Taking on a new crew member

Friday, June 28, 2024

This was an eventful day indeed! We left West Whitepine Cove at about 9 am, and, there being no wind, we motored for about three hours through calm waters and past many islands lined with sweeping white-sand beaches until we arrived at the large tourist town of Tofino at about noon. There was no space at the docks we tried first—it was a very busy place with fishing boats and tour boats and float planes coming and going. So we moved on.

The water was very shallow around the Tofino Resort and Marina, a very nice but VERY expensive place to moor one’s boat, and as we were very slowly approaching the dock with Hans, Martin, and me on Braesail’s deck to help with the lines, a sudden THUD caused me to cry out in startlement—the keel had hit a rock! The marina staff on the dock thought that the boat might be stuck in the sand and mud, and it would be an hour before the tide would rise enough to float it off, but Walt worked with the bow thrusters and the throttle, moving forward and backward and sideways, and it wasn’t long before the boat was free, with, we think, no appreciable damage to the heavy keel.

Hans was packed for his flight to Vancouver, and soon Martin’s girlfriend Karen was with us on Braesail, having taken a seaplane to Tofino from Vancouver in late morning and walked the short distance to our dock. We five enjoyed a fine farewell lunch with Hans at the marina’s restaurant up on shore, and then he left with his baggage to meet his shuttle to the airport.

Martin had been informed shortly before lunch that something in his computerized customer management system had suddenly gone awry, so he returned to Braesail to solve the problem, and Walt, Karen, and I caught (just barely!) the free shuttle bus that takes visitors out of Tofino to the gorgeous expanses of smooth sand beaches with which the town is blessed. The half-hour trip took us through the wooded areas around the town to aptly-named Long Beach, a breathtaking stretch of sand lined with driftwood, nearly free of marine debris apart from small shell fragments, and visited by long rolling breakers (and surfers!).

It was a cool, cloudy day, the air temperature was about 58, and the water temperature was 50, so the beach was not crowded. Karen changed into her swimsuit and ventured out into the surf and I rolled up my pant-legs and waded in up to my mid-calves; the water was very shallow out a great distance, which made swimming difficult, but wading was great!

When my feet were beginning to become a bit numb and Karen had chilled sufficiently, we scuffed back through the fine, soft sand to the driftwood where Walt had been sitting, watching the surf and taking some photos. We were just in time to catch the shuttle back around and through Tofino, so we enjoyed some different scenery and got off the bus in the area of town where the very nice Co-Op grocery store provided us with the provisions we’d decided we’d need for the final week of our journey.

We called a taxi to take us and a few boxes and bags of groceries back to the marina, where we stowed our purchases on the boat and collected four bags of laundry (our “substantial” moorage fee included free use of the washer and dryer in the building on the shore, as well as free unlimited showers and use of the equipment in the exercise room). I dealt with the laundry while Karen napped and then went with Martin to a free jazz performance in the very-visitor-centric part of Tofino. The laundry processing took me about three hours, as expected, so I did some reading and blog-post-writing while waiting for the washing and drying to take place, and then lugged the laundry back through the misty rain back down to the docks and to the boat.

Next came bed-making and clothing-stowing, and I finally finished my work at about 11:30-pm. We’d fed ourselves a small snack supper (our lunches were large!), and, after planning Saturday’s travels, Braesail’s crew trundled off to bed after a very full day!