Around Reid Harbor

Thursday, September 18

During another shimmery sun-soaked day, we spent time on German exercises, tying a decorative “Turk’s Head” knot around the new folding helm at the point where the boat’s rudder is centered beneath the hull (Walt), and writing three blog posts (Lorelette). Walt lowered Coracle, our inflatable dinghy, from Braesail’s stern into the water and motored around to the head of the bay to make sure that the outboard engine was functioning properly after a charterer had massively over-filled the oil chamber, leaving quite a mess to clean up. After his return, I climbed aboard Coracle and we spent a delightful hour purring around the perimeter of the harbor, observing fascinating rock formations; sandy, shell-strewn sea bottoms; long kelp serpents flying clusters of waxy flags; shore-side buildings old and new; power boats and sailboats in varying sizes and colors; a group campground with boat-launching and swimming areas and a small shelter built of driftwood on a beach; and two little islands at the harbor’s mouth around which we circled.

Back on Braesail, I enjoyed the caress of a whisper-soft breeze swirling through the warm afternoon sunshine that bathed the fore-deck, and watched two little “bubble jellies” jetting about the base of the bow.

We spent the rest of the cloudless day engaged in our usual round of activities: napping, reading, writing, and doing small maintenance tasks before Walt prepared our evening meal. The wine that accompanied our dinner came from the bottle that Walt had opened on the previous evening without the use of a corkscrew. He’d discovered that we didn’t have one in the galley, and so, after reading a response on the Web to the question: “How can you remove a wine cork from a bottle without a corkscrew?” he inserted the needle of our inflator (which we use to pump up sausage-shaped boat fenders) into the cork, found that it was too short to reach down through the cork to the pocket of air below it and above the wine, used a slender bit on his power drill to produce a little shaft all the way down through the cork, reinserted the inflator’s needle into the cork, pumped air into the neck of the bottle, and popped the cork upward and out onto the counter top! The wine was again excellent and was much more easily obtained than it had been on Wednesday evening!

Evening reading and writing accompanied by hot drinks and cookies proved sufficiently soporific that, despite the absence of wind to blow us into Slumberland, we decided to retire bit earlier than usual, anticipating a three-hour journey to Ganges Harbour on Saltspring Island in the Canadian Gulf Islands on Friday morning. Goodnight to glowing anchor lights at the mast tops of neighboring boats and to glittering stars above!