Show (and Tell) Us About Your Pandemic Day-Sailing
Prompted (or perhaps goaded) by Tom Pamperin’s thread wondering where all the sail and oar cruising threads are, I thought I’d better write something. I didn’t think a day-sail really qualified for its own entire small boat cruising thread, but, in these pandemic times, perhaps it qualifies for its own post, at least. Then I thought - why not cast the net to see what others are doing for day-sailing amusement? I’ll kick off the thread with one of mine:
I had built a new rudder blade for Fire-Drake over the winter but had not had a chance to try it out, as the Coast Guard here had been discouraging people from going out on the water while the COVID case load was high. They were worried about having to rescue boaters that potentially had COVID, I guess. Come June, though, the COVID numbers had dropped way off here in British Columbia. After a persistently wet and cool spring, there was a prospect of a nice day in late June, so I gathered up all the bits needed for a day on the water and trailered Fire-Drake, complete with new rudder blade, down to the nearest boat ramp to me in Victoria, BC, at Cattle Point in Oak Bay, a tony suburb.
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We are extremely fortunate in Victoria to be on the doorstep of some terrific cruising grounds - the San Juans to the east, the Gulf Islands and the entire Inside Passage to the immediate north. One of the overlooked gems, however, is Discovery Island Provincial Marine Park just off Oak Bay.
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Discovery Island is only a couple of nautical miles from a busy beach and residential area, but once around the corner of the southwest point of the island, you can’t see or hear the city. What you do see is the wide open east entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the entrance to Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains in Washington State. On a clear day, such as I had, you can even see Mt. Rainier, Seattle’s resident volcano, over 100 miles away.
It was dead flat calm when I set out, and I rowed the whole distance from the launch ramp to the beach on Discovery, about 3 nautical miles. I was a little out of shape so it took me about an hour and a half, but I was in no hurry so this was of no consequence. When I arrived, I found that I had the beach and park to myself, an unusual occurrence in the summer.
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There is a kayak camping area in a meadow just behind the beach and I had a pleasant wander about, seeing lots of Tree Swallows working the air for insects and Goldfinches working the grasses.
I also spotted flowers that were new to me, Brodiaea, a type of lily. I was able to identify it with the aid of a cool app that I had loaded onto my phone this spring: iNaturalist. The app uses AI, I think, to identify what you have taken a picture of and offers you a choice of what it thinks it might be. You pick the best match and upload it, whereupon others who know more than you can chime in to let you know whether you’ve got it right. It’s been great fun to use all spring and I’ve learned about all sorts of local plants that I couldn’t previously identify. But I digress.
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The Strait of Juan de Fuca is a busy place for shipping, as most large vessel traffic headed for Seattle and Vancouver pass by, so ship-watching from Discovery Island is usually interesting. You never know what you will see. While eating my lunch, a 40-ish foot Uniflite power boat came by, just off the island, headed west, towing this boat, the Callie Belle.
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After lazing about for a bit after lunch, I headed back. By this time, the flood tide had set in and it was a tough 20 minutes of rowing flat out to get round the point against it, to where it was assisting me. I resigned myself to rowing the whole way back when a breeze came up and I raised sail. The breeze held for about an hour. This was long enough to get me back to the ramp and also to try out the new rudder on various points of sail.
Near the ramp was the Callie Belle, anchored just off the beach. I sailed round her to have a closer look and was not impressed with what I saw – lots of bits of wood missing from the superstructure, every plank fastener weeping rust. Still, I couldn’t hear a pump going and she didn’t appear to be sinking. I found out later the boat had been purchased from somewhere in Seattle by a local Victoria man who thinks it is a viable restoration project. Good luck to him, I say.
The breeze died away and late afternoon saw me hauling Fire-Drake and snugging her down on the trailer – a satisfactory end to a fine day on the water.
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Originally Posted by WI-Tom
