We headed off to our Bluewater Crusing rendeyvous on Friday morning. We had loaded up with groceries and got the boat looking spiffy and were ready to start our trip around the island on Monday morning.

The rendeyvous was a lot of fun. There were tons of people there, we figured over 100 Bluewater people and over 45 boats. I could not believe how close people anchored to one another. One boat dropped anchor pretty close to us, when the wind blew it wasn't a problem, but when there was no wind and boats were facing different ways, we came pretty close to the guy..

We had appetizers aboard one boat on Saturday night and it was so crowded you couldn't move, then more people kept showing up and pretty soon there were over 30 people sitting in their dinghys around the boat, it was marvelous. The next day we got together for breakfast, there was a treasure hunt, a boat tour in the afternoon and then a pot luck in the evening. It was super to get to see all the other boats and see what innovative things people have done to their boat and what the interior layouts are like. Most seemed to have more storage room than ours, but oh well!!! In the evening at the pot luck it started raining but that didn't put people off, up went the tarps and the food was absolutely delicious. We got to meet the members from Vancouver that are planning to leave this year as well, there are 8 boats from the island and 3 boats from Vancouver that are off so I am sure we will see each other up and down the coast.

We had a couple of friends have trouble with their anchor windlasses when we were in the harbour. I kept thinking, okay there are 2 with problems, who is going to be the third. Well you guessed it, we went to wind in our anchor this morning and NOTHING, NADA, ZILCH. The &^%#*!% think wouldn't work. My husband said we should go back to Sidney to get it fixed because we would have a vehicle there and we know who to contact to get it fixed, if we couldn't so back we came. I am REALLY choked!!!!!!! This is supposed to be Day 1 of our trip around the island and we are still here, well, I guess that's boating.

Anyway we got some really good practise coming back. It was absolutely pea soup out there. You couldn't see 200 meters in front of you. We came back into Sidney steering a compass heading and using the GPS to set waypoints. We had the radar going to make sure the freighters didn't sneak up on us and keep track of the other boats that were close by. We started the computer and used our electronic mapping to make sure where we were. It was a bit alarming when you started looking around because all of a sudden you were 20 degrees off course. We had a power boat come up behind us and ask us where we were going, when he found out we were headed back here he asked if he could follow us, little did he know this was the first time we had actually done this. Barry and I did half the trip each on the helm so I got to practise the navigation and check out the radar. At first Barry was down below and he hadn't put a course in or anything. He was mucking around turning on the computer and setting up the radar, I was getting more and more agitated and louder and louder in my demands for a course. I couldn't see a thing and was wandering around on the course I had picked 20 degrees to one side and then 30 to the other side, it was like get me a safe course NOW. We made it without any problems, really good practise.

Barry spent the rest of the day trying to fix that frickin windlass. I hope someone can give us a hand tomorrow, like there aren't going to be a zillion others with problems that happened on the long weekend. OH WELL, these things happen. I just have to be back before July 8.