Hello all,
We’re in Sidney, B.C., arrived last Tuesday, July 20 from Roche Harbor Resort. It’s a short 10 mile cruise, and from dock to dock took us only 1:20. Now we’re sort of stuck here while some engine repairs are made – somewhat of a repeat of last year’s first shakedown cruise on Flying Colours.
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Tuesday, July 20 – Roche Harbor Resort – to – Sidney, B.C.
Getting away from Roche Harbor proved a bit more difficult than we expected. A couple of months ago we had a Dish TV satellite antenna installed at our slip at Anacortes. During installation, the installer fiddled with the satellite dish cabling wires from our boat’s radar bridge to get us hooked up, and he told us it was a simple matter of swapping the wires back to revert to the boat’s dish. A couple of weeks later when we were doing some work getting ready for this summer’s cruise we accidentally left the breaker for the satellite dish in the ON position – and the satellite dish was laying horizontally because we had the radar arch folded down to be in our covered slip. When we returned two days later, we could hear the dish motor making a terrible noise from several slips away. We feared we’d damaged the dish antenna, but things were so hectic we didn’t do anything about it. Besides, we can’t raise the radar arch in our slip anyway, so there wasn’t any way to test it while under the roof of our slip.
Brent Woodward of Yacht Masters NW spent a day and a half on Flying Colours to get our satellite TV system back up and running.
On arrival at Roche Harbor we wanted to watch the evening news, but the Dish receiver and satellite antenna indicated they weren’t locking onto a satellite – and consequently no TV. We fiddled with it more or less the entire evening and finally gave up – it obviously wasn’t something we were going to fix. With 2+ months planned on Flying Colours, going without some of our favorite TV wasn’t an option (PBS, TMC for movies, Seattle Mariners baseball games, and some small amount of local Seattle news). Our only option was to call for help from Yacht Masters NW back in Lake Union to see if they could send Brent Woodward up to get it working again. After a day’s work on the wiring, tests concluded that the satellite dish mechanism wasn’t harmed – and with some wiring changes it appeared our TV system was back up and running.
Click on any image to see an enlarged version.
The 160' tall ship, Zodiac, based in Bellingham was anchored in Roche Harbor on our way out to Sidney. Her website, www.schoonerzodiac.com, indicates she's about to head for Desolation Sound. It's hard to gauge her size until you see the tiny figure in the dinghy alongside.
On schedule we departed Roche Harbor at 3:45PM Tuesday afternoon (a week ago). The weather was crystal clear, with light winds and calm seas. Kap was at the helm as I prepared our paperwork for the border crossing into Canada. We both have Nexus cards for crossing the Canadian/American border, allowing us to report in with Customs and Immigration via an 800 number. I maintain a thick folder that has our boat documents, passport information, and pet vaccinations in one place. About 20 minutes after leaving Roche, when our chart plotter indicated we were at the border, I picked up my cell phone and called in. You have no idea where the person is you’re talking to, and it could be in the plains of Saskatchewan. An official sounding guy answered – and as usual I fumble a bit with the answers – most likely because they seem to ask questions that are slightly off-beat. My responses were almost true (there’s always some amount of alcohol or food stuffs beyond the limit). As usual, he asked if we had any weapons aboard; did we have any meat or vegetables; how much alcohol was aboard? I told him no to the first two, and gave him a small enough amount for the third that I figured he wouldn’t assert that we’re over the limit. Again as usual, he asked how long we’d be in Canada, and I stumbled – for some reason I told him mid-September, when we’re expecting to be here until the end of September – and it’s more of a hassle to lengthen it is than to shorten our time. But the question that I’d never heard before was, “What’s your expected ETA at Port Sidney Marina?” Catching me by surprise with this, I responded, “In about an hour.” In a slightly irritated tone he came back, “That’s not what I asked you – what time are you estimating to be at your assigned slip in Port Sidney?” I quickly remembered that Kap had mentioned our crossing time was 1 hour, 25 minutes, so looking at my watch I told him, “4:45PM”. The Customs guy said, “OK, you need to be at your slip at that time, and if you’re early or late arriving you need to call us – and on arrival remain on your boat for five minutes. If a Customs official hasn’t shown up at your boat by that time, you’re free to be on your way.” He then read off the Customs Clearance number that has to be displayed on a side window of the boat throughout the time we’re in Canada.
