Nanaimo

It’s Monday morning and time to head to Dodd Narrows so we can cross at slack tide. We arrived a little early, but because it’s a neep tide, so there wasn’t much current and we were able to sail right through.

Nanaimo - First stop was the fuel dock. We took 109 gallons, $923 CA. The exchange rate brings it down to $710 or $6.52 US a gallon, which is only about $.60 more than we paid in the US. Not as bad as I was expecting but still double the cost from last year. Yikes!

Second stop, drop anchor behind Protection Island and get settled in before heading over to the Dingy Dock Pub for dinner. Friends Al & Jody highly recommended it and Keith agreed with Al, the famous burger was excellent.

Nanaimo is a busy place. There are ferries, float planes, lots of boats and an inordinate amount of people rowing. Little tiny boats (typically with much older sailors) rowing all over the bay. Kayaks, canoes, and dingys everywhere. It was amazing to watch.

Let’s talk about anchoring - some will say it’s the bain of boating and can easily be the most frustrating. We are pretty good at it but we have our moments. We arrived back at the boat after dinner and found we were getting a little too close to the boat next to us during our swing. Come to find out, it was stern tied! This really messes up everyone around as it won’t swing. No one was on board and it appeared to have been there a while. We watched it closely to see if we needed to move but the winds died down a bit and so did the swinging. I checked once in the middle of the night just to make sure we weren’t going to bump and all was well.

Tuesday morning wasn’t so good as the winds picked up and we finally had to pull up and move. We dropped anchor again away from everyone, and waited to see how the swing would go. Again, we found the boat behind us was stern tied, but he was far enough away I thought we would be ok. You would think spotting a stern tie would be easy, but it’s not. You can’t always see their stern and boats swing at different rates due their size and weight.

All appeared well, so time to head into town to pick up fresh food and supplies. I could see our boat from the shore and everything was good. However, when we returned, the tide had dropped enough we were now stern into the broadside of the boat behind us with about 20 feet of water between us. The owner was onboard (he lives there full time) and was starting to worry we were dragging. We checked our electronics and were not dragging, just swinging, but it was too close, even for our comfort. So, we move again to a park bouy for a bit but we can’t stay there because we have our smaller boat rafted and that’s not allowed. We were so frustrated, trying to stay in the boundaries of the anchor area and not get to close to the many other stern tied boats, we finally gave up and went to the Nanaimo Yacht Club reciprocol dock… DONE!