Give us good friends, shore power, and open restaurants, and we’re happy

So Trevor and Brenda arrived from Winnipeg and we ate and we drank and we carried on until the wee hours the first night but didn’t really take a single blog-worthy photo.  Meh.  Plenty of time to make up for it, right?

We may or may not have been a bit bleary-eyed when we pulled out and headed for Secret Cove the next morning.  As has been the case for the past two months, of course, we constantly scanned the horizon for the whales everyone up here promised us.  Nada.  Again.  The Merry Island Lighthouse is scenic and all, but hardly a satisfactory substitute.

First stop with our guests?  Secret Cove.  The secret seems to be that the only restaurant for miles requires either a reservation or a prompt arrival at 5:00, neither of which worked for us.  It’s a fully functional marina halfway between Vancouver and Brenda’s sister in Powell River, however, which mostly is what we needed.

Aww.  Ain’t they cute?

Cute yes, but not as cute as the basking seal Dana bagged as we headed out.

Remember those photos—like the one on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV—of old people in Slovakia or Slovenia or some such place all stooped over carrying heavy loads of sticks?  If those old people were smart, they’d get a tugboat and a barge.

Then on in to Powell River.

We had low expectations, mostly because whenever we told someone we were heading to Powell River they invariably responded: “Why are you going to Powell River?  That place sucks.  Go to Lund.”  And we invariably defended our decision by blaming Brenda.

As we neared Beach Gardens Marina, we watched the marina webcam with increasing concern as the one space that might be big enough for Tumbleweed filled with other boats.  The one dockhand couldn’t be bothered to answer either his phone or the radio.  When a hotel maintenance guy finally called back, all he could do was assure us that they’d had sixty foot boats at the marina before, and he seemed confused when we suggested the obvious possibility that there had been fewer small boats clogging things up on those occasions.  But we scrounged up some courage and wedged ourselves in, which both the dockhand and the maintenance guy probably watched with smug satisfaction.

Later—after a bunch of boats left—we looked like cowards.

The other thing is that we couldn’t get shore power at Beach Gardens, even though the dockhand plugged in his 30A incandescent light bulb and assured us the problem was with our equipment.  Trevor worked some Canadian magic, however, and minutes later Brad showed up and re-wired the marina service panel.  Seriously.  He opened the panel and reconfigured some breakers, all without so much as, you know, asking someone at the marina for permission.  But as the sun set on the Malaspina Strait we had power, which is all that matters.

Turns out, all those people were wrong.  Powell River is kind of cool after all.  Powell River has a pirate statue.

Powell River has the Patricia Theatre, which either is the oldest continuously-running movie house in Canada, or is just the oldest in BC.  The Patricia was showing Inside Out 2, which we plan to see sometime when we’re not in Powell River.  We greatly enjoyed Inside Out.

Powell River has “The Hulks.”  The Hulks are a string of retired ships that—according to the sign—make up “what many believe to be the largest floating breakwater in the world.”  Not to be cynical, but most of those “many” believers possibly live right there in the town that offers The Hulks up as a tourist attraction.  Still cool though.  The first hulk was the USS Charleston, launched in Virginia in 1904, commissioned as a navy ship in 1905, then used for various tasks around the world until being sold to the Powell River Company in 1930.  The now-shuttered Powell River Company planted the breakwater to create a harbor it could use while churning out paper products on a massive scale.

Powell River has a pickleball court, surfaced with those plastic interlocking tiles that you see on sport courts that aren’t intended for pickleball.  It’s always great fun to play with Trevor and Brenda though, and the goofy bounces off the tiles provided a convenient excuse for Doug’s incompetence.  We took no photos.

Back at Beach Gardens, however, we took photos.

The familial lines that connect Brenda to Dan and Bonnie are too convoluted for us to understand, but things still worked out well.   Dan and Bonnie are awesome.  They invited us all over for an amazing meal and silly banter about the difference between an American gallon and a Canadian gallon and a sunset walk down to look for whales.

About that.  Bonnie said she saw and heard whales off their beach just the evening before.  Dan promised that we’d see whales the next day when we crossed back over the Strait of Georgia.  Dan also assured us that “There aren’t any mosquitoes here,” however, so while we were watching things that looked exactly like mosquitoes struggling to fly away while carrying litres of our blood we figured he was fibbing about the whales as well.*

While back on the boat after that amazing meal, we ran out with everyone else who was watching the moonrise.

Our guests needed to fly back to Winnipeg out of Comox and we needed to get back to Vancouver Island if we are to see The Butchart Gardens in a few days, so off we went on an unexpectedly gloomy day.

