Last night while I was tucking Holly into bed she asked me: “Where are we going to be after breakfast?” She was referring to the fact that nearly every morning for the past week she’s woken up while we’ve been underway and eaten her breakfast in the cockpit while we’ve made our way to someplace new.
Michael and I have been getting up at the crack of dawn each morning to travel north. It’s definitely not my preferred hour of waking but the tides are calling the shots. We’ve been riding the ebb north, through rapids and channels 600 feet deep flanked by peaks thousands of feet tall, making our way to the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Weather permitting, we’ll round Cape Scott this weekend and point our bow south for a good long time.
While we thought that sailing these long stretches (well, truth be told, motoring) would be tedious we’ve all quickly fallen into a comfortable routine. Michael and I wake with the sunrise, have a cup of coffee, haul anchor, then get underway. We get a few hours of traveling in before the girls wake (usually around 9 – the engine is a wonderful white noise generator!) The girls have breakfast and play in the cockpit with us or down below for a few hours and we usually reach our next anchorage by noon and have the afternoon to play and explore. We’ve swam in Pender Harbour, eaten ice-cream in the sunshine in Squirrel Cove in Desolation Sound, hiked around Big Bay singing loudly in case any bears were nearby, visited the 100+ year old store/post office (now museum) in Port Neville and now we are in Alert Bay absorbing thousands of years of Northwest Native culture and history.
Michael and I have been savoring this trip down memory lane. We’ve sailed this way three times now and it’s even more magnificent up here than we remember. Along the way, we came to see it was necessary for us to make this trip around the island after all. We have been getting used to our boat and her routines, learning to work together onboard again, and the girls have been learning what it means to sail full time. We are challenged each and every day by wind, weather, rocks, tides, currents, emotions.
Most of all, each day is absolutely filled with wonder, as we hoped it would be.
