We quickly realised that south of the Seymour Narrows, the boating in the Georgia Straits, which separate Vancouver Island and the mainland, suddenly becomes very busy. All of it is weekendable from Vancouver and other centres, and makes for some very pretty cruising, although as congested as any we have experienced for many years, probably since the Caribbean in 2005!!
The plus side of this is that the coast and islands now scattered along the mainland side of the Georgia Strait are justifiably known as the ‘Sunshine Coast’, and we enjoyed some lovely hot sunny weather, and enjoyed a bit of swimming in warm water!
The first stop after leaving Desolation Sound was a quick restock at West View Marina, south of Powell River, and a march up ‘Cardiac Hill’ for Giles to find some plumbing parts, and then five miles across to the lovely Texada Island, where we just managed to find a spot to anchor in Sturt Bay. The wind turned to the SE in the night, making it rather bumpy, so we decided to spend a second day there in the small marina.
We luckily met Ken Barton, who was fantastically helpful, and took us to the small museum just a walk up the hill, totally run by volunteers and absolutely excellent. It gave a fascinating account of the lime quarrying industry of the island, as well as much else. Ken also lent Giles a wrench and helped him break apart long corroded valves in our plumbing system, all geared at making the dreaded holding tank work!!
From Texada Island, we sailed 30 miles along the coast to Pender Harbour, and from there crossed the Straits of Georgia to Nanaimo, where we squeezed into a berth at the Nanaimo Yacht Club.
We had organised to meet Olly Woodford and family, before they took a ferry to Vancouver in the afternoon. It was a treat to see Olly and meet Anna and baby Hugo, we had taken Olly on a sailing holiday when he left school about 22 years ago, and had only seen him a couple of times since then! Anyway, we managed to give Hugo and Anna their first trip in a yacht, although attempts to sail were soon abandoned for lack of wind!
We were also meeting up with Phil and Lesley on Sagata that evening, they had just arrived in Nanaimo, so it was fun to catch up with them for a couple of days, before we headed back across the Strait to Vancouver.
We had arranged to spend two nights at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club at Jericho, just on the edge of Vancouver City. It was extremely friendly, a lovely location, and beautiful club house, very well connected to the city by fast bus. Our first priority was to go and see Shelter Island boatyard, well south of the city, but we managed to get ourselves there on public transport quite efficiently.
Next day we wanted to visit a couple of Yacht Brokers in the city who are mostly based on Granville Island, where there is also a big market and lots of touristy eateries and galleries, so it was a good starting point.
We decided to move Brother Wind into False Creek in central Vancouver for another couple of nights, and from there we hired bikes and whizzed off to Stanley Park, I should think that 90% of tourists to Vancouver do the same thing! We took a day trip to Whistler, which is only a couple of hours away, and were astonished to see how busy it was, but we duly took the expensive gondola up the mountain, and then swung across between the peaks and then up a steep chair lift to the sky bridge, the highest bridge in the world they claim! We enjoyed some of the many walking trails that they have made. A lot of the mountains are a rocky moonscape where they have been blasted to make wonderful ski runs.
Mountain bikers were kept to separate trails luckily, but they did some scarily steep and rocky descents, and we did wonder how many of them fell off or got hurt. We later discovered that it was the end of a mountain bike fortnight of competitions and training, all pretty impressive.
After our four lovely sunny days in Vancouver we headed back across the strait of Georgia to catch the tidal gate to get us through the Porlier Pass, which an hour before slack water was still running at 4 knots. The Gulf Islands stretch south from Nanaimo, and the narrow passes between the islands or into the Straits have very fast flowing tides of at least 8 knots at times. Definitely worth working them in our favour!
We found that the anchorage we had been recommended on Wallace Island was very full, and so chose to go to the larger, but still tight Princess Cove, where all the boats were lined up with their sterns tied ashore. We decided it was all a bit congested, so decided to take a view on the weather and anchor behind some rocks further out, which proved to be a lovely anchorage. We were amongst a colony of seals who lounged on the rocks and chatted incessantly to each other, how we would have loved to know what they were saying! There are some nice trails on the island, so we went ashore and enjoyed a good walk through the trees, and noticed how dry it was underfoot. Madrone trees with red peeling bark and twisted trunks gave it all a Mediterranean feel.
We made a last minute arrangement to meet up with Ken and Wendy Squirrel, who had been fellow yachties when we did the East Malaysia rally in 2012. They had sold their catamaran ‘Cop Out’ soon after that, and come back to live in their lovely house on Salt Spring Island, surrounded by cedars and spruce they have a fabulous view out across Ganges Harbour. They took us for a great dog walk through pretty countryside, and then a swim in a lake, before going back to their house for a bar-b-q. It was lovely to catch up with them.
Our next stop on was Sidney, right at the bottom of Vancouver Island, but on the way we wanted to find a mooring buoy (we had its waypoint), which belonged to the father-in-law of Jesse, who we had got to know in Alaska, and had kindly lent us a cruising guide we wished to return!
No sooner had we picked up the buoy than someone appeared on a paddle board, and we were able to give him the book to return to Jim Merrit, - mission accomplished!!
It was only a three mile hop across to Sidney from there, although we chose a very narrow rock strewn passage to get us there. Our hopes to anchor in Tsehum Harbour soon evaporated once we saw the number of boats on moorings, but we managed to locate one which we could pay a small fee for the privilege of using, and then could begin our search for winter storage in Sidney, which is a centre of yachting in the area!