mile up in the sky. Around here we passed another sailing boat who was making about 1 knot under sail, there was next to no wind. I admired him for not rushing and burning fuel like us. He was sitting in his boat saying to himself “Sister Midnight, I know that name…??”
We headed down to the pontoons to see how it all worked when we met the sailor heading up to the shop, I stopped and asked him if he was the skipper on the yacht that just arrived, he said yes and we chatted, I told him we had passed him under the pylons and he told us he was down from Sointula and I explained that we were heading up there. At this point he realised why he thought he knew Sister Midnight, he asked my full name, then introduced himself as Jim the guy I had been emailing with over the last few months as he was going to be looking after our boat while we returned to the UK. he had just sailed down here for a few days exploring. Quite a coincidence. We bumped into him later in the grocery store, but that was less of a coincidence as the grocery store was the only shop for 5 miles and there was nothing else to do 🙂
When we arrived it was lovely and sunny but in the morning the fog had descended and I worried if we would be ably to make the 35 miles up to Princess Louisa Inlet, but a local arrived in a small skiff and he told me the fog was only around the marina and was caused by the colder water you get around the rapids. 
We set off and sure enough the fog was very isolated around the marina, the pic below is looking back to the marina from about a mile away.
At the head of this inlet is the famous chatterbox Falls, in June the sheer mountainside vertical walls all along the inlet are flowing with waterfalls 
We found space on a public dock maintained by the park authorities. I’m not used to having to moor next to planes but I just treated it like a boat and all went well
The small float plane had just arrived with a bride and groom and photographer for some wedding shots in front of the waterfall, after those shots they pranced around on the pontoon for ages before shooting off in the plane. Watching the plane go round and round in circles to gain enough height to clear the mountains made me realise just how high these granite walls reached.
The next day a big motor launch $4.5Million dollars worth, arrived and I helped the skipper by taking his stern lines, we chatted and he had seen my “Liverpool” reg on the hull and explained his guests on the boat were two ladies from the UK, so later we were surprised when two giggly northern women turned up, banging on our hull and insisting we join them for drinks on the mega yacht, one of them was from Preston, the other frm Nottingham. We had a nice time chatting with them and a few other guests on the boat, a very luxurious affair, I noted the kitchen was way better than my own, and I’m talking about the one in my house!
Today we left Princess Louisa Inlet early to pass the rapids at slack water, this time at low tide, making the channel even narrower. On the way out we saw some new waterfalls that had been dry on the way in.
“La Boheme is one in a series of William Atkin designed double-enders. This one is the Eric. Modeled after Norwegian rescue boats at the turn of the century, the Eric is said to be “the best boat for the worst weather”. La Boheme’s keel was laid in 1926. She was completed and launched in 1938 out of Victoria, BC and has plied the waters of the North West ever since. Constructed of Port Orford cedar on oak frames, La Boheme is stout, sea-kindly and extremely comfortable as cruiser.”
One for Taffy.
Boats like this one above are scattered around the yard, this is an old classic cruise ship. One morning I looked up after hearing some swishing of the water next to us to see this yacht (below) passing by. A fairly common sight here. I think I will bring the boat back here next year to do any big jobs like the mast refurb I’m thinking of.
