Day 208 (sailing that is), Thursday, Jan. 16
My goodness, we have woken up to a cloudy day, there are not
many of these. Often it has been raining
in the night, but by morning the skies are blue. The
forecast for the night, by Chris Parker was dead on, as he had called for a
high north/northwest wind to come through which appeared around 1:30. For anyone planning on cruising down here do
set yourself up with a SSB radio. You
don’t need to send just receive, our $80 shortwave is working out great, and
allows us to pickup Chris’s broadcasts.
As the day is dark snorkelling did not sound attractive as
it was also a bit cool. Probably about
18 degrees vs. the normal 26. The water
is actually warmer than the air today.
The water we are snorkelling in is about 23 degrees. We still wear wet suits to keep us extra warm
but it is not a hardship to get wet.
Anyways, we decide to clean the boat as we had about 6 inches of fresh
water captured in the dinghy. Dawson
also had gotten up in the night to MacGivor a system to direct the rain water
from the deck into one of our water tanks.
The system worked better than expected yielding about 15 to 20 gals of
water. This was after it had been power
raining for about an hour so all the salt should have been off the boat and
hopefully it is good tasting rain water.
We don’t drink a lot out of the taps but it is potable water. We tend to fill up bottles for drinking from
drinking water facilities.
The boat is pretty clean, the rain had done a good job. We also treated the stainless and Julie did
some spot cleaning on the hull while Dawson tightened screw on the
portholes. By now it is 11:00 so time
for some socializing. We head over in
our kayaks to JALU as Tracy has offered to show Julie how she makes bread in
the pressure cooker, and has some books to trade. As usual, the men get chatting about
electronics and boat maintenance and Julie and Tracy have a great chat about
kids, travel and what is next for us. We
are always interested to hear people’s stories of what they are going to do in
the future as we are uncertain of what our semi-retirement will look like.
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| Ian, Lynn, Denis, Tracy, Julie, and Dawson |
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| Lynn and Julie at Cambridge Cay |
We decide to go for an afternoon hike so head back to our
respective boats for lunch. Since it is
cool this is a great opportunity for a soup lunch as we are running low on
everything except canned foods. Julie
makes a fabulous broccoli cheese soup from a dry mix, but unfortunately it
boils over and makes an absolute mess.
We lost about 2 cups of our 8 cups of soup behind and beside and under
the stove. Now the stove is a challenge
to clean around at the best of times as there is about 1 inch of space
surrounding its install. The other sad
part is it was just this morning that Julie had pulled out the baking soda and
made the stainless shine like new. With
stick and dishtowel in hand Julie painstakingly sloshes the dirty walls and floor
until there is more clean water than cheese soup all over. We will see when it dries how clean it
looks. The soup is excellent, but as we
are spooning it into our bellies, our sailor buddies are on the way to shore
for the hike. Julie is appalled at how
messy our boat is but we abandon any more cleaning and join in on the trip to
shore. We kayak which adds a few more
minutes to our tardiness, but is nice to get some arm exercise.
The hike is good. We
explore the north part of Cambridge Island.
We climb high initially and get some nice views, then head down to shore
side and hunt for sea beans along the shore.
Turns out that Blake had found one of these sea beans, which look like a
1 inch hamburger, and have floated across from Africa and are very sought
after. We had wondered what it was when
Blake found it and eventually cut it open and threw it away. I guess people make jewellry out of them. We did not see any along the shore which did
not surprise anyone as they are rare to find.
Too bad we did not know this when Blake had found one.
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| Funny looking pressure cooking bread |
After the hike we head back to the boat and Julie makes
bread, and Dawson cuts some new painters for the kayaks. Sundowners is in about an hour and the group
has decided to have a no food sundowner hour as the last 3 nights we all
brought appetizers and spoiled our dinners.
The site for sundowners is a sand spit where the pay box is for the Land
and Sea Park. We all need to toss in some
fees for using the moorings. We are
joined for sundowners by the 3 new boats in the anchorage so are about 20
people. A nice mix as some seem affluent
as they have “crew” and had flown in for a couple of weeks. There also were 2 couples and a 5 year old on
a 50 foot boat cruising long term together which is a different mix. Then there were some brothers who were
chartering just for the week. The rest
of us were the orthodox couples sailing for the winter season. Sundowners lasted about 90 minutes, but had
to end as the sandspit was now ankle deep approaching shin depth as the tide
was coming in.
Back to the boat for an excellent salmon pasta dinner,
(thanks for the salmon Tracy). By the
way the bread turned out “interesting”.
I ended up dry roasting it in the pressure cooker so the bottom was
somewhat toasty, but the top looked soggy, but was sufficiently dry. The shape was unorthodox too. The taste was excellent and we look forward
to having it for lunch tomorrow.
Cheers
Julie and Dawson
