Thursday, September 25
We awoke to a cooler, cloudier morning after a soundless, motionless night, and read, wrote, and did our German exercises in the cozy cockpit. Walt rowed Coracle over to the strange-looking blue catamaran and chatted with the couple aboard who were mending a sail. Walt learned that the boat had been designed and built by them, was made of plywood and fiberglass, and had an electric motor—most interesting!
By about noon, we were on our way to Thetis Island, having pulled our stern-line aboard and raised our anchor out of the cove’s shallow water with ease. There was, again, no wind, and so we spent an hour motoring across gently rippling seas and observing the amazingly sculpted sandstone shores of Tent Island. We docked at about 1:30 pm in the very fine Telegraph Harbour Marina (which we’d visited in the spring of 2022 on our way to Alaska) with welcome help from a fellow boater and a young dock-hand.
The early afternoon’s filtered sunshine kept us comfortable as we walked up the dock to the shore, crossing a walkway above rocks thick with oyster shells easily observed through the clear water. The marina’s grounds are nicely groomed, with flower containers lining the walk up to the store/restaurant. During our explorations, we found spacious, clean restrooms and showers, a nice laundry room decorated with a humorous wall-painting of clothes hanging on a line, recreation/game areas (including facilities for ping-pong, volleyball, tether-ball, swings, a game in which plastic hatchets and stars are tossed against a “sticky” target from varying distances, and shuffleboard—with an old-fashioned popcorn machine parked beside the court!), a “dog-walk,” a “dog-run,” chairs around and on decks for relaxing in the sun while eating, drinking, and watching the boats, and an excellent store/restaurant/coffee shop/ice cream parlor.
Walt and I bought ice cream cones, of course (I chose “shark bite,” consisting of blue-raspberry cream with red-raspberry swirls that produced an eye-catching aqua-blue-and-lavender concoction that was thoroughly delicious!), looked around the store at the clothing, gifts, books, souvenirs, small art works, fresh and frozen foods, baked goods, and menu offerings, and spent some time relaxing on the deck overlooking the marina.
We then walked a short distance to the Howling Wolf Farm Market’s “Honor Store,” a small, “un-personned” building surrounded by tables and chairs beneath colorful umbrellas, where the farm’s diverse products (including fruit, vegetables, homemade preserves, pies, various frozen items, small handmade gifts and souvenirs, a few CDs, hand-drawn greeting cards, and more) are available for purchase on the “honor system:” you chose your items, write your name and any comments on a sheet of paper, list the goods purchased and their prices and your method of payment, and deposit the payment into a lock box near the door. What a wonderful thing! Could such an arrangement exist in the US?
Walt bought a bag of beautiful cherry tomatoes, and we walked back down the road to the marina and climbed aboard Braesail, now surrounded by a large number of big powerboats belonging to people participating in a boaters’ weekend rendezvous. We napped, read, and enjoyed a steak supper, and after galley cleanup I worked on this post while Walt watched boating and cooking videos. Another lovely day was fading away beneath a pale pastel sky.
Braesail - A grand yacht in the Salish Sea 