May 1, 2022 – Sunday - Bellevue to Sidney

Let’s get ready to rumble! Yes, the rumble of the 4 diesel engines that fired up at 7AM this morning, as “Esperança” and “Lucky Dog” came to life. I am sure everyone on Meydenbauer Bay appreciated that on their peaceful Sunday morning. We are heading for Friday or Roche Harbor today with the goal of crossing into Canada tomorrow and clearing at Van Isle. Weather and water are supposed to be good today so we are expecting a peaceful crossing. Upon exiting the locks in Seattle, I was in the tender and John was driving the big boat through. I could hear this ever-growing ruckus over the sound of the engines and came upon about 6 sea lions balancing on a section of dock  off to one side of the channel. When one would heft up onto the dock it would roll to one side and then someone would fall off resulting in all of them barking at the offender. This continued for a few rounds and brought a big smile to my morning, it was absolutely hilarious and so wished I had a video! I was reminded of the cardinal rule of boating “never leave on the tender without a camera and binoculars.”  My mini crises so far are as follows: 1) I cannot for the life of me find the thingy that holds the espresso grounds on my espresso maker. Luckily, we have redundancy onboard with a combination Keurig/coffee maker otherwise this crew member would go mutinous (otherwise known as a hissy fit) without coffee; and, 2) I seem to have failed to provision my toiletries in that I have no saline solution onboard or shampoo/hair products. I guess if that’s the worst thing to happen, so be it. On the plus side, I have spent hours on my dinner menus as I will have lots of time to be creative in the galley. Similarly, I have spent a lot of time preparing for shrimping and crabbing and at this moment have 6 beautiful frozen bait cylinders in the freezer that will slip right into my shrimp bait barrels. Shannon and I are fierce shellfish hunter/gatherers, and good partners in that endeavor. I am glad she now believes in boots and rubber rain gear for this task rather than her preferred shrimping attire from our last trip of a miniskirt and topsiders. Much more practical. Today we are heading for Friday Harbor so I can perhaps shop for some of my missing items, but if not, I guess I wear a hat for a few days until we get to Campbell River, our first big provisioning stop.

Afternoon Update: Water is so flat we decided to head straight to Sidney BC for the night. I did not expect to be in Canada today and had some vegetable contraband that I needed to process! Thus I spent my afternoon prepping for dinner (Chicken Tacos, fresh Pico de Gallo, Guacamole) so I could throw the avocado pits and limes overboard before hitting Canadian customs. I also made up a huge green salad that we can eat for lunch for the next few days. The good news in all my lunch and dinner prep is that I have removed 4 cans from the pantry, and two packages of chicken from the freezer, both of which are stuffed and overflowing, so now I’ve taken the first step to emptying our stores. We arrived in Sidney BC at 4:30 and tied up to the customs dock. We have Nexus and used to be able to just use an APP to report our crossing, not having to go old school and actually report in person, but as a result of the pandemic (I guess?) Canadian customs haven't reinstated the easy crossing process. Luckily the phone-in process at the dock didn’t take too long and we moved on to our overnight slips in the Sidney marina. Within 30 minutes we were gathered on Esperança with margaritas in hand toasting our stellar first day of travel. These margaritas were especially coveted because my sister, Shelley, who lives in Hawaii, is a fresh juice producer and when I visited her in January I came home with 6 jugs of her fresh squeezed lime juice. After our Mexi dinner as described above, we all retired early, as everyone was beat. The process of preparing for this trip, making sure we had all the provisions we need, and making sure all the details on the home front were wrapped up, was mentally exhausting. Good night all.