Coming across Haro Straight towards Sidney, we caught a nice southern breeze on the beam and reached across the strait. It was heaven not listening to the motor. We also pulled the bimini off as the weather has great. As PNW'ers, we need to break this habit of being frightened by the sun. It's not a hole in the sky or an angry god, just a star that warms things up now and again.
As this was our first time checking in to another country on our boat, we didn't really know much about what we should be doing. All the rules we read are very clear about the amount of alcohol you can carry in. Clearly, the Canadians would prefer you buy their booze at their prices. So we sadly had to dump some extra tequila and whiskey we had on board and couldn't get rid of at our going away party. We checked in at the Port of Sidney dock and then headed over to anchor in Tsehum Harbor. Tsehum Harbor is just north of Sidney and it mostly seems like a working harbor. It's not somewhere you would anchor your boat to "get away from it all". Last night, a mullet sporting dude in a dinghy roared through the entire anchorage with a stereo wailing KISS's anthem "LICK IT UP". Awesome.
We came to Sidney to get our headsail adjusted as it's a bit too long. UK/Halsey has a loft in Sidney and the guy we've been working with is there. Tim met up with us and offloaded the headsail, shortened it a hair and then returned it the next day. Since this might be the last place we'll have access to reasonably priced chandleries, we decided to take care of a few items. Tim pointed us to a place called Waypoint Marine. If you're ever in Sidney and ever need anything for your boat, please PLEASE go out of your way to see these guys. They have bent over backwards taking care of finding us a raw water strainer (ours shit the bed), a new starter battery (also shit the bed), another propane tank to BBQ hose (shit the bed after one use), a carberator rebuild kit for the outboard and various little bits of hardware. Mark offered use of his dock to bring our dinghy in to knowing that the local marina would probably tire of us when they realized we weren't spending money with them. Can't say enough about these guys. Awesome.
I can say enough about Tsehum Harbor though. We were happy to be leaving it in our wake. Sidney is great and Tsehum Harbor served it's purpose but there's more interesting places we'd rather be.
48°40'19"N 123°24'28"W
2 comments:
How did you end up finding out that your raw water strainer shit the bed? Did the engine shut down? Maybe I missed this in earlier posts...
We went to clean it out just keeping tabs on the engine, no symptoms or anything. We pulled the basket out of the strainer and the mesh part of the basket had corroded and the plastic bottom piece fell off. Turns out a new basket for the strainer would be $100 and have to get shipped from the US east coast. Or we could buy a brand new raw water strainer for $140. We did the latter. The current strainer still works OK until we get somewhere where I feel OK replacing it but it's not super trustworthy. I always have one eye on the engine temp gauge (because we're always motoring).
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