All Who Wander Are Not Lost

 I got the title for this blog from a long time friend and business partner.  He found a ring with this saying in latin and thought immediately of Cathy and I.  We've been out sailing for the past 3 1/2 weeks and it both feels like a long time and no time at all.  We live on a boat, regardless of where the boat is, it's still home.  We wander around on the boat, spend time where in different anchorages as we like and change our plans as we need to. 

While we were in the Octopus Islands, we visited the "boaters shack" on one of the private islands.  A few years ago we carved Cygnet into a piece of reclaimed wood from a boat project and hung it up in the shack, along with literally hundreds of other boat plaques from over the years.  Each year since, we add the date we visited to the plaque.

The Boaters Shack in Octopus Islands

We left the Octopus Islands last Friday en-route to Rebecca Spit.  The plan was to stay a few nights there, maybe go into the marina and do laundry and generally make that anchorage home for a week or so.  We looked at the forecast while we motored down in light winds and it was not great.  The NW winds were expected to build to 30 knots by Monday/Tuesday and Rebecca Spit is not a great anchorage in the NW wind.  So Friday we dropped the anchor, launched the dinghy and headed into Heriot Bay to walk up to the grocery store to get some fresh food.  Back to the boat with a good load of groceries and after a easy Friday night meal (I cook and I choose Friday's dinner) we made a plan to go to Prideaux Haven in Desolation Sound the next day.  Of course there was no wind so we motored south around the bottom end of Cortez Is.  I decided to give a call out on the VHF for friends that we expected to heading north from Nanaimo.  As it turns out, they were only about 5 miles away and heading for Squirrel Cove, so we changed out plans and headed back to Squirrel to meet up with them.  We first met Bob and Sue on "My Wind Song" in marina in Monterey California in 2007 when we were sailing south on Tarun.  Sue was walking down the dock ahead of us with shopping bags from our Vancouver Island grocery chain "Thrifty's" so we caught up with her and and Bob.  We've connected a few times since then, on land, but oddly enough never on the water in BC so it was quite cool to share an anchorage with them for a couple of nights.