Canadian Gulf Islands to the BC mainland, July 4th-7th

From Prevost Island, we headed to Clam bay, which is a wide open anchorage and a good spot to set up for crossing the Strait of Georgia to the BC mainland.

 

Lotta wood chips

One neat feature of this anchorage is “The Cut” which is a channel that was dug out in the early 1900’s to connect Clam Bay to Telegraph Harbour. The channel hasn’t been maintained but is still passable “most of the time” by small boat or dinghy. We waited for the tide to start coming back up from a low-low before heading through with our dinghy, but still ended up getting stuck (along with some locals who had been out fishing on our side of the Cut). The tide was coming in really fast, so it was just a matter of floating along until we hit bottom, waiting a few minutes for the water to rise, then repeating- about a dozen times…

We got to the other side eventually and found the reward for our perseverance in the form of pizza and ice cream at Telegraph Harbor.

From Clam Bay, we set out the next morning to catch slack water at Porlier Pass, then out into the Strait of Georgia to cross over to the mainland. The weather was fine, with light following winds and calm seas.

We anchored in Buccaneer bay for the night, then set a course for a nice anchorage at hardy Island that we remembered from our last trip through here. On the way, we made a stop at Pender Harbour at tied up at the Municipal dock for a few hours for some re-provisioning, lunch, internet, and a very successful stop at the local thrift store ($3 Canadian for two nice pairs of boat slippers!).

Pender harbor to Hardy Island to Desolation Sound (from Sue):

After supplying up at Pender Harbour, we headed over to Hardy Island for the night. Found a peaceful anchorage where we lounged outside on the deck, listened to music and made dinner.

Then we headed up to Prideaux Haven in Desolation Sound. This was one of our favorite spots last time and we wanted to make a point of going back.

Aside from the beautiful scenery and (usually) sunny location, its a good spot for prawns. Oh yeah, definitely wanted to go back there. On the way into our anchorage we dropped our prawn pot off before heading in. I got very excited when I noticed one of the boats in the anchorage was the same as one of the reference books we’ve been using. Wow, the author was here – very cool. Not to mention he had a unique looking boat.

Unfortunately, soon after we anchored, they picked up and left before we had a chance to go over and say hi. In looking closer at the boat as it left we saw it had a different name, so it probably had been sold and wasn’t the author anyway.  Did take a dingy ride around and saw lots of jelly fish and a pileated woodpecker. Not to mention a couple of ravens having a shrieking contest – damn those birds are loud.

We set the Prawn Trap out for the night by Mary Islands just outside the anchorage and had a peaceful night on the hook.