This map shows the lower end of Vancouver Island. Victoria - the capital city of British Columbia - is at the SE tip, with the Saanich Peninsula running north of it. Sidney is at the northern tip of Saanich Peninsula. Notice how far north of this the U.S./Canada border rises above it. The unnamed islands to the right of Sidney are the U.S. San Juan Islands; the islands to the north of it are the Canadian Gulf Islands - both sets of islands are in the same island group.
We soon approached the breakwater to Port Sidney Marina and called in on VHF 66A to confirm our slip assignment. We were on E Dock, slip #6, which we were happy with as it’s a several hundred foot shorter walk, particularly with the dogs, to get ashore. On the way in, we were somewhat startled to see the number of Flemings – a Fleming 65 named Hokolo at the end of F Dock, and two Fleming 55s – one named Serenity from Everett, WA, and another named Golden Marlin II from Honolulu, HI. Absent and out cruising were two other Fleming 55s that we’re familiar with – Couverden and Rogue Retreat. Behind us on F Dock was the Fleming 55, Luxie Lu, with owners from Scottsdale, AZ – they departed for parts unknown the day after we arrived. There are at least two other Flemings at Sidney marinas to the north of Port Sidney Marina, easily making Sidney the largest concentration of Fleming yachts on the North American West Coast. (By the way, spelling Sidney with an “i’ rather than a ‘y’ is not a misspelling – it was named after a British Navy captain who surveyed the area in the mid-19th Century)
A Fleming 55, Luxie Lu, at left; a Nordhavn 62 at right.
Flying Colours at slip E-6 at Port Sidney Marina, with the downtown buildings in the background.
The boater's lounge at Port Sidney Marina is probably the best we encounter in this area. It has a well-equipped laundromat, lounging chairs, and a WiFi station. Across the hallway is a small movie theater (seats about 25) where free movies are shown several evenings a week.
Once at our slip, it was easy to wait out the required five minutes – if nothing else, getting mooring lines securely on the dock cleats and plugging into shore power eats up at least that much time (although hooking up shore power probably technically violates the Customs requirement “to stay aboard”). We were relieved that no one showed up, and we toasted our entry to Canada (finally!!!) with a Happy Hour song from the “Tiki Drummer” on board Flying Colours – and mixed a margarita from scratch with our contraband limes in the fridge. Raz and Gator got a much-needed walk ashore, and we settled in for what we thought would be four relaxing days for provisioning with meats, veggies, spirits, and wine that we’re not allowed to bring in.
The first night’s dinner in Sidney is always at the Suisse Bistro or Carlos Mexican Cantina – and since it was Tuesday and Kap thought Carlos’ was closed on Monday’s and Tuesday’s, we opted for the Suisse Bistro. Their specialty is Wienerschnitzel – a breaded pork cutlet with Rosti potatoes (a traditional Swiss potato pancake). I’ve been known to go hundreds of miles out of my way for a really good schnitzel, and Suisse Bistro never disappoints me. The only downside to the dinner was a very drunk American guy at the adjoining table, complaining as loudly as he could that his raclette (another traditional Swiss dish with “scraped” cheese melted onto veggies and/or meats) was “absolute garbage”, and finally his wife got him to leave the restaurant. God, what a bore!
The Suisse Bistro is one of our favorite restaurants in Sidney, featuring a pork schnitzel dish and rosti potatoes that I'd walk a mile for.
