Finally the time came to leave the laid back island of Sointula for home. It’s a shame as the weather had just picked up and sunshine was planned for the next few weeks. As you can see below the autumnal colours were just coming into play and I would have loved to spend another month there.
We stowed everything away on the boat, the bikes where the last items to go below, wrapped up in bags I made from the old staysail and we made our way to the airport in Port Hardy.
Jim, who is looking after our boat for the next 6 months kindly drove us and our bags to the ferry port where we caught a boat over to Port McNeill on Vancouver island. From there we took a small 16 seater plane down to Vancouver Airport (south).
It wasn’t easy to catch a plane home the same day due to ferry/plane schedules so we opted to have a night/morning in Vancouver City and check it out. Below is the Gas man, apparently called this because of his long epilogues, I wonder if this has a connection with the Irish term ‘A gas man’
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.
It was nice to be home, but I returned from my one year absence to no telephone/internet, no hot water or heating and a too high percentage of rugs and clothes destroyed by moths.
Communications systems should be back online on Monday when I get fibre installed, the heating engineer should have sourced a new water pump by Tuesday, and I start the Great Moth Recovery program tomorrow.
I still have a view of the water (River Dee/Irish Sea) from my living room, but already miss the scenes from British Columbia.
Kathy may post a final blog, but I don’t think much will happen boatwise/blog now for 6 months.
When I return to work on the boat in April, I will be preparing it for a summer, which I think will mostly be in north BC, maybe even as far north a Juneau in Alaska, then before it gets too cold we will whiz south towards Mexico as previously planned.
Thanks for following our travels and all the positive comments and support we have had.
Paul Collister
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.
Just along from the museum we realised we were in Twin Peaks country land, so we drove out to the back road where David lynch turned up one day and planted the sign below. They took some pictures, pulled the sign and drove off. 
Much later the city of Snoqualmie put up a replica sign, but it has since been stolen.
The ultrasound revealed no serious issues, just inflammation, most probably caused by an infection. The actual diagnosis was Epididymitis, and the treatment was to be a course of antibiotics, rest and loads of painkillers.
It’s a huge marina, hundreds of berths with some interesting boats
and is next to the entrance to Lake Union and Lake Washington, which you access via the Washington Ship Canal after passing up the Ballard Locks. 
You can also see outside the locks, many salmon waiting to enter the passage with the steps. This is a man made version of the rocky rivers and waterfalls they would normally be tackling, all built by the US Army when the canal was first created.
However once there we signed up for 2 weeks berthing. We cycled onto the space needle area, as we planned to spend a few hours in the Pop Music Museum there, however when we arrived it was getting late and I was surprised to see the admission fee was nearly $30 each, and I don’t even like grunge. $30 buys a lot of shackles! So we decided that Kathy would come back later in the week and spend the whole day there to get her moneys worth while I took my $30 down to the docks to see what I could find (In the chandleries).
Once again I find myself in a place where I think I need a year or more to fully get to know the geography and a bit of the culture.
Later in the day the tide turned and we got to see a different aspect of the house. For the people sitting on the deck in their loungers it must be great for the view to be changing all the time.
It was a very peaceful evening there and early the next day we were up and off to Sidney spit, a small nature reserve just of Sidney, Vancouver Is. 
Port of Friday Harbour is a massive place, with a great range of vessels berthed here
On the way we saw many luxury houses set back in the trees along the coast. They looked wonderful and I mused on the fact that I might have had one if I had been born in Seattle. I was writing software for a word processor, much like Microsoft Word , back in the 80’s. Had I been in Seattle, I might have been on the Microsoft team writing Word, and by now be head of word processor hyphenation and line wrapping, or some other wonderful title. My small allotment of company stock might have bought me one of these waterfront mansions, and as I said to Kathy that I might also be on my third young blonde leggy wife by now too. She pointed out that if that was the case, I probably would be broke and have lost the house by then!
Arriving into Port Ludlow saw the wind drop to zero, and the sun come out, the fog left and it became a glorious day. Port Ludlow is a small community town, with a few shops, a marina which is part of a Golf course resort, and a few holiday homes and ‘condos’. 
I got chatting to one of the guys sitting on our table during the meal, he was very friendly and keen to offer me tips on moorage. He, like many there was a friend of Bob’s and he also had a boat, but not a Perry one. But he also had a truck, which was quite a beast. 
I was keen to see his boat, which turned out to be just as impressive, and had me thinking of what kind of boat I would like next. Something small, fast and maneuverable, but mostly, something that looks great.
Finally I’m in a cold place, at night here with clear skies the temperature drops. The waters here are quite cold and consequently the sea breezes are very chilling, so at long last, after many years I was able to put my Irish sweater into service. It’s doing a great job, thanks to Tim and Asta who bought it for me as a present, some time ago.
Tomorrow (Monday morning), we leave around 8am for Seattle propper, we are booked into Shilsole Marina, just north of Ballard, once there we will have to find somewhere affordable to stay for the next four weeks as the daily rates are too much for us. Thankfully the people at the rendezvous have been really helpful with tips and suggestions, and a few have offered to meet up with us in town and show us around.
The sky turned black and it started to rain, but just before we arrived the weather moved on, the wind dropped, the sea calmed and into Nanaimo we motored to look for our berth. by the time we tied up the sun was out and I was pleased to be there, but had quite enjoyed the sail.
You can see our planned route in blue, our actual track is in red, not a bad angle on the wind really. There is a dotted/dashed trapezoid shaped box on the chart known as “Area Golf Whisky” This is a military exclusion zone, you can see I tacked over the western end, then across the middle. I could see the Patrol ships on the AIS but they didn’t bother me. I had read somewhere that they only use it on weekdays. It’s used for testing torpedoes, apparently they launch them at one end of the zone towards the other. All along the seabed of the zone they have sensors to record the progress of the torpedos, data is fed back to the base on Ballena island, which we tacked around.
In the morning we head south, we need to leave about 09:30 to reach Dodd Narrows with plenty of time before slack water.