Too soon, and too fast! Our sailing for the past two days has been fantastic, and we’ve been rocketing along at hull speed under clear blue skies, feted by porpoises, unimpeded by Customs. It’s all come too soon and gone too quickly.
Our last couple of days in Vancouver were just spent wandering, taking it all in. A stop to see the now famously cordoned off Olympic Flame; a quick public transit tour of the venues, or at least those accessibly by public transit (Cypress Mountain was not on that list, even before it started melting and even ticket-holders were prohibited from visiting); and a night spent wandering the streets of downtown, listening to the music and watching the throngs of people from every nation acting and interacting.
I say every nation but it’s just a broad assumption that I am making; Vancouver is such a cosmopolitan city anyway, it’s difficult to say if even the most exotic-looking or -sounding person is a resident or not. But from all those we saw fumbling around with maps just as we were, it’s a safe bet that not all were locals.
Being in attendance with the rest of the world, we weren’t really looking forward to leaving, but when we did, we did it fast. The day dawned clear and cool and brought a northerly wind bombing down the Strait of Georgia with it that left us tearing across at hull speed and better, bashing through three foot swells with a part-time escort of porpoises, who alternately annoyed, as they splashed water toward an otherwise miraculously dry cockpit, then frightened, as they made breathtaking cuts ahead of and beneath our bow. We were heaving and bounding so much that I was sure one of them would miscalculate and face an unexpected appointment with the leading edge of our much-abused keel, but they knew their business far better than I and steered clear, if only by inches.
The wind and weather encouraged us to angle south for Active Pass, cutting the corner on the route we took north, and saving us a day on the return trip. We caught the tides barely in time at the pass; we didn’t dare sail through but motored dully against the slight current, pausing only to raise sail again on the other side before rocketing off to the south again. A rail-car carrier, seeing us pause to unfurl the jib off Enterprise Reef, acidly informed us that he and a ferry were coming through and we should start our engines to get clear. I didn’t bother to tell him we were faster under sail and that he should step outside the bridge and check the wind sometimes… I just let the genoa unfurl again with a roar and took off down Swanson Channel.
With so much and so favorable a wind, we decided to put in at Sidney for the night. This was no easy decision; Mandy loathes Sidney and its approaches, cluttered with rocks and other vessel traffic year round. It always seems to be her watch when we’re passing through there. I talked her into it, then regretted it when I saw the chart for the approach to Blue Heron basin in Tsehum Harbor, where our moorage was… shallow. Then I realized it was a metric chart, and that wasn’t a one fathom sounding I was looking at, but one meter… half of what I had already thought was pretty thin water.
A detailed study of the tide tables convinced me it was safe to go in, but we only managed it with a lot of false alarms and the prop barely ticking over. Docking, even with the wind blasting down on us, was an anti-climax.
We were still in Canada, but the sedate club house of the Sidney North Saanich Yacht Club where I went up to register for the evening convinced me we were a world away from the Olympics. It was too soon, and we’d gone too far to go back. So it’s on for home in the morning.