Photo: the sailboat Tenacious anchored in Mouat Cove

Iain Lawrence, writing in his book Far Away Places: Fifty Anchorages on the Northwest Coast, describes Mouat Cove as a scene from the Group of Seven (Canadian landscape painters) with rocky islets and twisted trees. Fog and a northwesterly wind in Seaforth Channel chased Lawrence and his wife, Kristin, into the cove. All night they heard the foghorn on nearby Ivory Island blowing its mournful wail.

"Few people come here," Lawrence wrote. He doubted the cove would ever change.

A northwest wind was chasing fog into Seaforth Channel the day we went into Mouat Cove too. We'd last been there in 1999 and like Lawrence, I didn't expect it to change. As we rounded the corner into the cove, I expected to see an empty anchorage. But there, just beyond one of the little islands, was the sailboat Tenacious.

"I thought we'd see them someplace," said Steve. We'd been looking for the boat since we'd arrived on this coast, remembering our 2011 trip here and the pleasant visits we'd had with Pat and Lydia, Tenacious's owners.

Half an hour after we anchored, Pat and Lydia were climbing on board Osprey, Lydia carrying a big bowl of warm-from-the-stove prawns.

Like us, Lydia and Pat are voracious readers, especially of history, and soon we were deep in discussions of Lewis and Clark, Alexander Mackenzie, the politics of transcontinental railroads and why A.C. current rather than D.C. is the modern standard.

The prawns were delicious. Even Jigger got his share. I'm afraid he is now addicted.

We left Lydia and Pat in the clearing fog the next morning, with Pat working on replacing the brushes on their electric windlass. As we left, I looked around the little cove with its islets and trees and thought that it looked like we had last seen it in 1999. But there was a difference beyond the presence of another boat. The foghorn on Ivory Island didn't disturb our sleep. In a cost-saving measure, the Canadian government had disconnected all the fog horns.