The forgotten/lost post

Here’s the post that I never published, from before we went to Port McNeill…..No pictures because the connection is too slow here....(we're in Port Harvey)

July 2, 2014

We are still in Jennis Bay Marina – we enjoyed ourselves so much that we stayed another night! What a fun, funky place…..the owners, Kim and Kent, are terrific. Kim s really funny – she meets everyone on the dock and chats them up. Just an all-round friendly place. And really a beautiful spot.(Here’s what it looks like – that’s Kim, waving)

Bob caught his first ling cod today. A 34” fish, about 13 pounds. Ye gods, they are ugly fish! Biggest mouth on a fish I’ve ever seen.

So, here’s a picture of today’s seafood “take” – looks like prawn cocktails, followed by Dungeness crab cakes and baked cod. Yum.

We’ll take off for Port McNeill tomorrow. We’ve got a good weather window, so we’ll go over and fill up our water tanks and do laundry. We were going to stay here in Drury Inlet another day or two, but the water shortage is currently preventing showering! Not a good thing. J

July 8, 2014

Okay, back to the regularly scheduled programming…..we left Port McNeill at 5:15 yesterday morning, in fairly calm seas and a light fog, which turned into lumpy seas and a thicker fog within a couple of hours….but, on the bright side, we are no longer sitting in Queen Charlotte Straits, waiting for calm winds (which hardly ever happens, btw).

We’re sitting in Laura Bay, which is one of our favorite places in the Broughtons. We come here every time we’re up here. Because this is a smallish little bay with a very L A R G E rock in the middle, we have to stern tie, which simply means that once the boat is anchored you run a line to shore and around a tree and then take it back to the boat. (Operative word: “simply”) This prevents the boat from swinging around with the currents/tides. There is absolutely nothing simple about the process. It entails setting the anchor (in this case, in rocks), which we do all the time, so no biggie…..then, Bob takes the dinghy to shore, towing a polypropylene line, takes it around a tree and comes back. This is accomplished while the wind is blowing us towards another boat, Bob is yelling to me to “back the boat up” (ummm, we’re hooked to an anchor, Bob, it won’t go back, that’s the point, remember?) and then coming back to the boat e v e r so slowly – because it was only a couple hundred feet, he rowed over…….all of this time, I am running back and forth from the helm inside, where I’m attempting to keep the boat from hitting the other guy’s boat, to the aft deck, where I am attempting to unravel the stern line (since the reel broke when Bob first pulled on it) and muttering to myself about “if you’d just come back to the boat a little faster, Bob, this would be a lot better…for God’s sake, row FASTER.” I was happy that we provided dinner theatre (or lunch theatre, since it was only 11:00am) for the other boaters.  Once we got the line back to the boat and pulled it all tight, everything was fine………and this is what it looks like:

The guy in the boat next to us (we’re closer than we would like to have been, but nobody cares) is a super nice guy. He’s the commodore of the Tacoma Yacht Club, so he and Bob have been trading yacht club stories and sharing laughs. Yesterday he came over and gave us a couple of rock fish that he’d caught (and didn’t want, because he just wants the heads for crab bait), and we gave him some big prawns….this morning he brought us a couple of crab because you can’t keep them up here and he caught too many. So, thanks to him, we had fish last night and it’ll be crab tonight.

As y’all know, I brought several knitting projects with me, since I don’t like to fish, and crabbing and prawning take, oh, 15 minutes a day to pick up the pots and clean the critters………while I have upwards of 25 books (hey, I like to read), one can read only so many hours at a time. Thus, 4 knitting projects. That said, I have finished the socks – going around Cape Caution, remember? – I’m a little tired of the beading project (I’m teaching myself to bead while knitting – it’s a little tiresome), a shawl that I started in Maine, and a sweater for Bob. The sweater is the key thing, here, in this story…..

See those sticks? Ahhh, yes You see, I didn’t bring the right needles with me to finish….the sweater requires 2 sets of double pointed needles, sizes 2.5 and 3. I didn’t remember the size 3 doubles. Now, this sweater is fun to knit, because it’s just hard enough to be interesting, but not so hard it’s frustrating. One of the things that makes it interesting is that there are no seams at all – so when it came to the sleeves, that’s where I needed the double pointed needles. Now, I could have just put it down and done something else for the rest of the trip, but I’m into this project now so I don’t want to stop. (My knitting buddies, and you know who you are, will totally understand this. The rest of you will just remind yourselves that I tend to be a little freaky at times, okay?) So, Bob make me a set of knitting needles! Yes, he did! The bamboo skewers I bought for cooking prawns on the bbq are the same circumference as a size 3 needle. So, a little sanding paper, et voila! I have knitting needles………they were a little rough at first, but after a few inches they got smooth. Maybe I’ll start a cottage industry, making knitting needles out of kitchen utensils and make my fortune.