Thetis Island to Nanaimo via Dodd Narrows - July 8th – July 10th, 2008

We left Thetis Island to time our arrival at Dodd Narrows with slack tide. It is a very small pass, smaller in width than Deception Pass and has a dog leg shape so you don’t see oncoming boats. In order to make it safe for everyone, most boats pass only at slack times and announce their entrance to Dodd Narrows over channel 16, which is the channel everyone monitors. So for us it went something like “Securtie, Securtie, 42 foot motor vessel, NuMoon entering northbound Dodd Narrows, any concerned vessels respond on channel 16”. There was no response and most folks were northbound at this time, so off we went. The current through the pass is strong, but it is the narrowness and dog leg shape that make up the challenge. After going through the narrows we proceeded to Nanaimo. Nanaimo is a large city, one of the largest we have been in a while. They have 130,000 people in the city and a West Marine store. We jumped on our bikes and rode to the West Marine store. Our barbeque that we got at West Marine just under a year ago had stopped lighting with the striker and we were using a lighter. We saw one at West Marine, but did not know how we would make it back the three plus miles to the boat with a small barbeque. Well the sales person at West Marine Rachael, was simply wonderful. She offered to drive us back to the boat with the new barbeque, get the old one and bring us back and then we could ride our bikes back without concern. It was simply perfect. Rachael is a very charming young woman with three young children and a husband who recently suffered severe injuries in a motorcycle accident. However, Rachel is someone who seems very capable tackling all things life throws at her and she still remains a kind and generous person. The wind had picked up in the Straight of Georgia to 25 to 30 knots and it is a large body of water we would need to cross. We decided to sit out the two days that the wind was projected to blow. We could have made it and it would have been perfectly safe, but the chop is close together at around 6 to 8 feet and just plain old unpleasant. We had promised ourselves no more of that kind of travel, and we are holding to that promise. We walked the town and on the third day it was still windy, so we headed over to the worlds only floating pub called the “Dinghy Dock.” There is a small boat that runs every hour from Nanaimo to Protection Island where the “Dinghy Dock” pub is located. We were seated next to a group of women,L iza, Bon-Bon (Bonnie), Nina, Trudy and Josie. They were there celebrating Liza’s (Liza with a “Z” like Liza Minelli), birthday. Well one thing led to another and we ended up walking over to Josie’s house on Protection Island. She has lived there for sometime and she and her son have enjoyed the island life. Her house is wonderful, she says it is small, but it is comfortable, and seems to serve and fit her well. Nina’s sister was to come the next day and they were planning a party at Nina’s and Trudy’s house and they invited us to spend one more day in Nanaimo. They were all wonderful, joyous, women of our age, enjoying life. Josie gave us a tour of the island in her golf cart and we did donuts in a golf cart on the cement basketball court. I think golf carts have a ways to go to be high performance driving machines, but Josie’s does it all including “off roading”. It would have been nice to go to the party, but we had stayed three days in Nanaimo waiting on the weather and the next days was good cruising weather so off we went on our way to Smugglers Cove on the mainland of British Columbia.