June 25-July 6, Cortes Bay. This summer marks the first time in 13 years that we haven’t cruised to The Broughton’s or beyond. As we made our plans for this summer, we thought we’d at least dip our toes into the southern edge of The Broughton’s for a few days. But that just didn’t make sense, given Kap’s desire to be home by August 1 to get in the serious training she’ll need for the Cascade Express Marathon on September 8th (starts at Snoqualmie Pass and ends at North Bend – you can see details and the course description at https://cascadesuperseries.com/the-cascade-express-marathon).
Nevertheless, being at the Cortes Bay SYC outstation was a good, quiet time, and treating it as if it was our summer’s destination was great. Normally, it’s just a quick stop on our way north or south, but this time we just hung around and took in this great spot. By this time in July we expected Cortes to be crowded with SYC cruisers, but some nights we only had 2-3 boats moored, and the docks felt empty (which was just great in our minds).
The Seattle Yacht Club and the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club each have outstations at Cortes Bay – on opposite sides of the bay at the western end. This map makes Cortes Island look big and heavily populated; in fact, the permanent resident population of the entire island is 1,035. Kap’s run was a 19.5 mile out-and-return, to a tiny (half dozen building) settlement named Whaletown. The General Store there has a Canadian Post Office inside. We’ve spent quite a bit of time in Gorge Harbour over the years – mostly at anchor – right about where you see the tiny anchor symbol. There’s a wonderful restaurant on shore, called the FloatHouse Restaurant, very good food, and it’s one of the primary reasons we like to spend time at Gorge Harbour. On the eastern side of Cortes is a wonderful secluded cove, called Squirrel Cove – we’ve only been there once, in 2006, when we spent a couple of nights in this incredibly picturesque cove aboard Paula and Jim’s sailboat, Apt. 5 (about a month after we sold Mainstar). We also met up (rafted) with Paula and Jim in Gorge Harbour for a night in 2007, but it was short-lived, as our Basenji, Gator, ruptured a cervical disc just standing beside me in the cockpit of Cosmo Place, and we had to race over to Campbell River to a vet, and then flew him home for treatment. There’s a halfway decent grocery store at Squirrel Cove, but from Cortes Bay, the only reasonable way to get there is by a 30-minute dinghy ride in fairly open water around Mary Point on the SE tip. We’ve done it twice in our 11’ dinghy, and I don’t hanker to do it a third time.
On Tuesday, Kap “went to the Post Office” and back . . . not that she had anything to mail, mind you, but it just happened to be the furthest point on a 19.5 mile out-and-return practice run for her upcoming marathon. I have to say, she came back a bit whupped! Cortes Island is nothing but hills – so it was up and down the entire way, with hardly any flat terrain along the way. Her Fitbit-type watch recorded that her elevation gain throughout the run was the equivalent of 156 office tower floors. To put that into perspective, the Columbia Tower in downtown Seattle is 76 floors tall (until 2017 it was the tallest building on the West Coast), and Taipei Tower – which we visited in Taiwan when Flying Colours was being built – is 101 floors! FYI, in training for a marathon run, you never do the full marathon length of 26.2 miles – instead she’s trying to do an average of 30-40 miles per week – and the largest focus is on getting her pace right. To maintain the necessary stamina for a run of this distance she needs to slow down just a bit from her pace doing 12+ half marathons for several years. That’s not as easy as it sounds (as if I’d know, which I don’t).
Don’t forget – you can click on any photo in the post to enlarge it.
Yes, the problem with the Current Location map has definitely been identified as our out-of-date linkage with Google Maps. When we return home this summer I’ll need to have my tech guy update the linkage to the new API that Google is using. Nevertheless, you click this link to see where we are located: http://fms.ws/19wmqG/48.65277N/123.39432W, and then zoom in/out to see the detail or overall view, and you can click on Satellite to see the terrain view.
Also, this post is more readable in the online version, plus you can read any of the posts back to 2010 from the archive – just click on the link above to the blog. Go to www.ronf-flyingcolours.com.
