Hope everyone had a super long weekend. Ours was adventurous and torturous in that we had a super sail on Friday afternoon, stopped at a small harbor and let out the anchor, and then I was waiting for Barry to back the boat up and set the anchor and the boat refused to go into reverse. Our brand new transmission seemed to have decided it only wanted to go front wards. Don’t ask me how or why these things keep happening but they do. Barry spent a couple of hours trying to fix the problem. When he was finished we had forward and neutral but no reverse.

Soooo, instead of going up to a different harbor and going to a rendezvous our yacht club had organized we spent Sat. in this smallish spot watching all the boats come and go and spying on the BEAUTIFUL houses that were around the bay. That’s one thing different about sailing around here there are more than rocks and trees and wildlife to look at, some of the homes on the waterfront are absolutely spectacular. Sometimes looking at some of them I think they must have more money than brains because they build so close to the cliff edge or so close to the high tide mark. Hasn’t anyone down here heard of global warming and the effects of erosion? Okay, okay, I’ll get off my soap box.

On Sunday we consulted the tide tables and listened to the forecast and figured out where we planned to go next. Once we had almost got there we decided that we had gotten there too quickly and we didn’t like the looks of the weather that was headed there so we turned around and went somewhere else. The weather caught up with us and dumped, I mean DUMPED, a whole wack of rain on us, not tiny gentle little drops, huge smacking, popping off the water drops. What a way to get wet in a hurry. Then since we were going against the tide and the wind had died to next to nothing after the rain storm, we motored to the spot we planned to stay the night.

WELL, there were tons of boats all closely anchored together (another difference when you are sailing down here, you can’t just go into a spot and have your pick of anchorages). We decided that without a reverse gear we didn’t want to go rumbling through all those expensive looking boats, so we high tailed it back to Sidney, giving that new engine a real workout. We didn’t want to have to return in the dark, we are having enough trouble figuring out where we are during the day, all those stupid little islands look the same. Anyway on the way back there were some lovely cloud formations and I hope you enjoy the pictures.

Barry is becoming frustrated with all the stuff that is going wrong and is being nostalgic about our smaller, uncomplicated Catalina 25. I told him that if he wanted he could always go back to Yellowknife for the winter and get a job and live with Heather.