Tonight finds us anchored in one of the coves inside Pender Harbor. We are anchored off the beach of Garden Bay Marine Park. Pender Harbor is a maze of "nooks and crannies", several different bays in which to anchor and several marinas if you desire to tie up for the night. The only real town here is called Madiera Park and is located on Wellburn Cove inside of Pender Harbor. You get the picture.

The last two days have been really nice with lots of sun with warmer temps. We enjoyed being anchored at Smugglers Cove the last two nights...very calm and peaceful. Smuggler's Cove is very small and has three distinct anchoring basins within the cove. We anchored in the middle basin with our anchor down off the bow and a stern line taken ashore. This prevents us from swinging and frees up more room for other boats, similar to parking stalls. The park service has installed metal rings in the rocks in which you take the end of your line ashore with your dinghy (or I guess you could swim when the water warms up a little!) and pass the end of your line through the ring and bring it back to the boat. When you're ready to leave, you only have to release one end of the line from the boat and pull it all the way through the ring and back to the boat. Saves another trip in the dinghy. There were only a few boats in the anchorage while we were there, but the cove can accommodate dozens of boats if need be using the stern tie method. We rowed the dinghy all throughout the cove and explored all the different areas. The tidal changes are as much as 13 feet and the "landscape" changes every 6 hours or so as the tides come and go exposing quite a bit of rock and bottom areas at low tide to explore. The highlight of our visit was observing the resident eagles as they perched in the trees above us and in one case swooped low over the water near the boat and scooped up a fish before coming to rest on a tree branch to devour the fresh caught meal.

We'll be here in Pender Harbor for another day or two before beginning our trip up Jervis Inlet heading for Chatterbox Falls.