Inspired by our last trip to a small cove where I wanted to anchor the boat with a stern tie at high tide. I wanted to make sure the boat was beyond the low tide line the next morning. Not having any tools on a small boat this was mostly guesswork with the anchor rhode which is not yet marked (future projects).
I found that Steveston marine had 7lbs lead-line weights on sale at the end of the season. So I got to work on making a lead line. Being in Canada I decided to make the markings metric instead of the traditional fathoms.
1 meter, 11 meters, 21 meters One strip of leather 2 meters, 12 meters, 22 meters Two strips of leather 3 meters, 13 meters, 23 meters Blue bunting 4 meters, 14 meters, 24 meters Green and white bunting 5 meters, 15 meters, 25 meters White bunting 6 meters, 16 meters, 26 meters Green bunting 7 meters, 17 meters, 27 meters Red bunting 8 meters, 18 meters, 28 meters Blue and white bunting 9 meters, 19 meters, 29 meters Red and white bunting
We shall see if this logic gets internalized over time. Most of the time I think I will be sounding in less than 10 metres. My line is 30m long and I may also use it before putting out my crab trap.
Last summer’s longer cruise and additional time in the water started to show some new cracks in the enamel paint I used on the hull, mostly below the waterline. I started to think that after five years it might be time to update the bottom paint. My debate was, do i just sand the bottom and lightly scrape the cracks and just re-apply the existing enamel bottom paint… that would have been the easy option and I would likely have been done in a weekend of work.
I however was tempted to install a proper hard bottom paint that would have an epoxy primer and be more resilient to the trailer and spending more time in the water. I bought a couple quarts of VC Offshore and Interlux epoxy primer. This it turns out, was the longer and harder option as I had to remove all the alkyd enamel paint and primer before applying the new epoxy primer.
Propping up the hull by myself is a feasible and I have almost full access without having to flip the hull.
I started out with a scraper and a heat gun which felt effective at removing the pain, but quickly got old.
The first day of scraping
I quickly realized that although it was good, there was still a fair amount of primer left on the surface. I decided to get some paint stripper to help remove the primer and have a fully clean bottom to be able to put on the two part expoxy primer that needed everything removed.
Day two of scraping
Then I moved the boat in the hangar hoping to quickly have all the primer removal done with the paint stripper. But as I got into it, my attention to detail increased and I ended up spending a second weekend just preparing the hull.
Feeling pretty good about the progress
I then took the opportunity to put a little more expoxy filler in the fillets between each strake. The idea was that it would be easier to paint and I would also contribute to a slightly faster hull.
I used System Three epoxy fairing compound
Then a final prep of the hull after some sanding with acetone to remove any oils or blush that might make it harder for the epoxy primer to stick.
The first coat of primer was done on Sunday evening at sunset. Fortunately the days were warm and there was little chance of dew overnight.
The next day after work I came by and added a second coat of epoxy primer, this time with a white colour that made it easier to see where I was putting it on the grey primer layer before.
And then all week I came back every day after work to add another layer of VC Offshore bottom paint.
The results are pretty nice and I hope will last quite some time. I was finished on Friday night and Saturday morning I had to roll the boat back down and onto the trailer.
In a couple hours I had the boat all rigged and loaded with gear and ready for a weekend trip across to Howe Sound with my family.
We launched on a beautiful late August day from the Jericho Sailing Centre.
In a couple hours we were at Passage Island to visit a friend who has recently purchased a property there. The access is somewhat adventurous.
After a visit for a couple hours we then crossed over to our BC Marine Trails camp spot.
Using my inflatable paddle board I was able to anchor with a stern-tie far enough to be sure to be still in the water at next morning’s low tide.
The boat looked pretty good just at the mouth of the cove. The bottom is not excellent for anchoring but with the stern tie providing a constant pressure from one direction, I felt pretty confident.
By sunset we had our tent set up on one of the tent pads and dinner was cooking. It felt pretty cool to be able to get out of the city for camping by dinghy and be in a place that although has capacity for a few more tents, did not have a soul this weekend.
The next morning I found the boat exactly where we had left it with a falling tide.
The south-east orientation of the site meant that I was able to lay out the solar panels to re-charge the battery for the electric outboard which we had used a little bit in the approach to Passage island where the winds tend to do funky things around point Atkinson where the Howe Sound and Georgia Strait winds are sometimes at cross purposes.
Just at the head of the beach in the cove there is a small stream coming down in a little “V” in the rock which we used to have a nice fresh water shower after a dip in the ocean.
At the lowest tide near noon, we were able to practically ferry all the camping gear by foot or stacked on the paddle board. I then just had to coil up the stern tie and we were able to sail off the anchor.
