Moving the Boat (Part 2)

Just over a week and a half since the last attempt at BoatMove, it was time to try again. The weather was calm, I managed to get the day off work (and I didn’t want to carry on paying a huge amount of money to keep a boat in LADNER. I hate ladner. Also, it takes 5 hours and a ferry ride to get there).

Mer was unavailable, so I hired a captain, called captain mac. He went over the afternoon before, effortless snipped the padlock (note to self – get a better lock. It was quite shocked how easy it broke) and checked everything was ready to go.

The starter battery was knackered, so he replaced the starter battery and the propane tank. I came over later that evening and stayed in downtown Vancouver, since we wanted an early start.

I realised that to get to the boat by 7:30 (the agreed start time), I would have to get up at 5. Yowch. A wonderful two hours on public transit later, I was at the boat. Wait, where was the boat?

It turns out it had been moved to another temporary slip the night before, and I quickly spotted it. I just had time to take down the tarp when captain mac arrived. Ten minutes later, we were off, at 7:40 (the shifter worked great, much to my relief)

The first part of the journey was down the Ladner river, to the river mouth. The water was really calm, and it was high tide, so a lot of the edge of the river wasn’t visible. 

There were a ton of birds, we saw a lot of eagles, along with cormorants and the ever-present gulls. There were huge patches of birds just sat in the water, as seen below.

In the first picture you can see the dredger ahead of us – he stopped and started dumping the silt back into a deeper part of the river

Eventually we got to the mouth of the river, and out into the Straight of Georgia proper. Not much to say about this, except it was extremely calm and we didn’t see another boat the entire trip across (~12 miles). The view most of the time was as below – not terribly interesting.

After what seemed like a long time, we reached Active Pass, the entrance to the islands. This pass is quite narrowish, and takes about 30mins to get through at our speed (6-7 knots), and is also the route several ferries take – including the large Vancouver- Victoria ferries. I was constantly looking over my shoulder, however the closest we got was not that close at all, thankfully.

Eventually, we got to westport marina, in Sidney, after trundling along a very long channel. I’d booked the haulout for 4pm (and wasn’t even sure we were going to make that) but incredibly we turned up at 1:40, having caught favourable currents and winds almost all the way and the boat being a lot faster than it looks (it doesn’t look fast. Just grubby). I went and spoke to the marina people, and they hauled it, cleaned it, and had it on rails within half an hour. I said goodbye to captain mac, dropped him at the ferry, and went off to plan the first of the serious maintenance I had planned. I can’t wait!

Below is the route we took (expertly free-handed in by me in paint):

Also: Bonus Picture of yours truly, staring ruggedly into the wind Most Handsomely and absolutely not being cold, squinty and mildly terrified.