OK, just for fun. Watching for interesting boat names is a good pastime while cruising or sitting at the dock (I have a list on my computer that I keep for special occasions – particularly for knocking them when they’re excessively stupid). This one just fits the description of being fun. ZERODACUS – spotted on the next dock from us at the SYC Cortes Bay Outstation. At first I figured it must be a Greek name – maybe a goddess or something like that, and would be pronounced zer-ah’-da-cus, and rhyming with Herodicus.
Having grown up in Seattle during the 1950s, though, Kap immediately picked up on the true pronouncement and background of it, and she knew it was from the King 5 TV children’s show that starred the corny Scandinavian, Stan Boreson. So, in fact, this name opens the TV show’s theme ditty (introduced on the show as “songs my Uncle Torvald taught me”). It goes like this:
Zero-dacus, mucho-cracus / hallaballu-za bub
That’s the secret password that we use down at the club
Zero-dacus, mucho-cracus / hallaballu-za fan
Means now you are a member of: KING’s TV club with Stan.
So to pronounce it correctly, use the pronunciation of “mucho cracus” and apply it to ZERODACUS – as in “zero-dack’-us”. Obviously, the SYC member who named this boat also grew up on the Stan Boreson Show.
This stay at Cortes Bay turned out to be a long one – longer than we ever stay in one place as a rule. For some reason – we aren’t alone this year – a surprising number of cruisers are doing the same . . . sticking closer to home, and not going beyond the Desolation Sound area. It was the same for us. After a couple of weeks at Cortes, we decided it was time to slowly head south, planning to make it home by early in August.
I grabbed this photo off Google Images, and it just happens to be the Queeqeg. You can see the boat name on the stern, and at the bow it's flying the SYC burgee.
Another good boat name. Next to us on the dock at Cortes was the Queeqeg, a classic Hinkley 34’ Picnic Boat. It’s named after the fictional South Pacific island native who became the harpooner in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s pronounced “qwee – qweg”
Hinkley is a well-respected boatyard, founded by Henry R. Hinkley in Southwest Harbor, Maine in 1928 – first building fishing boats, and then yachts for summer residents on the nearby cluster of islands. As their website says, “Nothing looks like a Hinckley and nothing handles like a Hinckley.”
Because of their fine construction and dazzling reputation, a Hinkley like this one sells new for around $1M, so they’re only for the well-heeled. And rather than just “picnic” around Seattle’s Lake Union on Saturday afternoons, the couple who own Queeqeg cruise as far as Desolation Sound and a bit beyond. From Cortes Bay, they were heading for Dent Island, about 30 miles north – a fishing resort originally created by the Nordstrom family as a private retreat. With a cruise speed over 30 kts (over 35 MPH), they can be in Desolation Sound from the San Juan Islands in a single day. The night before we departed Cortes, heading south to Garden Bay and with a planned departure at 5AM for the 5-hour cruise, the owner of Queeqeg asked us, “Why so early? It’s only a 2-hour cruise.” Yeah, for him.
Saturday, July 6, Cortes Bay to Garden Bay. Kap‘s favorite pastime is studying the weather. At home, given the chance, she’d watch The Weather Channel as her favorite program – and something about it just drives her interest level. On the boat, this is a good thing, as she always knows what the weather should be doing for the next x-days. The beauty of it is, she knows several days in advance if crappy weather or nasty cruising conditions – high winds, rain, heavy seas – are about to befall us, and based on that when we should be thinking about a departure . . . or maybe hunkering down. By Wednesday, she was seeing that Saturday was the best day of the next week to head south for Garden Bay. Given that it’s a 5-hour cruise – and importantly, we wanted to get there before a hoard of boats crossing the Strait of Georgia could get there – so we elected to head out as close to 5AM as we could.
On arrival at Garden Bay, our good friends, Steve and Andrea Clark on Couverden, were waiting at the dock to catch our lines. Expecting to find the outstation full – and maybe overflowing – it was just the opposite. There were three other boats on the docks. We opted for the outer side of Dock 3, as it’s rather tightly spaced with a neighbor’s dock next door, and with a boat width restriction for that dock area, rafting is not allowed if/when the outstation becomes full. (In the busy summer months, rafting is mandatory at SYC outstations, and that means people clamoring across your swim step to get on/off, and everything spaced just the width of the fenders between the two boats.