On the way home we had a really beautiful sail with a solid thermal breeze that gave us a nice broad reach all the way back to Jericho.
Passed by all the anchored tankers
This was a fantastic way to close out August and get a nice overnight sail from Vancouver back to Vancouver. I am hoping to do this again and connect more dots along the Howe Sound Marine Trail.
This winter I had a good list of things I wanted to do to improve the boat autonomy this summer.
#1 glue together my take apart scarf 12′ oars. By planing down the scarf a little, I was able to shorten the oars to 11’6″ (350cm).
#2 make a second set of 295cm oars that fit between the bulkheads on the floor. These I am making out of reclaimed windsurfing masts. The blades are vacuum bagged carbon and fibreglass over XTPS foam that I shaped into a simple oar blade.
The vacuum bag is a standard large bag used for storing woollens out of reach from mites. It works great as a ready-made vacuum bag for epoxy work. The only thing I learned after the fact was that it is worth adding an absorbent layer between the peel-ply and the bag. This will help pull more epoxy out of the layup, help with avoiding the wrinkles caused by the plastic.
This trip really saw An Aod Oolichan come into its own. Going into tiny bays and anchorages, breaching to drop off camping gear, carrying more than five days of drinking and cooking water and doing nice long passages under sail.
One of the many little bays on the south side of Thormanby
Our plan was to set out from Halfmoon Bay and explore Thormanby and then the Jedidiah marine park and the Simpson marine park Islands nestled between Texeda and Lasquiti in the middle of Georgia Strait a little more than 40 nautical miles north of Vancouver. No matter where you come from there is a crossing of at least 10 to 15 miles to get there. That relative remoteness is what attracts me to this place.
right as the front of the ferry
Wednesday August 23 was busy at the Horseshoe bay ferry terminal. After getting the boat ready for travel and hitched to the car we were at the ferry at noon… and were the first car not to make it on the 4:15 pm ferry. So we had to wait until six to cross over to Langdale. This setback our launch to 7pm when we arrived at Coopers Green boat launch. By the time the boat was rigged and the car and trailer was parked in a legal overnight spot it was 8pm which is also sunset.
So with my GPS in hand and a nice still night we motored out 2 miles out to Thormanby to arrive and navigate our beaching in total darkness.
We were off and the next four days would allow us to explore the middle section of Georgia Straight and some of the northern Gulf Islands.
In the morning I was happy to see that my new 4kg Rocna Vulcan anchor had found a way to nestle itself in the large beach pebble. Definately one of the harder substrates for an anchor to be effective in. If I’d set just a little further out their was good mud and sand.
The boat settled down on the pebbles perfectly, I felt lucky as a little further out there was a bit of a minefield of boulders on the beach and the drying out would have been a little more fraught. Fortunately the morning was very calm and this particular bay is nice and sheltered. The anchor buddy really was handy in this kind of anchoring context, allowing us to quickly bring the boat to shore if needed.
Nice hike out to Walter Mathers memorial lake
We then set out in a nice NW breeze with two reefs in the main to go towards our next destination of Jedediah Island.
About two thirds of the way there, the wind started to lighten up and we were able to shake out the reef and and get from the north end of Thormanby to Lasquiti on one tack.
Arriving into the channel to our anchorage there was a big junk anchored right at the entrance and for a moment I thought we were going to get a close visit of China Cloud.
It was however a 45 foot steel junk built in east Sooke. It was on it’s maiden journey to get its mainsail being made in Quadra.
The tides aligned perfectly and our arrival was at high tide.
This was a wonderful setup for making dinner.
The next day on our walk through Jedediah we met the local feral sheep
This amazing south facing bay has what appears to be decades and decades of winter storm driftwood.
Day 3 there was a southeasterly we did a nice day sail out to Jervis island with a fast down wind sail under full sail.
The sail back up was upwind and felt much more comfortable under two reefs.
Day 4 we hiked up to mount Gibraltar with a full view of the whole southern strait obscured by forest fire smoke,
and a close encounter with the goats of the island
After the hike we set out in 12-14 knots with a nice NW wind to push us out Sabine Channel into the strait and back to Thormanby
The final treat was a close encounter with a humpback whale just off of Bertha Island on the south west tip of Thormanby.
One last night of camping before we pulled the boat up on Sunday and drove back to Vancouver.
As is our tradition, we plan a group campsite booking at Saysutchun once a summer, either on Canada day or Labour day long weekend.
This year we chose to kick off the summer season with camping at Saysutchun. The weather forecast was solid and amazingly we had a South Easterly forecast for Thursday.
