Nanaimo

Old man and the sea, Nanaimo Harbour 

We tied up in the Nanaimo inner harbour early afternoon, which gave us lots of time for Emily to go for a bike ride, and to do laundry and a few other chores.  I had great hopes of getting caught up on this blog, but had some computer problems, that took a day to resolve.  We have also been struggling with the batteries on the boat, and I finally convinced the charter company that the problems were real, and the owner planned on coming up early Tuesday morning to investigate.

We decided that we would spend a full day here, so once the service call was completed, Sara, Emily and I headed off for the aquatic centre.  We had a good swim, and then headed to the Vault, a restaurant/ coffee shop we discovered the last time we were in town.

After lunch, I headed to the boat to finish my computer cleanup, and write a few emails related to Arctic Tern (orange boat).  When Sara and Emily got back, Sara helped me lay out the anchor chain on the dock, so I could properly mark its length in various places.  Knowing how much anchor chain is out is important for safe anchoring, and this boat, like many other charter boats, does not have it marked well.

As we were finishing up that chore, our neighbours on sailboat Nayeli invited us over fro a glass of wine.  Bill and Janet are one week into an all summer cruise up to Alaska from their port of Anacortes, and they shared locations of some of their "secret" anchorages with us.  I hope will have a chance to visit some of them later this trip.

I awoke to more mis-behaving batteries.  After a few more tests, and more communication with the owner, we decided to take the larger of the 2 battery charger out of service. We won't have great performance, but hopefully this will improve the pretty weak electrical performance we have had to date.

As I write this, Emily and Sara are off running a couple of last errands.  We are hoping to set off in the next hour or 2, bound (I think) for Lasqueti Island for tonight, and start working further north after that.