Day 37
21 August 2013 | Victoria to Sidney Spit
Laurie / Sunny

Day 37 – August 10, 2013 Saturday
For some reason, I wasn’t on top of my game in the morning. My wonderful skipper was quite patient as I got myself together. Our checkout time from Victoria was 11:00 so we weren’t in a big rush. This gave me time to gather my wits and for Moe to trade experiences with the Aeolus crew. I did make an attempt to get online which turned out to be a waste of time. I would have been better off using that time to set out course for the day. We were headed to Sidney to hook up with Jon and Kate again. As it turned out, I was setting the course as we left the harbour. The Sailing Directions told me that both Trial Island and Discovery Island should be given a reasonable berth. Not so easy when there is a Traffic Separation scheme for the ‘big boys’ and we were travelling in the wrong lane!
Moe convinced me that we were doing the right thing by hugging the land and leaving the shipping lanes to the big ships and he was quite right. All the sailboats were following the same course as we were. It appeared the 11:00 was check out time for all the sailboats in Victoria Harbour as we were one in a large group of departing boats. We made our way around the eastern side of the south coast of Vancouver Island and into Haro Strait. Haro Strait was not at all harrowing! At around 2:30 we had a dolphin sighting, which proved to be the last of our sea life sighting. The rest of our trip to Sidney Spit was uneventful. The weather was good and we enjoyed a relaxing passage.
When we found ourselves between James Island and Sidney Island Moe brought out a couple of shot glasses with some rum. As we had traveled here previously, at this point, we had now, in fact, circumnavigated Vancouver Island. What a feat for us and worthy of celebration and note! We toasted our achievement with satisfaction. Yay us!
We arrived at Sidney Spit about 3:00 and found it full of other boats. What else would one expect on a beautiful Saturday? The anchorage is quite shallow so we chose to anchor further out and dropped our anchor. We thought it was a good spot but, as soon as we were hooked, the current put us on a 90 degree angle to our anchor rode. Usually the anchor rode settles right away and sits right under the bow. Not so this time. Neither one of us were thrilled with our anchor, though we knew we had a good hook, it just seemed weird that we were at such an angle with a strong current. Jon and Kate were already anchored much closer in as the draft of their boat isn’t as deep as ours. Moe and Jon talked on the phone and Moe learned they didn’t have their dinghy with them so he would go over to pick them up and bring them back to Reborn where we would have dinner together. Moe lowered James into the water and quickly went over to retrieve our guests.
Everyone returned and we combined our food to make some yummy shish ke bobs on the barbeque and corn on the cob. After dinner we all got into James and headed over to the Spit. The tide was in so there wasn’t much beach to explore, but we did our best and had a great time. As we arrived at the end of the spit the sun was beginning to set. We made our way back to James exclaiming all the way about the beautiful sky. We were to enjoy the best sunset we had during our whole trip. As we watched the sky changed many colours from blue to pink, then brilliant orange with many water colour hues in between. Gorgeous! When the sunset was almost done we got back into our dinghy and took Jon and Kate back to their boat and returned ourselves to Reborn. What a great day!