Photo: the story not told, Osprey anchored in Gardner Canal

“You can work on your blog underway,” Steve assured me when I told him I wanted to work on the blog instead of play Mexican train dominoes. We were anchored in Triumph Bay on our last night in Gardner Canal and I wanted to get my blog ready to post in Kitimat when we arrived there in two days. But with Steve’s promise to run the boat while I wrote, I agreed to wait. The weather forecast predicted calms and the distance was short. With two easy days ahead of us, it seemed doable.

As we turned into Douglas Channel from Gardner Canal the next morning, I took my notebook out into the cockpit and started writing. It was a beautiful sunny morning, too good to work down below. I struggled to describe the spectacular scenery of Gardner Canal and the challenge of anchoring there. How do you describe the most beautiful fjord in British Colunbia without resorting to trite superlatives? And how to put reams of information together in an interesting way? All I could think of was that Gardner Canal was like Tracy Arm and Fords Terror in Alaska, but without the icebergs.

I looked up from the page as we passed a small white sailboat going the other way. It was crowded with people and dogs and had towels hanging from the lifelines. Avoceta was its name.

“Wait a minute,” said Steve. “Wasn’t Avoceta the boat Prince Rupert Coast Guard was trying to reach last night?” We had heard the Coast Guard calling “Avoceta with Patricia Lange on board” several times but had never heard an answer. Steve called Avoceta on the radio but when they didn’t respond, turned to go back. When we caught up to them, they told us they hadn’t gotten the message. “Oh my gosh, said one of the women on board. “Maybe I’m a grandmother.”

Avoceta’s radio couldn’t reach the Coast Guard so Patricia came on board Osprey to call. The message was that her daughter had gone into labor and wanted her mother home. Patricia looked at us and said, “You’re going in that direction, can I get a ride with you?”

So it was that the leisurely two day trip with time to write became compressed into one. But an afternoon spent conversing with an interesting guest, full of information about Kitimat and the controversy of the Enbridge pipeline proposed for its port, was far more fun than writing a blog.

As of this writing (the next day), the baby still had not arrived.