You don’t really feel how big British Columbia is until you’ve done it by boat. We’re jaded by highways where we go 100kph and jet planes which go 500kph. It’s when you are in a boat moseying along at 6 knots, or even slower, and it takes 8 hours to get somewhere, that I start to have appreciation for the enormity of the land.
How big is 250 nautical miles? By car, that’s 4-5 hours on a highway. So far, on Quijote, where we are traveling every day except one, that’s 9 days. On foot, in the frontier days, or by canoe, it’s even longer.
Enough ruminating.
We hauled up our anchor on time and departed our serene anchorage. So far, of the trip, this is the first anchorage where I’m actually feeling wistful about departing. All the ones prior to this, I was eager to move on to the next destination.
We reached Malibu Rapids about 1/2 hour before slack, but it was a non-event, hardly a ripple and Quijote barely seemed to notice anything unusual. Then it was out into the wider Jervis Strait and heading south to Thunder Bay, which is at the juncture of jervis and Georgia Straits. We’re still only about 1/3rd of the way there, but already our arrival time is better than we thought – hovering around 7 to 7:30 this evening, which means we’ll arrive with still daylight. We won’t really be able to do anything, but Rod tells me that there isn’t anything to do anyway, so it all works out.
This trip is, amongst other things, a floating test bed for the software. I’m finding bugs and fixing them, slowly fine-tuning the system. At night I read myself to sleep, and have finished two novels so far. Maybe I should go back to writing my own, except that I’m spending all my computer time working on the software. Still, it's great to get out of the house and be doing these things.
My ankle is bothering me a little today - a momento of twisting it on the trail yesterday. It's not serious, but it does put a minor hitch in my walk and twinges. I should be fine in a few days to a week, though, and meanwhile there are more places to go and to see!
We got lazy for dinner today - sloppy joes, most of which came out of one of those McCormick spice packets. However, even something like this can be an adventure. The ground beef was still partially frozen, so we put it in a zip lock to immerse the whole thing in boiling water, except... What happens when plastic zip-loc comes in contact with very hot pan? Right. it melts. So that was adventure #2 - cleaning solidified plastic off of one of Rod's Magna pots. Still, the sloppy joes came out pretty good.
We are anchor up at 7am tomorrow and i can't sleep tonight for some reason. It's going to be a pain getting up but, as they say, Time and Tide wait for no man!
Oh and for my traditional dip at each anchorage, I wussed out. it was late and I was tired, so I dipped my foot in. That counts, right?
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