Back in the UK

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