My sister was my crew and the rest of the family took the bus and ferry over. Our plan was to meet up with my friend Justin on Shamrock in the strait as he was leaving from mosquito Creek marina in Burrard inlet. We indeed had a good SE from Vancouver to Newcastle for 2/3 of the way and and even put in a couple reefs for the early part of the crossing. The last 10 miles were light for which I used my electric motor. We found Shamrock which is a 26′ keel boat with a much smaller sail area to whetted surface ratio than An Aod Oolichan. The had at times used over 1000W on their electric motor to motor sail to keep up with us. Along the way we were treated by a nice visit of Humpback whales with whale watching boat in tow. Total trip time 8h55 min .
We had a wonderful stay on the island and I kept the boat anchored at Brownie Bay. Except on the eve of the departure I moved it to the docks so that we could leave even at low tide and it was easier to load the boat.
However the way back for my brother in law and I on Monday had a strong wind warning of NW winds against tide from 11:30am onwards. So I stayed an extra night and set out at 10am on Tuesday in 18-23 knots with all three reefs in the main. It was a beat in short chop to get around the north end of Gabriola, but after that we had a fun broad reach to Vancouver. Half the time it was wind with a falling tide. With the swell we started to surf and peak on these boats should be going. The rest of the time we were cruising at 5.5 to 6 knots until the wind died and we had to shake out all the reefs.Â
I just motored for 45min and caught the thermal at the entrance to Burrard inlet and sailed all the way in. Total trip time 7h05 minutes.
It is a big exposed crossing and so far the wind has slackened somewhere along the way. It is nice to know the boats can do it but I certainly want to continue to respect the strait. I’d much rather sail for 3 to 4 hours and get somewhere fun to shake out the legs. My kids are not really into the super long crossings either. So the next trips will be looking for shorter legs and changing up the camping locations.
As you can imagine, once you’ve crossed the straight of Georgia and it went so well there is both a sense of accomplishment and trepidation as now I have to do it one more time. Even though I’ve done it dozens of times on different sailboats of various sizes from 21′ to 130′ this 19.5′ Caledonia yawl is by far the smallest one. Without a keel and with only oars and a 1276Wh battery the prospect of making it across in a reasonable time does make me a little anxious.
The evening before looked like this and so with a forecast of light to moderate north westerlies building in the late afternoon, I felt somewhat confident of the prospect of a good crossing.
The boat was anchored in Brownie bay with a big low tide at 8am which I knew would dry out the boat and so we would be able to carry out all our stuff directly from the group camp site to the boat and not have to bring the boar around to the marine park dock.
We then waited for the tide to float the boat and with only a few inches of water we were able to walk it out to deeper waters at 11am while our families set off to catch the BC Ferry from Departure bay to Horseshoe bay. I had a new crew for the sail home with my friend Patrice and my brother-in-law Lucas. We set off with a solid 10-12 knot NW breeze and lots of sunscreen with zinc oxide.
The boat was a bit lighter than on the way back and for an hour we were making great time averaging just over five knots.
But soon as we went past entrance island and it’s beautiful lighthouse we saw that the light part of the forecast was really going to take over. We started to motor-sail to keep the boat moving at at least 3 knots and set up the solar panels to recharge the battery as we went along. This worked quite well as we moved them around to stay in the sun.
The MPPT charger is a bit hard to read as it’s refresh rate seems to match the shutter speed of the digital camera but you can see it was stepping up an input of 19.2V to 48V for an input of 1.8 Amps. This was with just two panels out. We then managed to find a spot for a third 50W panel on deck. My plan is eventually to have all the panels lay flat on an inflatable paddle board that I tow behind the boat so that all four 50W panels can get shade-free sunlight with minimal resistance from the paddle board.
Nevertheless with 25 nautical miles to go and very little wind, it was still a question if the 1276Wh battery would take us far enough to catch a breeze or we would be left rowing at the end of the crossing. We kept optimizing the motor output to keep it around 250W-300W which seems to move the boat easily over 3knots and then would feather it back if we caught a little bit of breeze.
As we approached the shipping lane to the NW of Point Grey we caught the thermal sea breeze that helped to pull us towards English bay. There were a few moments of doing some time on distance calculations to figure out what the best course was as we had to navigate one freighter and one tug with barge while crossing the shipping lanes. I was very happy to have a handheld VHF radio and a full sized Davis collapsible radar reflector hauled up on a flag pole to the top of the mizzen mast. Which hopefully made this little wood dinghy much more visible on the water.
As the sun set the sea breeze started to slacken and we eeked out every last ray of sunshine to charge the battery by holding the panels up to near vertical until there was no free energy left to harvest.
After 9 hours on the water with most of it motoring it was amazing how relaxed and comfortable the crossing had been. The electric motor was so quiet that we did not feel like it had been a tiring day at all.
That said, the motor readout was letting us know that at the current rate we had just 40 minutes of run-time left and there was still over three miles to go from the bell buoy at the entrance to Burrard Inlet.
