Friday-Saturday, October 9-10, 2026
Our hopes for a calm night were dashed with a thump around 3 am Friday morning! Had our inflatable dinghy, tied beside Braesail, been blown against the stern? Instruments showed wind outside, but not a great deal. Walt’s anchor position alarm was sounding, and so he got up and dressed and checked his electronic chart plotter, turned on the deck lights, and scanned the shore with our powerful hand-held spotlight, and called to me, “Get dressed! We’ve dragged anchor!” The news I dreaded! The thump had been our keel hitting a rock near the shore behind us as the anchor had come loose and we’d drifted backward.
We spent the next dark, rain-sprinkled hour with me mostly at the helm and engine controls and Walt clambering back and forth between the bow and the helm raising the anchor, repositioning the boat using the engine and bow thrusters, dropping the anchor, trying to get it to dig into the bottom, finding the stern over the rocks again, lowering the anchor again, pulling it backward into the mud of the cove’s floor, adjusting the stern lines, pushing the boat around with the engine and thrusters again, checking the read-out of the depth-sounder, looking at the position of the boat on the chart, looking at the position of the lights on the neighboring sailboat at some distance to our port to judge our own position, watching the raindrops fly by in the light of the spotlight, listening to the muffled roar of the wind in the rigging and surf on the rocks behind us, and trying to get the boat into a safe and stable situation again! Walt needed his little chain-length-counting device (the amount of chain that’s passed through the windlass is transmitted via signals to the hand-held device) to tell him how much chain he’d let out (would it be enough to keep the anchor on the sea bottom without its pulling up and out because of tidal and wind action?), and we looked EVERYWHERE for it and couldn’t locate it—where had he left it after we had anchored on Thursday afternoon??
By sometime after 4 am, Walt had reset the anchor and adjusted the stern lines, the wind had lessened a little, and we both sat in the cockpit watching to see if we were safely repositioned indeed. Suddenly, Walt looked at the device holder above the chart-plotter at the helm, and THERE was the little counter, right where it was supposed to be! WHEW! He had laid out some 60 feet of chain, pulled back on it at high speed, and Braesail’s position looked much better on the chart and from what we could see with the spotlight and other lights. It wasn’t very cold in the cockpit, but I brought up a blanket from below for Walt, who decided to spend the rest of the night there, sleeping for 15 minutes and being awakened by an alarm so that he could check the boat’s position. Fortunately, my “tummy troubles” had subsided, and I felt alright in that regard, but I was tired from the activity and anxieties of the past hour or so (I had been praying hard the entire time!), and I decided to take myself and the remainder of my stress down into the aft cabin and try to sleep fully dressed so that I could help as needed on short notice.
It was light not long after 7 am, and I got up, having gotten SOME sleep, to see how Walt was doing in the cockpit. He’d laid down another 20 feet of chain and the anchor seemed happily settled, so he told me that I could go back to bed, he’d continue to be “on watch” for another few hours, and he thought that it would be safe for us to stay in the cove through Friday and Friday night as we’d originally planned to do. I did return to bed and fell back to sleep, Walt joined me there in mid-morning, and we both slept until sometime after noon.
We spent a relatively quiet Friday engaged in our usual activities, enjoying a sparkly fall day under deep-blue skies. Intermittent showers had come and gone, leaving behind some laggard clouds with which the wind was playing. The next-door sailboat whose lights had served as a useful reference point for our position through the night departed in the afternoon, and Walt decided that Braesail would be in a safer position if her stern line was fastened to the pin being vacated by the neighboring boat. So he rowed Coracle to the shore, tied it to a rock, walked over the shoreline sandstone formations to “our” stern-tying pin, pulled our stern line free, walked with the line over the rocks to the better-positioned pin and pulled the line through it, rowed the free end of the line back to Braesail, and tied it to the port cleat in the stern. Done!
We both felt the need for good naps in the afternoon, and Walt made pizza for supper. We looked forward to getting a good night’s sleep, with no more anchor-dragging alarms! Low tide was approaching, however, and the water level in our part of the cove might be so low for a time that the boat’s keel would be sitting in the mud and we would list a little to one side until the tide turned shortly before midnight. So I put away everything that might slide off something, and we watched videos until we were sure that Braesail was afloat again, having had no indication that the boat was actually “grounded!” At last, we made our way to bed after a VERY long and eventful day!
Sinking sun in Conover Cove
After having had a very welcome, wonderfully tranquil night and a good sleep, we prepared to leave Conover Cove at about 9:30 am on a partly-cloudy Saturday morning. Walt had no trouble pulling our stern line out of the tying pin on the shore, raised the anchor from its snug bed in the mud, and guided us out of the shallow water of the cove and onto a course for the town of Chemainus on the coast of Vancouver Island a short motoring journey away. Some wind blew over the bow, but it wasn’t enough to sail in, yet again.
We arrived at the dock in Chemainus a little after 11 am, moored Braesail, and spent the first part of the afternoon walking around the very attractive downtown area that we had enjoyed so much during our visit last fall. We had lunch at an interesting place (“Tea, Coffee, & Used Books”) that sells all sorts of local organic items, viewed some of the many murals illustrating the town’s history that are painted on the walls of buildings by various artists (there are about 60 in total, and have made the town world-famous),
Two unusual incorporations of murals into the Chemainus environment (the “underwater piano” is out-of-tune but playable)
walked through some grocery stores to see what they offered, visited a beautiful little gallery featuring the works of local artists, wandered through a huge “antiques mall” whose vast holdings are refreshed weekly by local organizations, stopped into a shop selling all things British (the rhubarb-custard hard candies are marvelous!) whose proprietor was suffering from hiccups (poor chap!), revisited the astonishing “Hansel and Gretel’s Candy Store” beside it (a favorite from last fall), bought some licorice, and had a fine time discussing politics with the father of the store’s owner who was helping out, found that the ice cream store was closed for the season (rats!), walked by the local Anglican church that we plan to attend on Sunday,
looked at several restaurants where we’d thought having an evening meal would be enjoyable, and finally made our way down the hill to the docks and to the patiently-waiting Braesail. On the way we stopped to talk with a man and woman working on the restoration of a beautiful 50-year-old wooden schooner docked nearby—they’re doing a marvelous job on a huge project!
We rested (Walt napped, but, with the boat moored on the outside of the dock near the ferry terminal, there was too much noise from waves slapping the stern for me to fall asleep) and took showers, and soon it was time to hike back into town to dine at an excellent Indian restaurant very near the theater where we attended the recent play, Peril in the Alps, a comedic detective mystery centered around Agatha Christie’s hero, Hercule Poirot, with all of the many characters played by only six actors. The excellent performance was entirely sold out, and we were glad we’d bought tickets online some while ago!
We walked back to the docks on a pleasant night with our dinner leftovers in a paper bag, having had a wonderful day in town. Given the water noise in the aft cabin, I didn’t think I’d get much sleep, but I would try!
