8/31 Telegraph Harbour

I shouldn’t have written that first sentence about the weather yesterday. We were awakened about 4 o’clock this morning by a squall blowing through, with driving rain and winds 18 to 20 mph here in the harbor. Not terribly nasty, but bothersome nonetheless, as we have some leaks on the topside that need attention, especially since this is the first rain the Potentate has been exposed to in nearly a year. We’ve also been a bit leery about wind in the middle of the night since dragging anchor in Princess Bay a few years ago. Granted, we had another boat rafted to us at the time and the winds were even stronger, but once bitten…

We placed some drip bowls at the usual sites, and I noted our position relative to some landmarks to make sure our anchor was holding, which it was. It probably would have been prudent to run out some more chain, but it was nasty out and holding as it was, so we left it. Later in the morning, after daylight appeared, Erin fixed a nice breakfast of hash brown potatoes, bacon and scrambled eggs with cheese. That was a treat after our early awakening.

Our cruising plans for the day were to head up to Nanaimo, but plans are made to be changed. The last 5 or 6 miles into Nanaimo, after transiting Dodd Narrows, can be nasty when the weather’s blowing in from the Georgia Straits. We’re being fair weather boaters this trip, so we modified our cruise plans somewhat. We raised our anchor and cruised at least 500 to 600 yards down the harbor to the Telegraph Harbour Marina, where we plugged in to spend the day.

A sailboat transits Boat Canal between
Telegraph Harbour and Clam Bay

It wasn’t our lucky day with boat equipment either. Erin started a load of laundry in our washing machine, and for some reason it has decided that its 40 minute wash cycle should take about 45 seconds. We manually set it to rinse and then spin, with basically the same results – it didn’t want to spend much time at any step. Although it was turned off at the time, maybe our little brown-out the other night goofed up something in the circuitry. It’s on our fix-it list now.

Other than the morning excitement we’ve had a pretty lazy day, just taking a few walks to look at the boat canal and visit the store. We’re in the same spot on the docks as we were last year when we were here for the Chris Craft Rendezvous. We didn’t come for the one this year, but the harbormaster told us they’d already arranged for a repeat in 2011. He said it was his favorite rendezvous here with all the classic boats that show up.

Tomorrow we’ll take another look at going to Nanaimo.