On our arrival the outstation was almost empty, but as the day wore on more and more boats arrived. Flying Colours is at the far upper left corner of the photo, barely visible behind the three boats on the inside of the dock. The boat where the paddle board accident occurred, the Orenda, is on the inside of the dock at the far right, and the second boat out from shore. The boat on the left side of the middle dock is the Queeqeg that was with us at Cortes Bay.
Within a minute of our arrival we got word of an accident over on Dock 1 – a guy slipped and fell as he was stepping off his paddleboard onto the swim step of his boat, and an EMT crew was just arriving. He had come in at a bit of an angle, causing the paddleboard to bounce back a bit, knocking him off balance, and he fell as he tried to step over to the swim step. He landed with his full weight on the edge of the swim step, breaking the main bone in his upper arm about 3”- 4” below his shoulder (what a nasty place to do it).
A guy on the boat next to him heard it happen and saw him in the water – not moving – and when he got to him, ashen-faced and not talking. Luckily he had a PFD on (personal flotation device), and these are designed to keep your head above water. The guy’s wife was in the front of their boat and didn’t know it had happened. By the time the next door boater got to him he was in shock – not only from the fall itself, but also from the cold water. Using techniques he’d learned in boating safety courses, the Good Samaritan knew how to get this guy up onto the dock. That is usually a major problem when a full grown male is in the water, particularly when they can’t help with the lift.
With only three or four boats at the outstation, it was a bit surprising that we had two medical doctors and one nurse on the docks – but with a broken bone there wasn’t much they could do. While waiting for the EMT crew to arrive everyone got the accident victim dried off, out of his wet clothes, and poured warm water over him to get him up to normal body temperature. It was then a 15-20 minute ambulance ride to the nearest hospital. It was really lucky the situation wasn’t worse.
We had a Green Box Happy Hour that evening, and to our surprise the guy showed up right after his return from the hospital, arm in a sling, cheerful and talkative, and most likely doped up on a lot of pain medication. The next day, he and his wife departed for home – and recuperation.
Early one morning, on the way back from walking Jamie, I couldn’t resist snapping this photo looking across Garden Bay to the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club – referred to as the RVYC – and the serenity of everything in between. I’m a real fan of work boats, and the little wooden fishing boat in the foreground is easy on the eyes – belonging to the caretaker of the Edith Iglauer estate – the woman that I wrote about in the last post who died earlier this year at age 102.
In the photo at right, you can see the early morning serenity of Garden Bay, looking across to the Royal Vancouver Yacht on the opposite shore. if you look closely at the sailboat just beyond the little green fishing boat (have to enlarge it to see it), you can spot a yellow line at the stern of it, snaking on the water surface over to the shore. There, the line is tied to a big rock, providing what’s known as a “stern tie” for the sailboat. There’s an anchor down from the front of the sailboat, and the two secure it from swinging in close quarters.
We like to think that Flying Colours is a very good sized boat for two aboard – plus a cat and dog. At today’s boat shows, though, our 62’ boat is junior-sized compared to what people are ogling at the docks. At one point in our stay at Garden Bay, the outstation was essentially full with just a half dozen 80’ boats at the dock. This photo shows what Flying Colours looks like when it’s next to an 80’ behemoth across the dock. The couple on board were very nice – yes, just the two of them – but that’s a lot of boat for just two, not to mention how difficult it is to find dock space for it everywhere they go.
There aren’t many photos in this blog of both Kap and I, and this one strikes my fancy. It was taken by Andrea Clark in their dinghy on their return from Madeira Park and they had stopped by to chitchat. When they spotted Jamie watching them from the edge of the dinghy deck canvas extension, a photo was mandatory. You might ask . . . what is that yellow cord snaking out from the enclosure below the “Fl” in the boat name. Well, it’s our 75’ long 50A shore power cord, fed in/out by an electric motor-driven unit at the aft of the lazarette. A 50A power cord is horribly heavy, and having it motor driven is huge.
