Princess Louisa or Bust

Where are we going? The only goal is to hang out for a bit at the mythical Chatterbox Falls in Princess Louisa Inlet. We say “mythical” because we attempted to visit in the snowy January 2007 but were iced in for 5 days just past the rapids but prior to Macdonald Island and never saw the falls themselves. That’s a good story for a later post.

In the here and now (or close), we left Victoria and our winter slip on the last day of the month and I began moving the boat slowly North during the day while Carol finished his last week of winter part-time work. We spent two nights at the Royal Victoria Yacht Club and another two nights at the Sidney North Saanich Yacht Club, which incidentally is shortened to SNSYC and so I always misread it as NSYNC. For the most part, no matter how fancy, the yacht clubs have been very welcoming when we visit. No surprise I guess because they are, after all, boaters.

In particular, the RVYC has been fun to visit because they have a energetic racing fleet of all ages and it seems that many of their boats go out on a regular basis, in all kinds of weather. The RVYC does not seem to be a club full of dock queens. One day when we were coming in to escape a westerly gale, their long distance racing fleet was headed out to do laps in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

From SNSYC we sailed up to Montague where we were spotted by a fellow boater on the ferry, the Coastal Celebration. We spent 3 nights at Montague Harbor. Montague is nice, particularly when there are light winds overnight and you can anchor on the North side of the park. Alas, the winds were blustery and we were in the nearly deserted main harbor to escape them. We spent the days doing boat work, relaxing, dreaming of future anchorages and by the end were itching to move on.