As I said in my last post, I once again misgauged my anticipation in crossing the Straits of Georgia. In this case, though, it seems like to appropriate thing to have done. I did check the weather ahead of time and looked at the tidal current predictions, the two of which predicted safe conditions. Right-oh. It was dull.

Arriving at Pender Harbour was exciting only in that I did not have much detail in my charts for what looked to me like a tricky entrance channel, but I kept a close watch on my depth sounder, followed the marks, and constantly checked my Dreamspeaker Guide’s artistic rendering of the bay. You know the ones that say in italics right below, “Not to scale. Not to be used for Navigation.” Those ones. Still, I anchored safely in about 50 feet of water a hundred yards or so off the public docks on Hospital Bay.

The General Store here is semi-historic, dating back to pioneering days. Though it is a bit of a destination in its own right, that they’re not all snooty about it is demonstrated by this self-aggrandizing announcement posted at the entrance, “Don’t ask for anything specific. This is a GENERAL store.” I bought an ice cream bar and sat down to post yesterday’s blog update.



My doings yesterday and today amounted to a short walk, having dinner ashore, then a dinghy run around the labyrinthine harbor. My walk took me past the historic Sundowner Inn, originally built by John Antle’s Columbia Coast Mission in 1930. Antle had rowed and sailed his sixteen foot sailboat 500 miles up the coast from BC to Alert Bay in 1904 with his nine year old son. His Anglican upbringing and seeing the hardy, independent life of the settlers in the Desolation Sound area inspired his petitioning the Anglican Church for funds to establish the Columbia Coast Mission, eventually building three hospitals to support the medical and spiritual needs of loggers, fishermen, trappers, and just plain folk all over the area. The Sundowner is the last and no longer the healthiest incarnation of the Columbia Coast Mission hospitals. I’m sure my anchorage was named for this landmark.

Buzzing around the harbor this morning to give the southbound current in Agamemnon Passage time to turn my way, I found the back-water relic pictured below at a somewhat isolating distance from the usual exquisite and sometimes funky shoreside homes elsewhere on the bay. It was very common for settlers to convert disused floating commercial and residential buildings ashore and set them on pilings for new uses of their own. This story is frequent in the historical accounts of the area and I’d bet dollars to donuts that this is one of them. It was probably scavenged from some defunct logging or fishing business.