“Look!  There’s a blowhole spout,” shouted Brenda.  Sure enough, our first whale.  Unfortunately it was as far from the boat as the Canadian equivalent of a mile—and we were bouncing around at the Canadian equivalent of eight knots—but we managed to get a really crappy blurry photo just to prove it wasn’t our imagination.  Dan was right about the whales despite his fibs about the mosquitoes.

The skies cleared just as we rounded into Comox.

Comox is a town but also was an indigenous group in the area, although they spelled it K’ómoks.  Apparently the K’ómoks weren’t fazed by the increased difficulty of finding the “ó” on an iPad keyboard.

Sailors in Comox aren’t fazed by the big tide swing.  Just sit on the bottom until the water comes in.  The bonus is that twice a day you can walk into town for groceries and hammer your anchor down if you’re worried about it slipping.

Comox is a decent enough town, but we didn’t want to waste precious game-playing time so we popped into the brewpub for a quick lunch and missed most of whatever Comox has to offer.

Most importantly, Dana and Brenda and Trevor paid dearly for making Doug look foolish on the plastic pickleball court.

We remembered one last photo before our friends returned to Winnipegging** or whatever else they do in Manitoba.  Great fun while they were here.  Fortunately we have Cholla pickleball and a trip to Tennessee with them in our future.  Trevor even says he’ll get a number 16 jersey for the game against Kentucky.

Not much of interest on the run down to Nanoose Bay.  We did see a whale, but mostly it hid underwater.  And a derelict boat.

And the Chrome Island Lighthouse.

Typically, we start googling restaurants about three hours before arriving in a new place.  You’d think that after hundreds of disappointments we’d learn to look at hours of operation before deciding what we plan to order from the awesome menu.  Nope.  Fell for it again in Nanoose Bay.  One restaurant.  Closes at 1 pm on Mondays.  But Dan and Bonnie sent us off with a bag of huge local prawns that went quite well with garlic butter and Old Bay, so it all worked out for the good guys.  That’s about all there was to our short stay.

Today took us back through Dodd Narrows, which we hit at slack only because we wisely factored in our inability to understand the tidal currents and left Nanoose Bay early.  Dozens of other boats decided to ignore etiquette and crowd through all willy-nilly from both sides, making it less fun than if, say, they’d all stayed home.

In our last post, we listed Pamela Anderson—famous for her roles as a Playboy Playmate, a lifeguard, and Tommy Lee’s sex tape partner—as a famous Vancouverite.  Our friend Mary on Feisty Lady follows the blog and is much smarter than us, however, and correctly clarified that although Anderson may have lived in Vancouver, she was born in Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island.  In 2019 she (meaning Pamela Anderson, not Mary on Feisty Lady) moved back to the property in Ladysmith she bought from her grandparents, all of that being handy information when you’re heading to Ladysmith.  The point is, her remodeled house is hidden behind trees, but here’s her new dock, the permit for which was approved over many objections.

Although we arrived to more power pedestal funny business at the marina, this time there was space for us to pull forward.  The Greenline 48 that rolled in after us and had to take the spot we vacated may have been screwed, but we had power, which is all that matters.

Ladysmith originally was a coal town, and by “originally” we mean after the coal company ran off the indigenous tribes who had lived here for centuries.  The mine owner supposedly was so overjoyed when the 1899 siege at South Africa’s Ladysmith ended that he stole the name.  (On a tangentially-related note, Breaker Morant is a grossly-underappreciated movie.)

In one of our posts when we were in Quebec, we noted the province’s ubiquitous motto “je me souviens,” meaning “I remember.”  As in “I remember what those English bastards did to us.”  Ladysmith also remembers.  As in “We remember what we did to those natives when they had coal we wanted.”  So basically the opposite.

Anyway—as often seems to happen with mining towns—the mines closed, the trains stopped coming, and destitution plagued the place until a big revitalization effort.  At least we assume the trains stopped coming.

While Ladysmith indeed seems to have turned the corner and now counts a C-list actress among its residents, we can’t give it five stars until the best restaurants start operating on Mondays and Tuesdays.  Grrrr.  But we ended up at a quirky pizza joint in one of those 1903 coal-mine era houses, so we didn’t starve.

Tomorrow off to Montague Harbour on Galiano Island.

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* Canadian mosquitoes carry blood by the litres.  American mosquitoes carry blood by the quarts.  Canadian mosquitoes who come across the border use liters, “liters” being the correct spelling and all.

** Which reminds us of a joke . . .