This is what rafting up looks like; it's pretty cozy. This is a tame version, at that... it's not unusual at a lot of fishing floats to see boats rafted three and four deep. If you want to go ashore, you wander across someone's back deck or cockpit. I had always heard it was more polite to go across the foredeck, which is less like a living room than the cockpit, but here circumstances dictate we wander through someone else's social space any time we need to get ashore. Apparently the owners of the yacht we are attached to, Oceania, keep her here to live aboard sometimes, and don't often go out, so at least we don't have to worry about the spaghetti mess that would no doubt ensue if they were to depart while we would stay and move inboard.Of course, there are certain compensations; this, for instance, is the view from our own cockpit:
Surely there are worse things to wake up and look out upon in the morning.
We're going to stay a couple of days here, get some work done, and get the boat dried out. Two or three days of rain following a day with heavy seas over the front deck have resulted in a general dampness that was starting to get on our nerves. The solar panel got stepped on and is out of commission, so some electricity is most welcome. Our autopilot compass has been unsettled... there are no charted magnetic disturbances up here but Watmough mentions a magnetite mine up in the hills around here somewhere so there is a possibility it's simply local interference, but a good drying out couldn't hurt. Finally, our diesel stove is giving us problems again, so electric heat is nice (although today is plenty warm enough already).
So, we'll get things back in order here, but I'm glad we are as far south as we are... it's getting to that point in the trip where the stuff that is broken is starting to add up, and we didn't outfit ourselves as carefully or comprehensively as we did for last year's trip, so I have even less capacity for fixing or replacing it. We'll head down into Barkley Sound on Friday, weather permitting (it's only about thirty miles; northwest winds are forecast, however) and poke around there for a bit before heading back for the States toward the end of next week. Again, that will be weather dependent... the Strait can be rough enough when you are simply going across them, but when you have sixty miles or so to run through them in addition you want all the favorability you can muster. Unfortunately, the tides this time of month look like they are biased toward the ebb, with relatively short floods for us to ride inland. We may have to make a couple of hops to get all the way through. The winds look like they will probably be with us, though; fog may be another story. The radar has been operating less predictably over the last couple of days and we may have to put Mandy up the mast again before we head out into the Strait just to double-check all the connections. There are relatively few places to duck into shelter once you have entered them, so a positive forecast is a must-have.
But that's all in the future. Tonight we getting aired out and getting rested up to go explore the rest of Tofino tomorrow. Already I found a book shop that had not one, but two new Terry Pratchett novels, in softcover well before the softcover has hit the States! I keep forgetting that about Canada, they get a lot of good British stuff well before we do. So, anyway, I'm in reading material for the next two days, as Mandy says. We also had a great lunch at a neat little cafe. I have no doubt there is more good stuff hidden behind all the tourist traps fronting the downtown area.
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