Nanaimo

Pulled into Nanaimo last night around 2130 and dropped anchor in Mark Bay off of Newcastle Island Park. It's a lovely large anchorage, though fairly well packed with boats of every shape and size. We grabbed a spot with some open swinging room near the outside of the pack, but the depths throughout are shallow and the weather is calm so we don't have much to worry about. It does, of course, place us further from the dinghy docks at the park, but closer to those in town (if we could figure out where those are) and we're actually quite close to a nice little beach to land at on the island.

I imagine I will get some pictures of the place up at some point in the next few days.

We plan to stay here for a couple of days. We're not really tired; the trip down from Campbell River has been characterized by light winds and calm seas (except for a patch of pitching around yesterday morning departing Blubber Bay on Texada Island, where I got fairly well soaked up on the bow securing the anchor as we punched through three foot seas) and the weather has been terrific so we're doing okay in those respects. We have a horde of miscellaneous little tasks to take care of in town, though, laundry probably being the largest.

We also need some quality time in a good marine chandlery and then with the boat itself. The transmission lever, that same foul beast that indirectly led to all our worst troubles on this trip, is still giving us grief. We bored out the sheared off screw and replaced it with a bolt... which in turn sheared off within a half hour. Since then, we've been making down with a series of cotter pins, a steel nail, and anything else we can think of to secure the handle to the bar. But they all bend or break outright after a day or so of use. The thing is a demon. It has always been stiff to shift, but now it bends nails? It's almost unreal.

We also need to get some slugs for our new mainsail. We finally took some time in Campbell River to try to get the thing up. It's cut perfectly and fits the frame of the mast and boom without any problem, but the slugs at the luff are too large to fit into the track on the mast, which is what holds the sail and the mast together. We shaved one of them down (they are plastic) but it turns out that not only is the body of the slug too big, but so too is the very loop with which it is attached to the sail. With the Dremel aboard, we could probably grind it all down in an hour or so and make do; since it was soaked and so far unreplaced, it's probably easiest to just buy new slugs that fit the mast and attach them to the sail.

Campbell River is very nice for the location, but it is not a sailing center in any respect. Here, we are hoping to find a chandlery which has honest to goodness sailboat hardware.

So, that's the plan, and we'll try to enjoy what looks to be some lovely weather for the next