We spent 10 days at Garden Bay, mostly quiet and relaxing time, with the occasional dinghy ride to the Madeira Park IGA for groceries, or to the local vet for the proper cat food for ZuZu. Each evening’s Happy Hour time was typically spent at the clubhouse deck with Steve and Andrea, watching the world go by, catching up on their news from Maui and Port Angeles (they split their time 50/50 between the two). Each morning on the boat, I managed to get in a lot of writing on a new literary tome I’ve begun – for about the fourth time, and maybe this time it’ll come to something (heaven forbid . . . a publisher?). ZuZu tried her best to get off the boat every chance she could, and she succeeded multiple times.
One concern for us – not only Kap and I personally, but for Jamie and ZuZu as well – was the number of predators on the prowl. There’s always been a black bear or two that hang around the park within a few blocks of Garden Bay that we need to be aware of when we take Jamie for a walk, plus a bunch of bald eagles that can snap ZuZu up in a flash if she’s walking around on the forward deck, or has gotten off on the dock by herself. But this summer a wolf (or two) is hanging around, and in the last few days they’ve attacked a dog and chased a boy on a bicycle over near the Royal Van Yacht Club. And now there’s a pack of coyotes – and we could hear a cacophony of howls one morning as they were making a kill on a hillside not far from us. When I’m out walking Jamie and she acts spooked, I’m telling you, it spooks me too.
Pender Harbour (with Garden Bay at the innermost within it) is at the top end of B.C.’s Sunshine Coast, which tells you something about the normal weather there. It does rain, though, and this is what it looks like.
Several times we heard helicopters flying overhead and behind us. We figured it was the result of the fire three weeks earlier, and sure enough, we learned the fire is still burning – but underground, and only rainfall will eventually put it out. Hopefully it won’t come above ground and start burning out of control again.
Just before our departure this gigantic sailboat came in. At first we were afraid it was heading for our dock, which it would have barely fit on. Luckily, it turned towards the RVYC outstation, and we cheered. We knew, though, that RVYC was almost full too, and it instead docked at the Pub Inn next door to the outstation. Someone said it was owned by Jane Fonda, but we don’t believe it, and if it is, there’s no record of it on the internet. To get an impression of just how long this thing is, note the tiny people on the bow . . . then turn them sideways, and replicate them to see just how many of them would fit end to end.
Andrea took this photo of Jamie from the Couverden on the next dock over at Garden Bay. This is one of Jamie's favorite spots on the forward deck.
Tuesday, July 16, Garden Bay to Ganges (on Salt Spring Island). All good things must end, and spending good quality time in Garden Bay is one of those good things. At 6:05AM we slipped our lines at the SYC outstation and slowly cruised out of Pender Harbour, heading across the Strait of Georgia – and with our destination actually not known for sure. It could be Page’s Marina just before Gabriola Passage, or it could be the SYC private Ovens Island outstation on the other side, or hopefully it would be the SYC outstation at Ganges Marina in Ganges. Slack tide at Gabriola Passage, and the time we would arrive at it would be the deciding factor. Slack was estimated to be at 10:30AM, and unless we hit unexpected heavy weather in the Strait of Georgia that shouldn’t be a problem. Two of the Weather Canada weather-reporting buoys have been out of service for over a month, so Kap wasn’t all that confident of the weather and sea condition reports. The Whiskey Gulf military zone was open – where U.S. and Canadian submarines 1,000’ below the surface test torpedoes – so we’d need to skirt around the south end of it, increasing our transit time. Otherwise, it was a very good crossing – until we hit a bit of lumpiness on the last 1/3rd of it. ZuZu didn’t complain loudly, though, so it must not have been very bad.
As expected, Kap hit the entrance time perfectly at Gabriola Passage, with just 1 knot of current running with us as she powered through at 12 knots. We met two or three other boats on either side of the passage, but had it all to ourselves as we crossed through the main channel, making it a piece of cake. (The cruiser’s refrain is, “If it’s boring, you must have done it right!) We’re both still a bit gun shy of it since the passage three years ago when a whoopsie at the narrowest, shallowest point whipped us 90° in the space of 2-3 seconds, and it was only Kap’s quick thinking and reactions that kept us from a possible disastrous situation.
