From Montague Harbour to Ganges

Sunday-Monday, August 30-31

A cloudy day in Montague Harbour found me writing a blog post and several emails, reading some excellent sermons from Brothers of the Society of St. John the Evangelist (an Anglican/Episcopal monastery in Cambridge, MA), doing a few German exercises, and visiting with a friend on the phone. Walt worked on a project involving his new thin Dyneema strands, and did a good deal of reading.

We decided that, in order to dispose of a bulging bag of ten days’ worth of rubbish, we should move Braesail from her present anchoring position to one of the BC Provincial Parks’ mooring buoys and pay the $15 fee to spend the night AND pitch our garbage into the proper receptacle onshore. This we did, and had relatively little difficulty attaching our deck line to the buoy this time.

Walt loaded himself and our detritus into Coracle and took it to the Parks’ dock, where he needed to register our presence on the buoy and pay the fee. He discovered that 1) the fee was actually $35 US for non-Canadians, and 2) that the fee had to be paid in cash, of which Walt had none. So he motored over to the Montague Harbour Marina, bought ice cream (of course!) at the marina store in order to obtain the proper amount of cash, and returned to the dock to pay his buoy fee. As he arrived, Coracle’s outboard engine died of gasoline thirst, and it took Walt some time to determine how to give the engine a drink from our new gas can, with its elaborate spill-prevention system. At last, he was able to pay the fee and return to Braesail, where he napped and we then prepared for Sunday evening online Compline using StarLink. Five of us enjoyed our weekly service of song and prayer, and we gave thanks for being able to be together as a worshiping community.

After a cheerful, relaxing Monday morning, during which Walt made another soft shackle for the staysail and I did some reading, we slipped our deck line out of the mooring buoy’s ring and motored for about an hour to Ganges Harbour on Saltspring Island. I was again at the helm so that I could practicing steering, while Walt coached me and took the wheel as we approached the marina, passing small islands with shores sculpted into stone lacework by wind and water. There were a great many boats of all kinds coming and going and riding at anchor and on buoys, and sea planes zoomed in and out as well. It was sad to see so many of the moored boats in deplorable condition, and to wonder why they’d been abandoned and how they might look had they had proper maintenance through the years!

We found a suitable spot in which to drop our anchor, but it would not grab hold of the bottom, and so we raised it and decided to see if there was space at the marina’s dock for a boat Braesail’s size, thinking that if we WERE able to get the anchor to hold, it might slip loose during the night because the harbor bottom had been scoured by so many anchors over so much time. At the dock, we could plug into shore power for our electrical needs and could fill our water tanks as well.

We DID find space at the dock, and were soon securely tied and registered. Walt wanted to visit a metal shop, about which he’d read online, in order to have someone work on the head of our power winch-grinder, so we were soon climbing into Coracle and buzzing over the water toward the center of the attractive town of Ganges. We wandered around, looking for, and not finding, the shop, though Walt had spoken with someone there earlier. Google Maps sent us to a location where the shop was not, so we stopped into the Visitor Information Center to make inquiries. They had never heard of the place and could find no information about it either, so they sent us to Mouat’s, a large and well-stocked hardware and home furnishings store. Here, Walt tried to find a piece of hardware of the right size for his job, but did not succeed, so he bought a thin piece of metal (a little “Keep Out!” sign) for use in the digital keyboard he has been working on for many months, and which presently sits on the bed in the bow cabin. He was able to help one of the store’s young clerks who was struggling with a wheelbarrow wheel, and Walt’s assistance was much appreciated. Walt began to think about other solutions to his difficulty with the power winch-grinder, and we bought wonderful ice cream cones (what else?) at Glad’s Ice Cream and Candy store to eat in the shade on a very warm afternoon while Walt pondered his problem.

Back we walked to the Thrifty grocery story near the dock where Coracle was tied up, and we bought some English muffins and Nanaimo bars, one of our favorite confections that’s difficult to find in bakeries in the US. Before we returned to Braesail, we enjoyed motoring slowly around the nearby docks and viewing the beautiful boats assembled there as part of a Classic Yacht Association get-together in Ganges. As we approached “the Mother Ship,” we were entertained by the training exercises of five little sailing dinghies being supervised by sailors in a larger boat—I was reminded of a mother duck surrounded by her ducklings as they practice paddling!

I made another plum cobbler for dessert after enjoying dinner and a splendid sunset,

and worked on this blog-post while Walt watched cooking videos. Although we’d failed to find the phantom metal shop, it had been another fine day!