The Weather Witches are beginning to say decent things about the weekend – a little rain on Friday drying off towards the end of the day with a few more drops on Saturday but mostly sun, then sun on the appropriately named Sunday, so it would appear that we will be off again this weekend. Our destination is a spot named Blue Island on the charts, a 20 acre hunka real estate just to the northeast of the mouth of Shelburne Harbour. It guards the mouth of Jordan Bay which is the next inlet over. We have never been in there and neither has anyone else that we have spoken to so it will be a new experience of raw exploration. The chart looks like there is good water all the way in and the only concern will be the wind direction and strength. Worst thing that could happen is that we have to get up in the middle of the night and head on back into the club which is about a two hour steam, but so far the forecasts are for less than 10 knots of wind out of the southwest. Of course that is 3-4 days into the future and the Weather Witches are notoriously feeble minded about their promises.

The weather for the rest of this week looks crappy, to say the least so we won`t be finishing the rest of the cockpit sanding and varnishing this week, plus as the instrument pod is out doors it is unlikely that we will be able to get working at the autohelm issues. Oh well. Not required for this weekend.

The club ran an Emergency Action Plan (EAP) exercise last night (the exercise director is, like myself, a former military person) and it was really interesting. We ran the exercise because the club is hosting the Canadian Albacore Nationals on the 26-28 July. The military and Emergency Measures organizations run these things for a reason – mostly to uncover shortcomings and that is what happened with the club. At the end of the exercise we determined that we needed: to run these exercises at least once a year to familiarize ourselves with the procedures for handling such emergencies. The exercise last night came up with a number of things that we need to resolve or change in our modus operandi, so all in all it was a successful enterprise. I wonder how many other clubs do that sort of thing.