Wednesday morning I walked about two miles to the other end of Sidney to pick up a rental car (I really needed the walk since Kap injured her wrist and we’ve stopped walking the dogs each morning). Our first order of provisioning business was to get meat. During our 2009 cruise on Flying Colours, we spent some time in Maple Bay – about 20 miles north of Victoria on the east side of Vancouver Island and to the west of Saltspring Island. While there, I discovered a wonderful meat market – Cowichan Valley Meat Market – owned by the Quist family who supply much of the grain-fed beef and pork from their local farm. Leaving Kap to work on some things around Flying Colours, I headed off by car to get our summer’s provisioning of meat. Since Sidney is at the north end of the Saanich Peninsula, it’s necessary to drive south almost to Victoria to pick up Canada Highway 1, then 30km north to Duncan where the meat market is located. It was a hot day, so along the way I stopped and bought a Styrofoam cooler and a bag of ice to keep the meat cold during the drive home. At the meat market I carefully picked out 30+ lbs of meat – including a dozen each NY sirloin strip steaks (for me) and an equal number of tenderloin steaks (for Kap) that they cut to order, flank steaks (to marinate in my own Kalbi sauce recipe), pork tenderloins, pork schnitzel, pork chops, Kielbasa sausages, bratwurst sausages, and a dozen chicken breasts. Coupled with the number of nights we eat out, this should keep us in meat supply through the end of September when we expected to head back across the U.S. border. As soon as I returned, I individually shrink wrapped packages of meat for each meal for two, and loaded it all in our freezer – thank you Fleming for the large side-by-side GE fridge/freezer in our galley.
The drive up to Duncan for the meat market run crosses a low mountain pass that overlooks Brentwood Bay separating Saanich Peninsula from Vancouver Island. Sidney is on the NE corner of the Saanich Peninsula.
Late in the afternoon we did our fresh fruit and vegetable provisioning at the local Thrifty Foods market, plus we bought up a large supply of their locally-made bratwurst – which is almost as good, if not better than our favorites from Bavarian Meats in Seattle. With that completed, we were ready to depart Sidney in a day or so and get on with our summer’s cruise.
The evening’s dinner was at Carlo’s Mexican Cantina – only to find that the chef we knew from cruising year’s past was gone, and the chicken in mole sauce wasn’t up to par. Just as bad, we were all set to hear our favorite waiter announce when he brought the margaritas, “Here’s a little something to start your mini-Mexican holiday!”, but he was gone too, and the margaritas weren’t up to snuff. The conclusion was, maybe we should be scouting out a few additional restaurants in Sidney to be on our list of favorites – there are plenty to choose from here, so that shouldn’t be difficult.
Evening sunsets from the fly bridge are often spectacular - and this photo isn't re-touched!
During the afternoon Kap discovered that our satellite TV reception was hosed again (or maybe I should say, still hosed). From her tests, we now felt we had indeed damaged the satellite dish and it was time to bite the bullet and see if we needed to have the dish repaired or replaced. This time we decided to call Delta Marine in Sidney, rather than pay to have Brent flown up to Sidney from Seattle. Delta Marine is very familiar with Fleming yachts, so it’s a preferred place to take Flying Colours when we’re in-country. A quick call on Thursday morning brought the good news that they’d have someone out a couple of hours later. Before noon, a very knowledgeable guy named Jay arrived and began looking into the problem. Within the hour he determined the problem was beyond his experience, and it would be necessary to bring Flying Colours over to their yard at the north end of Sidney – but their specialist on satellite TV wasn’t available until Friday. They suggested we stay at their dock on Friday night, so we gave notice to Port Sidney that we’d be leaving in the morning and not returning for our last night’s moorage reservation.
Early Friday morning, in preparation for our short trip over to Delta Marine Kap did her usual engine checks. She was surprised to find the coolant considerably low on the port engine, and further investigation found it to be puddled under the oil-absorbent pads that she keeps under the engine to detect oil leaks. In filling it up with additional coolant, she found it to be about a quart low – not something that should have happened in the two short cruises we’ve had since leaving Anacortes. She had found the coolant low at Anacortes as well, so we decided to have Delta Marine look into this too.
