Surprise, Surprise

It’s not exactly the highest compliment that one can pay one’s own navigational abilities to admit surprise at finding oneself in a port, or indeed an entire country, where one had not intended to be at the beginning of the day’s journey. Nonetheless, I stand here before you to admit that I am vaguely surprised to find myself back in the United States right now, tied up at Roche Harbor marina after a remarkably painless clearance by US customs.

I say “remarkably” because historically we have had dramas of some sort coming back by boat from Canada to the US, always the more distressing in light of the ease with which we enter that foreign country and the misplaced presumption that, as citizens of our own, it should be easier to get back in than to leave. Until this year, that has never proven to be the case. But at Roche Harbor we were cleared in quickly, politely, with a minimum of suspicion and a veneer of respect. They even said “Welcome home,” when we had finished up, heartwarming words that had never before passed the lips of dockside customs agents within our hearing. I very nearly teared up.

I suppose the key is to sneak up on them (WARNING: do not actually sneak up on armed Customs officers) as we did. They might otherwise have had time to better prepare their ritual humiliations and depredations. We didn’t even have a suspicion we were going to the US when we departed Ganges that morning, motoring slowly through heavy fog bound for Sidney, BC. The plan was to get to Sidney, then park ourselves at a friendly yacht club of our acquaintance and avail ourselves of the many fine bookstores and groceries for which the town is known. Perhaps, during the four nights we planned to stay, we would even take the bus to Buchart Gardens, always a favorite stop for my wife. I had quite the grand agenda going through my head, as often happens when one’s world is otherwise shrunk down to a half-mile in any direction.

In the middle of these musings over our last hurrah in Canada, I spotted what looked suspiciously like a fast-moving white sperm whale crossing our bow. I wasn’t so far gone that I imagined the humped shape was actually a whale, particularly not the notable literary icon of that shade and species, but I did wonder for some minutes if someone had either purchased or built a scale replica of the Kalakala without my knowledge.

A couple minutes later, I could make out the dim dark shape behind the fast-moving white blob and I was embarrassed; obviously I’d been looking at the bow wave of a particularly fast barge.

A couple minutes after that, I was shocked again to make out the white superstructure over the black rectangle behind the white blob: in fact the whole contraption was a BC ferry speeding on toward Vancouver. It had been lost in the ground clutter of islands on the radar, and served as an excellent reminder not to let the mind wander overmuch while at the wheel.

When we got to Sidney the fog had lifted to reveal a bay full of wheeling sailboats racing in the freshening breeze. We felt our way nervously into Tsehum Harbour, a popular but shallow area that is remarkably poorly charted in all the references we have aboard. After all that heart-in-throat navigation, we were disappointed to find that the racing sailboats were all part of a regatta put on by exactly the yacht club we had planned to stay at, and that all their guest moorage was reserved for visiting racers.

There are plenty of marinas in Sidney but they are all far more expensive than we had budgeted for the stay, and anchoring out seemed inconvenient and counter-productive for our purposes. There was some patently unjustifiable anger close on the heels of the disappointment. It was as if we had personally been rejected. The nerve! After some rather muddled considerations, we finally hit on the idea of just skipping Sidney and crossing right back over into the US. Forget Sidney! We didn’t want to stay in their lousy old fresh-groceried, bookstore-filled city, anyhow!

So we raised sail and zipped across Haro Strait and found ourself at Roche Harbor, with even more expensive moorage, a lesser selection of groceries, and no bookstores to be had. We sure showed those hosers over in Sidney, eh?

All the same, it’s sort of liberating to be back in the States finally. Our phone service doesn’t cost extra, dollars are dollars, and remarkably, the sun is shining. We chatted with another crew at the marina who said it has been convenient enough to rain only at night here, which will be a welcome change over the Gulf Islands if it continues to hold true. And we have an unexpected week to spend poking around the islands in the off-season, checking out places we have always rushed by in the past. So, it’s a surprise to be here, but not an altogether unpleasant one, commentary on my planning and navigational skills aside.