It was fun to have a visit from the Jericho Sailing Centre’s rescue boat as they did their evening sweep of the bay. We switched on the portable running lights and let them know we would be alright making it back to the club under our own steam.
A beautiful twilight lingered long enough for us to enjoy the return to familiar waters.
As we got within sight of the Jericho Sailing Centre we had just 20 minutes of run-time on the battery left. It felt like such a fun accomplishment to stretch the capacity for the 1276Wh battery to more than 7 hours of run-time to do this 30 nautical mile crossing.
Luckily the centre has great lights in the compound which made taking all the gear out and putting the boat to bed a relatively easy task.
For the next four days we did little day trips around Protection Island and out to Kanaka Bay on Saysutchun.
The boat stayed comfortably at anchor in Brownie bay at the north east end of the camping area on nice sand between two sandstone rock groins. The tides were nice and big and so the boat would lay on the sand each morning for a few hours. This is how I was able to go and walk out to the anchor and see exactly how it lay. It is fishermans with folding flukes which allows it to pack up into a nice small package aboard. I also have a Fortress FX-7 4lbs anchor but I find it much more involved to take apart and so my tendency is to keep it as the backup as it is quite cumbersome on a small boat when it is put together. I’ve been eyeing the Mantus M2 8lbs anchor as it looks to be quick to take apart and would stow away nicely. It is just a little expensive and not that easy to source in Canada.
The boat in the morning at anchor looking back towards the camping area of Saysutchun. Note that there is a no anchoring area that protects eel grass for half the channel between Saysutchun and Protection island. I’m anchored further out where there is mostly just sand and less eel grass.
Each morning, I could not help but go out to take pictures of the boat at sunrise as it was such a nice light.
This one really captures the feeling of a languishing summer morning.
I also took the time to recharge the ePropulsion battery with my solar panels. On the way over we had only motored a little to get out of English bay and then near the end to do the last few miles to the Saysutchun dock. So it only took a few hours to top off the battery.
This long weekend trip was touch and go as I watched the weather window. The plan was to take the 19.5′ Caledonia Yawl An Aod Oolichan across Georgia Strait from Vancouver to Nanaimo a distance of 30 nautical miles with the whole distance in an open stretch of sea with quite a bit of fetch if the winds really pick up.
Windy forecast for the departure day
After a little bit of light winds in English bay because the the land-shadow, true to the forecast the SE breeze did settle in all day at about 12-15 knots.
Once past Point Grey the wind was strong enough that as a precaution i put in one reef in the main and we cruised along comfortably at 5.5 knots and quickly saw the city fade into the horizon.
Laden with food, camping gear and two of my siblings as crew we really felt the boat hold a steady movement.
It was a warm day and the boat is quite dry, but there was still an occasional wave that came broadside and a good splash on the front quarter.
By mid-day we were on a healthy broad reach, we’d shaken out the reef and were still doing good speed in the middle of the strait feeling good that we’d arrive in Saysutchun before sunset.
The south easterly held all the way past entrance island to the norther tip of Galiano by the Malaspina galleries and then it started to shut down.
Vancouver is now out of sight
We started up the electric motor with Protection and Saysutchun islands in sight.
Our welcome party (who had taken BC Ferries) was already there waiting at the campsite.
Once unloaded I took it back out to anchor at Brownie Bay as we camped on the island for the next five days.
Not everything works straight out of the box so to speak. Especially if you built the box… Since launching the centerboard has been getting harder and harder to move. Last year after launch I removed it and sanded off the paint on the sides to make it a bit thinner in the hope that it would be sufficient. But on our latest trip last weekend I found it would not go down and we tipped the boat over and although with the leverage of the tip of the centreboard I could slide it down, it was clear that there wasn’t enough space at the opening.
So I decided that I will remove the centerboard and tip the boat over to find a way of filing the centerboard slot a little wider.
Sliding off trailer onto rollers
I tried to see if I could do it all on my own. So I figured it was possible with the beach rollers that are really effective.
I then tipped it over ont a foam mat to protect the rail and used blocks to hold it up by the bilge stringer. This allowed me to work at eye level at the keel slot and will be a good system for the time I need to repaint the underside of the hull.
What I found, was that the centreboard well was fine, but it was at the keel wood that things got narrower and one side for some reason was toed in so it was not parallel with the centerboard well.
I then used a Japanese shinto rasp to file down the section that toed in so that it was parallel with the centerboard well and provided ample room for the centerboard to slide down.
I then sanded it and applied a layer of epoxy with a little graphite powder to seal it back up. It is a hard spot to get to so hopefully this repair will last a long time.
Projects, images, and ideas for my little piece of the internet
