Vancouver High Life

The absolutely incredible weather streak we have been enjoying is miraculously continuing and welcomed us into Vancouver. We enjoyed a most fantastic sail from Galiano Island across the Strait of Georgia. We had to wake up at 4:45 am to catch Porlier Pass at slack tide. The tides in this part of the world are HUGE. A big tide in Vancouver is about 14′ high. When that amount of water has to pass in a narrow constriction between two land masses, serious and very dangerous rapids occur. Hence it is a requirement for all vessels to catch these rapids at slack tide.

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Porlier Pass at Slack Tide. A few hours later this will be a roiling and boiling body of water with whirlpools and all. Not a good place to be.

Upon crossing the Strait we bee-lined it to Wreck Beach, the local “anything-goes-nudist-hippy-party-only-on-the-West-Coast” beach attached to the University of British Columbia Campus (I’m not making this up!!) where we stepped off our dinghy wearing nothing but our Captain hats and sandals. Vancouver, we are back!!

It felt really special to be arriving in our home City, on our boat, in one piece, with some good sea miles under our belt. No sooner had we crossed under the Burrard St Bridge and yelled “We are home!” that we got napalmed by seagull poo all over ourselves, the cockpit and even our drinks! Sigh…

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Crossing Strait of Georgia with light NW wind. Destination Wreck Beach!

It’s funny how things go sometimes. Throughout our major winter push, we kept the dream alive by imagining what our week in Vancouver would be like. “We’ll be tourists in our own town”!, “We’ll go to concerts and 3rd beach drum circle!”, “We’ll sleep in and do whatever we want!”… Ya right…

We did have a great time in Vancouver but in the end, I had some business affairs to attend to, we had some shopping to do for boat parts and projects to finish off before we left destination North. Mainly we hosted friends and family on Leela pretty much every single day or evening and sometimes both. We are extremely lucky to have such a great group of friends and family and it was a pleasure to share the mega project we embarked on with some of them during our short stay. We ended up spending 7 days anchored in False Creek. It was fun, it was tiring. We did not go and see concerts, or sleep in as we wanted. We shared our Love for Leela and made sure she was ready for the next push North, where well-stocked marine stores will be fewer and far between. Of special mention was the fact that we were anchored for the week next to our new boating friends Sarah and Dylan who own a beautiful Alajuelah 38 named Arabesque. We are sad we can’t cruise with them this summer but they are working on getting their boat in A+ condition which will serve them well for their planned cruise.

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Our home for one week. Not a bad place to be.
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My friend Rob from Kelowna, BC. An experienced racing sailor with cruising dreams of his own. When he found out we purchased Leela he made a 5h drive trip each way to spend a day aboard Leela. We were rewarded with big winds and intense sailing.

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1 Response
  1. Peter A. Green

    Every photo of Leela powering under sail makes my heart ‘skip a beat’…… you seem to have her in ‘tip-top’ shape, though I smile when you say that you have to go to every chandlery to get stuff for boat!

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