We haven’t been through Pender Harbour in a couple of years, but it is pretty much the same as we remember it… beautiful homes lining the snaking bays and inlets, lovely little parks and patches of otherwise inaccessible terrain rendered unbuildable to prevent the place from feeling overcrowded and urbanized. The same seals sunning themselves at the entrance light, the SloCat harbour ferry still putters (slowly; as advertised) through a diverse forest of anchored cruising boats, and the same little derelict red runabout twists gingerly about its mooring off the Seattle Yacht Club outstation docks.
Last time was the early season and we had thought then that Garden Bay, the favoured anchorage, was the most crowded place we had ever seen. We hadn’t seen anything, yet. Now, at the height of the season, there are ten times as many boats in here, resting amicably in a tranquil pond on 2:1 or 3:1 scopes.
We also inadvertently contrived to arrive on a Friday, just like all the boats out of Vancouver or Nanaimo heading to Desolation for a long weekend, so that even after we anchored in the early afternoon, more and more arrived, eventually spilling out of Garden Bay into the rest of the Harbour area. Nonetheless, it has been a quiet anchorage. No generators have fired up for the morning shave, and even those heading out for an early start have raised anchor softly and with reverence, so that you hardly notice they’ve left until the small wake slaps at the hull.
It turns out that my hesitancy to depart Nanaimo was mostly rooted in laying at the dock. We decided to make our last day ashore an easy one, sleeping as late as we wanted, taking care of a last few errands at our own pace, fueling and pumping out after the early rush. To catch a favorable current north, we would anchor another night in Mark Bay and head out early the next day.
Once we were at anchor, I was raring to go. The forecast hadn’t changed, nor our itinerary. Free of the easy access to amenities, shorepower, and unlimited water, I suddenly found myself back in a cruising mindset and was eager to move on.
So it didn’t take much to get me out of bed at five in the morning and motoring north through the wind-swept Newcastle Channel. We dodged a departing BC ferry in Departure Bay, spun up into the lee of Jesse Island to raise the mainsail, and pushed out into the heaving swells of the Strait of Georgia (in accordance with the ubiquitous forecasts of the Canadian Coast Guard’s Continuous Marine Broadcast, I always find myself thinking of it as “Strait of Georgia – North of Nanaimo”).
We went out behind a forty-something foot ketch and ahead of a powerboat of similar length; both turned back within a mile. The waves, three footers, were short and sharp, and we were taking water over the bow immediately. The wind blasted down out of the northwest and put us on our ear. For a rough twenty minutes, I thought hard about turning back as well, but decided to trust the forecast and the latest reports from mid-channel, which seemed to indicate the wind would abate and the waves flatten if we could just get that far. I eased the traveler to leeward, reefed in the jib, and got used to the spray in my face. And the wind did abate, and the waves did flatten, and as we pushed south of Texada Island into Malaspina Strait, it turned into a nice day for sailling.
Off the Thormanby Islands, it got a little too nice. We lost our current, the wind dropped to a whisper, and we decided to motor up to Pender Harbour instead of putting in at picturesque, but tiny, Secret Cove nearby.
So here we sit, enjoying our coffee and the sunshine and tranquility of another day on the Sunshine Coast. Here we will probably sit for another day, both to enjoy the scenery, to take ourselves out of the pack of boats heading north for the weekend, and to make some hopefully minor engine repairs (while we are still within a day’s sailing of the yards in Nanaimo and Vancouver). It’s just Pender Harbour, same as ever, as if we had never left.