The Saltspring Marina docks being towed out - possibly for good. The red building at the shore is a pub that was located at the head of the marina docks. At the far right of the photo is Hastings House - a 3-star hotel and restaurant that is probably the most famous place to eat in Ganges - but we've never been to it, because it's a prix fixe menu that never sounds good to us, and until very recently they required a coat and tie for men and a dress for women - which is way too formal for us during summer cruising. We'll leave it to the people who prefer more formality.
From there it was smooth cruising for the remaining 3+ hours into Ganges for our planned arrival at 1:20PM. All along the way our nerves had been a bit on edge about moorage, as it was now mid-July – the busiest cruising time of the year. The SYC outstation at Ganges is the first one north of Roche Harbor, and every year the SYC has a major July 4th celebration there with upwards of 70 boats crammed onto the docks. School is out, it’s everyone’s vacation time, the weather is typically warm, and it’s time for the cruisers to head north. All of that argued strongly for Ganges to be full, not only on the SYC docks, but at the only other marina in town. We braced for a moorage problem.
Ganges is at the head of a long (5 mile or so) inlet that cuts into Salt Spring Island, and we expected to see a flotilla of boats heading in for moorage. Instead, it was quiet and we only saw a single cruiser along the way. Strange. Once inside the slow-down zone we could train our binoculars on the SYC end of the Ganges Marina docks. And what we saw didn’t make sense – empty docks, giving us the impression we weren’t looking in the right place. As we neared, though, we could see that a single boat was tied up at the outstation – the rest of it was empty. The couple on the boat came out to catch our lines, and they hollered, “It must have been something we said . . . we’ve been alone here for two days!” The rest of Ganges Marina was also sparsely occupied. Across the harbor from us the rebuilding of the Salt Spring Marina obviously hadn’t begun, so obviously no boats there either. Where was everyone?
After our arrival we learned that the Saltspring Marina’s rebuilding plans had been put on hold, maybe for a very long time. Whatever government (or First Nations) organization that controls waterfront usage had balked at the plans to dredge the marina dock area before installing the new docks. Somehow it was discovered that the sea floor beneath the docks was “almost alive” with a nursery of crabs, and a dredging operation would be disastrous for it. Without the ability to dredge, the new marina docks wouldn’t fit. At least for now, that leaves Ganges Marina as the only real marina in town (there’s a government dock on the downtown side, but it’s quite small).
I snapped this of the Blue Peter just as she was pulling onto the dock across from us. What a beautiful old yacht!
More beautiful boats. In the heyday of Chris Craft wooden boats (1950-1975), you couldn’t find one that wasn’t a piece of art – stylish, well made, and wonderfully proportioned. We had the Blue Peter for eye candy, but there were a dozen pleasing-to-the-eye Chris Craft’s on the docks this week, all making their way from a classic wooden boat show in Port Orchard (across from Bremerton in Puget Sound), and now heading to this coming weekend’s classic show in Telegraph Harbour on Thetis Island (15 miles north of Ganges). This one, the Irrestible, is a 1956, 36’ cabin cruiser that’s based in La Conner. It sure is great that there are people in this world who still care enough about these classics to keep them up. A gentleman across the dock from us mentioned that he essentially re-purchases his Chris Craft every two years – with money spent on keeping his boat “alive”.
Not long after our arrival, a classic – and gorgeous – fan tail yacht settled onto the outer dock. (Fan tail means it has a rounded stern.) It turned out to be the Blue Peter from Shilshole Marina in Seattle – a yacht that we had a minor association with a few years ago. The Blue Peter is a 96’ motor yacht, built in Seattle in 1928 by Lake Union Drydock as a private yacht for an oil company owner in Los Angeles. After WWII it returned to Seattle in less than stellar condition, but was purchased by a boat and bridge builder (his company built Seattle’s I-90 Floating Bridge in the 1930s) – who had always coveted it and wanted to restore it to its former glory. With a major rebuild – and a couple of refits since then, the Blue Peter was restored to original condition and is one of the most well-known boats around Seattle.