Sidney Port Marina is our usual moorage, located right next to downtown Sidney. Delta Marine is in Tsehum Harbour at the north end of Sidney. This area is on the Saanich Peninsula, north of Victoria, B.C. and is a 20-mile long peninsula jutting northward along the east side of Vancouver Island.
Flying Colours (center red boat on the Google Map image) at Delta Marine deep inside Tsehum Harbour.
It’s only a ½ hour cruise over to Tsehum Harbour to get to Delta Marine, but you have to be on the lookout for crab pots everywhere, and the marine traffic in and out of the harbor is heavy. It was low tide when we left and our charts indicated it would be very shallow on the channel into the back part of the harbor where Delta is located. As Kap steered us out past the breakwater at Port Sidney Marina, I telephoned our contact at Delta Marine to get his reading on just how shallow we could expect it at low tide (because marine charts are sometimes not all that accurate). He said, “No worries, just hug the boathouse side of the channel as you enter the innermost part of the harbor and you should be OK.” Easy for him to say, as we were seeing depth marking on the chart that were just about at our keel depth (depth references on Canadian charts are at “normal low tide” depth, and today wasn’t a particularly low-low tide day).
The entrance to the inner Tsehum Harbour channel is marked by a series of in-line wooden posts rising from the water, with triangular and square buoy panels on them on either side of the channel. Although we’d just been in here last fall on a successful trip in and out of Delta Marine, the first marker was confusing – leading Kap to believe she should go past the marker, then turn right and keep the piling on our starboard side. Just as she was abeam of the piling, I saw that our depth was only 1’ below the keel . . . then .8’ (yes, that’s “point-8 feet”, which would be about 8” below our keel) and she immediately reversed the props to stop us. We could also see that the post alignment was such that we should have turned before the piling. As Kap reversed Flying Colours, we could see dark brown water swirling up around us as our props churned up the bottom – luckily, there wasn’t any sand or gravel, or worse, rocks at that point, and we safely backed out without damage. She then turned inside of the first, keeping it on our port side. As we passed through the buoy posts, our depth gauge continued to read .8’, then 1.4’, and our breathing returned to normal as it rose up to 6-7’ – a depth that would normally have us fairly worried, but this time was pretty comforting.
A mechanic from Delta was there to greet us, and we tied up at the outer dock. Within minutes we had three guys on Flying Colours, one working on a minor fiberglass ding from a canvas button pin, one guy working on the satellite dish problem, and another down in the engine room looking after the coolant leak – this level of service on such short notice was wonderful. Over the next hour or so, the fiberglass repair went well, but the news on the satellite TV was that it’s really a Dish network problem, due to their current inability to handle both HDTV and non-HDTV channels, and we have to put up with manual switching between satellites 110 and 119 to get the full range of TV channels. Kap was given a full briefing on what has to be done, and for now, the problem seems to be manageable. The word on the coolant problem wasn’t so good – it’s a bad O-ring, and the gasket isn’t in stock locally and wouldn’t be available until Monday or Tuesday.
Delta Marine is a Fleming warranty station for Western Canada, so having our repair work done there when we're cruising in this area is preferred. Our coolant repair was a Cummins engine problem, and they do warranty work also for Cummins.
Tony Fleming's 65, Venture, was in a work shed having some varnish work completed.
As the mechanics wrapped up their work, I took some photos of the Delta Marine facility for the Resources page on the Fleming Owner’s website (since it’s a Fleming warranty station). We also found out that Tony Fleming’s original Fleming 65, Venture, is currently in the yard’s work shed having some teak varnishing completed, so Kap and I went in to have a look-see at it and grab a couple of photographs. Tony Fleming is the designer of our boat, and owns Fleming Yachts, and he keeps Venture in U.S. and Canadian waters – sometimes on the East Coast, sometimes on the West Coast, and cruises it almost constantly to perfect his design ideas. His new second Fleming 65, Venture II, was delivered to Southampton, U.K. just about the time Flying Colours was delivered to us, and right now he’s cruising back to Scotland from Iceland, then down to Southampton for a boat show this summer.
