Thursday, May 23
Braesail, though fastened securely to a dock, was bobbing, bumping, bucking, and rolling about during most of Wednesday night, with the wind rising and agitating the water and the marina’s location in Schooner Cove not being a well-sheltered one. We were pleasantly rocked to sleep around midnight, but were awakened at about 4:30 am by the jerky, erratic motions of the boat in the turbulent water and the harsh grating noises resulting from surrounding docks’ construction that sounded like a cross between a donkey braying and a sea lion barking! We were able to rest but not to return to sleep!
In the morning, we sat in the sunny cockpit (our solarium), watched the surf break in lacy bursts of foam on the nearby rocks, and waited for Ken to arrive from the Qualicum Beach home of our friend, Jacquie, where he and Lisa had spent Wednesday night. The shore of the bay was beautiful, but a large earth-mover on one bluff was creating quite a thumping racket that joined the raucous groans from the surrounding docks to produce quite the cacophony!
Ken appeared at about 11:30 and drove Walt and me to the sea plane terminal in Nanaimo in Jacquie’s car (he was off to Seattle by plane, then to Everett in the car of some Seattle area relatives to pick up his car from the street in front or our condo building, then to Vancouver BC, and finally by car ferry back to Nanaimo, Parksville, and Qualicum Beach), and Walt and I then spent the rest of the day driving around Nanaimo before finding our way to Jacquie’s home to spend some time with her and with Lisa. We did some shopping for boat hardware and groceries, visited the city’s “old town,” enjoyed a fine lunch at a brew pub (excellent seafood chowder!), looked at another (more sheltered) marina containing many fishing boats, searched for our favorite “Nanaimo bars” (a scrumptious, very-rich confection with a chocolate/coconut bottom layer, a butter cream middle layer, and a dark chocolate frosting layer on top) at several bakeries before we found some at an “Eat Fresh” urban grocery (hooray!), and arrived at Jacquie’s home in late afternoon.
Walt fell asleep in a wing chair in Jacquie’s living room after a pleasant visit, and I took a walk around her neighborhood to get a closer look at the gorgeous rhododendrons and other flowers in people’s yards! Walt prepared an excellent steak dinner for the four of us, and after clean-up had been completed, Jacquie drove us back to the Fairwinds Marina, where the winds and the water were much more subdued than they’d been overnight and in the morning.
Ken stopped by the marina at about 10:30 pm on his way from the Nanaimo ferry dock to Jacquie’s home, and brought us a few items from our Everett condo that we’d forgotten. We wished him and Lisa safe travels back to Elk Grove, CA, thanked him for his help on boat, hugged him good-bye, and returned to Braesail for what we hoped would be a much better night’s sleep than the previous night had brought us!
Braesail - A grand yacht in the Salish Sea 