Our association? In 2009, Kap and I attended the annual charity auction gala for Make-A-Wish – the foundation that grants wishes to young people who are facing life threatening illnesses. The gala raises money through donated gifts to finance these wishes. One donation that night was a 5-course catered dinner for six on an evening cruise in Seattle’s Elliot Bay, to be catered on-board by the chef from the upscale Suncadia Resort in CleElum. Against the advice of Kap (I’m a sucker for these charity auctions, always bidding way too high above our budget), I won the auction on this. Later, on a warm evening the following summer, we had an elegant and wonderful dinner on the aft deck of the Blue Peter, along with our good friends, Jim and Laura Kleppe and Marty and Linda Ellison, as we cruised along the Seattle waterfront in Elliot Bay. Prior to dinner, we had a full tour of this incredible yacht – and at the pilot house, Kap got to take the wheel for part of the cruise. It was a real treat!
While watching TV in the salon of Flying Colours one evening, Kap turned around to look out the window and exclaimed, “Quick, grab your camera!”. Just as the moon was rising above the horizon I snapped this photo in the waning hours of daylight, looking out the full length of the Ganges harbour. I didn’t use a tripod, so the longer-than-normal exposure meant a bit of camera jiggle – but it’s still a pretty good photo.
In mid-July, restrictions on length of stay begin to apply at the SYC Ganges outstation, so we kept our visit to three nights – and of course, that gave us time for another great dinner at Auntie Pesto’s on the first night, and at House Piccolo on the third night.
When a Brit says, “How ‘bout a curry”, they’re usually talking about going out for a Butter Chicken dish at their favorite Indian restaurant. This recipe is the closest I’ve found for a really good version of this dish.
The second night was reserved onboard Flying Colours for what has now become one of our most favorite cruising dishes – Butter Chicken. The recipe I use for it is from a recent Cook’s Illustrated, with a wonderful made-from-scratch butter sauce (that isn’t very heavy on butter) – and I grind my own garam masala spice mix for it. Mixed in the sauce are bite-sized chunks of a home oven version of Tandoori chicken that’s easy to make. It’s served over an excellent saffron basmati rice with all the right Indian spices flavoring it (cinnamon stick, cumin seeds, cardamom pods, and a bay leaf). Kap has located a Canadian bakery that has the closest thing to true Naan bread that we like, and we now have a freezer full of it that’ll hold us until I can learn to make my own. Our oven on board Flying Colours doesn’t have a broil function that’s hot enough to cook the chicken in an authentic Tandoori style, so I cooked up four batches of chicken at home, vacuum sealed each one, and froze them for our cruise. The sauce can be made ahead of time too, and you can even whip up the saffron basmati rice ahead of time and freeze it in a vacuum bag.
Friday, July 19, Ganges Marina to Port Sidney Marina. Our original cruising plan was to go direct to Friday Harbor from Ganges, bypassing Sidney (which has always been our last stopover in B.C. before crossing back into the U.S.). While still at Garden Bay, though, Steve and Andrea made us an offer to use their slip at Port Sidney Marina (it’s a condominium marina, and they’ve owned a slip there for the past dozen+ years). Their plan was to stay another week in Garden Bay, so their slip would be open – and we just couldn’t pass up the offer.
If the sun’s out, Jamie is sleeping somewhere in the fly bridge. This time she’s actually taking a break from the sun and is scrunched down behind the navigation instrument console in the shade – most likely it got too hot in the sun when it really starts to burn.
The new schedule is to spend five nights here in Sidney and then head over to Friday Harbor next Wednesday for the last segment of our 2019 cruise. Sidney feels like home to us – we know all the restaurants in town, all the grocery stores, and best of all, a lot of cruisers that we’ve gotten to know over the years are also passing through here.
Just look at all of the South Puget Sound possibilities that exist south of Seattle. We spent some time here way back in 2010, and this will be our first opportunity to do it again.
This will likely be my last regular post for Summer, 2019. After the marathon race in early September, our plan is to resume a bit of cruising – hopefully in the South Sound to the south of Seattle. We haven’t visited the wonderful waterfront marina – Dock Street Marina – in downtown Tacoma for a bunch of years, and with Tacoma booming as it is, it’s become a pretty lively scene. We’d also like to stop by Port Orchard, Gig Harbor, maybe get down to Olympia, and a couple of other interesting spots on the backside of Bainbridge Island. Stay tuned for an update on that.
Thanks for reading my blog of our adventures.