Desolation Sound and The Gulf Islands

It’s time for a quick update. My apologies for neglecting this site. It’s never been our intent to be sailing bloggers but we did plan on providing more updates than we have. In our defence, we’ve been busy sailing and learning for the last couple of months.

I say sailing and learning because really, the learning is key. Our goal for the first year or so is to learn as much as possible about Cambria–how systems work, how the boat handles various wind conditions and how to live aboard it safely and comfortably. I say “for the first year or so” but really the learning will never stop. It’s just that at first the learning curve is very steep. We are on a crash course–Cambria 101.

Here’s the short version of what we’ve been doing and learning.

We arrived back to Canada in mid/late-June. We spent the first two weeks in quarantine. After emerging from quarantine the first week of July we immediately got to work moving aboard the boat and doing routine maintenance.

Maintenance included basic things that have to be done regularly on a boat–things like changing the oil and the water pump impeller. We naïvely thought it would take us a couple of weeks to get these things done. It was more like six weeks before we got out cruising. The list of things to do on a boat is never ending. We probably would still be tied to the dock working on that list if it hadn’t been for the fact that our daughter had two weeks holiday booked and was going to join us to go cruising. I’m so glad we had that deadline. We may be still stuck at the dock working on things had we not had that commitment.

We met our daughter–Hannah–just north of Vancouver in Gibsons. From there we headed north to an area known as Desolation Sound. We were joined by her boyfriend for part of that time. After Hannah left our son, Brian, joined us for a week. In all we were away from our home marina for almost a month.

You might be wondering why anyone would go to an area called Desolation Sound for a holiday. I can assure you that it is far from desolate. The English name came from Captain George Vancouver. I guess he didn’t enjoy himself like we did. (See my Cetacean Tour post for more about the whales we saw.) In fact, when Brian joined us we hadn’t planned to return to Desolation Sound but after telling him about the things we saw and did and saying, “we’ll have to take you up there someday” we decided not to wait for someday and go then. We had beautiful warm weather and enjoyed swimming in fresh water lakes, eagle sightings and whales–lots of whales.

Since Desolation Sound we’ve been spending time in the Gulf Islands. We were joined for a week by a couple of our oldest and dearest friends. It was great to reconnect with them. The Gulf Islands are our home cruising grounds which makes it easy to explore their many safe anchorages. We know the area well but it’s fun to rediscover them with a new boat.

We’ve been very fortunate with good weather this month. We have yet to turn the heat on. (Yes, Cambria has a central heating system.) We plan to sail as much as possible in the coming months. The boat can handle sailing all winter but we may tire of long rainy days so we’ll see how it goes.

Lessons Learned

The to-do list is never done. There comes a time where we just need to go–to untie the lines and leave the dock. Along with this, it’s important to learn to live with the angst caused by an incomplete checklist. We’re not good at this but we’re learning.

We’re not good at making the time to update this site. We’ll try but if you want the most up-to-date info, please follow Rob’s Instagram feed.