What happened in Vancouver...

Well, nothing much has happened in Vancouver yet, actually, since I just got up and we got in at midnight last night. I have high hopes, though!

Let me back up a bit. I had intended one of those grand "we're off on our big adventure" type posts to let everyone know that we were on our way, but didn't run into a sufficient combination of time and Internet between when we got home from Las Vegas and now. So we've been a little out of contact. Sorry. We're not dead.

We drove up to Hadlock from Seattle on Tuesday mid-morning and spent the rest of the day ferrying loads of stuff out to the boat and putting it away. It was a pretty miserable day, raining off and on and generally providing a very dreary counterpoint to all the sunshine we had been used to in Vegas. We weren't able to get a lot of things done in between it being too wet to work on deck much and missing parts and such, so that was a little depressing as well.

We got up at 0530 Wednesday to get underway by 0600 to catch the ebb out of the mouth of Admiralty Inlet and make it to Rosario Strait (heading north past the San Juan Islands) by slack current there. It was foggy and raining again, very wet and miserable. In between the chartplotter and the radar, though, we were able to pick our way north through Port Townsend bay under power and get out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where visibility improved a bit and the wind picked up enough to raise sail.

Despite being wet, we had a decent sail northward with light following winds up through about 1300 in Rosario. Then the wind died down and the current wasn't helping much so it was back on with the engine. With all the messing about with the wind, we weren't making the time we needed to get to our intended destination of Sucia Island, so we ducked in at Clark Island and spent the night on a buoy at the Marine park there instead.

We got up the next morning and dinked around a bit longer than we should have before getting under way about 0715. We had good sailing weather right off the bat; it was overcast, but a nice breeze out of the northwest had us cruising along at 3-4 knots. Of course, since we needed to go northwest, we spent a lot of time tacking and made only 1-2 knots over ground toward Vancouver, which is where we wanted to be.

The sky cleared as we went, and the wind picked up a bit and we had some real fun sailing north past Point Roberts. It was fresh enough that we dropped a reef in the main at one point but that didn't last more than an hour before the wind dropped and we shook the reef out again.

Finally, a combination of dropping wind and current coming out of the Fraser River slowed us down enough that it was apparent we weren't going to make Vancouver at all that day without firing up the engine. There isn't really anywhere else to duck out of the Strait of Georgia down there, and nowhere else to clear Canadian Customs, so we were pretty much stuck with that destination. So we dropped sail and motored on from about 1930 to 2300, when we arrived at Fisherman's Wharf in False Creek.

Never having been there before, we relied on information in the guide books, which said do not, under any circumstances, tie up before contacting the Harbour Authority. Fortunately, the Authority is supposed to be open 24/7. Well, after repeated radio calls, we couldn't raise anyone, and finally Mandy got through on the phone after a couple of tries to the night watchmen. He directed us to the customs clearance dock, where we cleared through with a quick phone call, then set us up with a slip for what was left of the night.

And now it's this morning. Phew.