Wednesday-Thrusday August 6th-7th:
Another windless day today. As we were motoring through the southern part of the Canadian Gulf Islands we saw a pod of Orcas. They were quite a ways away, but you could see their fins as they swam along.
Right after we spotted the Orcas and left them in our wake, I discovered something about my trusty little camera. Up until this point I had only one real complaint about it. That being it had a really lame 3x zoom. You really could’nt zoom in on anything. And today, after almost a full month of taking pictures with the thing, I finally discovered that there was a setting that could be enabled to give the camera 11x zoom!! FRAAAAACKKKK!!!!
So in celebration, I give you a zoomed in picture of a lighthouse:
We were heading for Roche Harbor so we could check back into the U.S. and clear customs. Right after we crossed the official border we motored past Stuart Island and had to take pictures of our favorite lighthouse, the Turn Point Lighthouse, on the NW tip of Stuart Island.
About 10 minutes after that picture was taken, I noticed an apple floating past the boat and thought to myself…..hrmm, what are the odds that I would float past a random apple in the middle of all this water? Then I spot another apple, and another and a few oranges and a couple more assorted pieces of fruit. All whole, wierd. I guess somebody dropped them overboard by accident.
We thought that clearing into customs on a Wednesday would be a good idea and alot less crowed, but we were wrong. There were 8-10 boats ahead of us and 10 or so other boats already at the customs dock getting cleared in when we got there. Luckily there was no wind or current so it was not too difficult to hold station while waiting for our turn.
Clearing in was not a problem, and after assuring the custom’s agent I was who I claimed to be, that I did’nt have any exoctic birds, monkeys (I did’nt know they had monkeys in Canada?) or any fruit onboard….’Aaahhhaaa, that is why I saw all the fruit floating about’, I was allowed back in to the U.S.
We had a small list of stuff we needed to pick up while we were here in ‘town’, but there was such a long ass line up of boats behind us wanting to check in that we felt it would be a dickhead move to stay at the dock and go shopping. It’s allowed for up to 30 minutes, and alot of folks do it, which accounts for the line up. But decided to move on and pick up stuff later.
Originally we planned on staying just around the corner in Garrison Bay, but decided that we would instead head back over to Stuart Harbor and meet up with Ghost and Pearl in Reid Harbor.
Once there and anchored we found Ghost and Pearl, but the crews were ashore hiking. So we stole Scotty jerry cans and Tawn took the dinghy back over to Roche Harbor to get 10 gallons of diesel fuel and some stuff from the store.
As we were getting settled in, the tall ship “The Hawaiian Cheiftian” was leaving the harbor:
We set out the crabpots when she got back and had a crab boil with the crews of Ghost and Pearl.
We took a little hike the next day, and did some fishing. Not alot of luck fishing, Zack caught a big Ling cod, but since it was not ling cod season, he had to put it back. We also stopped by the little treasure chest on the island and picked up a couple new tshirts.