So much for getting out of Sidney on Saturday to head for Ganges – where we had moorage reservations and Kap had a Kenmore Air flight booked to Seattle on Sunday afternoon for her next physical therapy appointment. Almost as important, I had a stash of four cases of wine at our favorite wine store in Ganges – wine I’d ordered and paid for back in April when we were planning to depart for a four month cruise. With the weekend staring us in the face, we decided there was no choice but to completely alter our cruising plans once again. For the next hour we scrambled on our cell phones to get our slip back at Port Sidney Marina, cancel the Ganges Marina moorage reservations, change Kap’s flight plans to go to/from Seattle via a Victoria Harbour Kenmore Air flight, and keep the car reservation through the weekend. Surprisingly, all of the changes were successful, and we got underway in short order to return to Port Sidney Marina.
ZuZu loved being outside on the boat deck during the hotter days.
One day ZuZu disappeared on us and we searched high and low for her in all the hiding places she likes. Finally we spotted her sleeping under the canvas cover for the fly bridge helm station. It must have been 100 degrees in there!
The weather has suddenly turned hot (at least, hot by our standards) – in the low 80s (Fahrenheit), so we cooled off with the dogs and cat around Flying Colours, then settled in for a great dinner of stir-fry chicken and mushrooms in a ginger wasabi finishing sauce over rice, and topped off with a very nice bottle of wine.
Saturday was a work day on the boat – well, work that is for Kap, as I spent a large part of the day keeping cool in the aft cockpit with a new Flying Colours Margarita recipe that I’ve just perfected. It’s a lot simpler and less labor-intensive than the recipe I’ve been using, and I can make perfect margaritas from scratch on the spur of the moment. What a concept!
Sunday morning required an early start. Kap’s flight to Seattle was scheduled at 10AM, with a 9AM check-in at the Kenmore Air floatplane base in Victoria’s Inner Harbour. It’s about 25 miles from Sidney to Victoria, so the plan was to head south in the rental car at 8:30AM, drop Kap off for her flight, and I’d then drive north to the Vancouver and Gulf Islands ferry terminal just outside Sidney to catch a ferry across to Saltspring Island, then make my way by road to Ganges for the wine pickup.
The Gulf Islands ferry to Fulford Sound on Saltspring Island.
While waiting for the 2PM return ferry at Fulford Sound, I had a nice waterside lunch of Croque Madame (minus the egg, so it was really a Croque Monsieur).
We had earlier thought Fulford Sound might be a nice place to stop by with Flying Colours, but a quick visit showed that the small marina is too small for us to get into. There's nice looking anchorage in the sound, though.
All went according to plan, and I managed to catch the 11AM ferry and the 35 minute crossing to Fulford Sound on the south side of Saltspring Island. It’s only a 14km drive up the island to Ganges, so I was there by 12 noon. We loaded up the four cases of wine and I was back in Fulford Sound in plenty of time for the 2PM return ferry crossing. Kap reported in that she was safely in Seattle, picked up her Zipcar, and we heading to Bayview Manor to see her father. I was back on Flying Colours by 3PM, in plenty of time to walk the dogs and take ZuZu for a dock walk before they all became stir crazy.
With these trips home, Kap and I are in a strange reversal of roles. Throughout our married lives (33 years), it’s always been me leaving on airplane flights around the world and Kap staying home to take care of the house, dogs, and cat. Now it’s the other way around – but oddly, she’s getting to go home and I’m staying with the dogs and cat from wherever we are.
With Kap's return home on Monday afternoon, our Tiki drummer got our Happy Hour going for fresh margaritas.
The new coolant gasket arrived on Monday afternoon, and is set to be installed on Tuesday morning. As expected, it’s not the going to be a 5-minute job, as they have to drain some/all of the coolant out, replace the gasket, and then refill. It should be a 3-hour job. The plans after that are to leave on Wednesday morning. As of now, we aren’t sure exactly where we’re going, but it will be north. Kap’s next physical therapy appointment is scheduled for Monday, August 9th, and we need to figure out a Kenmore Air spot for that date.
That’s all for now.
Ron