May 26th - Discovery Island (#34)

Dan and I went for a morning run round our favourite islands. It was raining, but not too hard and the winds were calm - a very west coast day! The tide was very low (0.3 feet in oak bay at noon), and it was cool to see so many exposed reefs. many of our usual passages were blocked! The tide was ebbing quite strongly as we crossed over Baynes channel and we had to work hard to get past the aptly named Strongtide island. We saw the Ocean River Discovery shuttle in Rudlin Bay as well as a group camped there. I used my Aleut NLP on the way out and my shoulderless on the way home. It was interesting to compare them. I think my cruising speed was very similar with both (see the track) but they worked different muscles and at different cadences.

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16 km, YTD 367 km

May 25th - Pine Point (#33)

I went up to spend Saturday at Pine Point Campground on Cowichan Lake with the Pautik group. This gathering was organised once again by Gerhardt and was a very nice low key gathering of Greenland-style paddlers. Nice to meet a few new faces and to reconnect with some others. It was fun working on a few of my rolls and helping others with theirs. I went for a quick paddle out to the little islets to burn off a little fuel!
The weather was not bad though it started to rain a bit as I was leaving.

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6 km, YTD 351 km

May 17-20 - Cadboro Bay and San Juan Island (#32)

Monica and I used our west marine inflatable double as a tender for our trip in Natural C-lection to a C-dory gathering in Friday harbour. The inflatable worked well as a tender as it was easy to manoeuver onto the roof and to get in and out of etc. I think it may become our tender of choice for taking with the C-Dory.
I did a couple of trips from Killarney to the C-dory (one leg did not get tracked) as well as a ship to shore trip at Jones Island State Park and a paddle around Guss Island in Garrison Bay.

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2 km, YTD 354 km

May 11 - Discovery Island (#31)

Dan, paulo and I went for a morning paddle around Discovery. There was a good ebb in Baynes, so we caught a bit of a ride down to Heritage point (as you can see from the grey section of track >10 kph). Conditions were nice, though the air was a bit hazy. We stopped for a break at Boathouse bay and saw the wolf on a beach on the north side of Discovery! The tide was pretty low so we decided not to try and make our way up between the Chathams.

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15 km, YTD 343 km

May 2nd - Cadboro Bay (#30)

I led a SISKA evening paddle (the first!) with 16 other paddlers for a short evening paddle around Caddy bay. Conditions were great and we had a nice paddle out to Cadboro Point via Staines and Flower Islands. We then worked against the current a bit to make our way over to and past Jemmy Jones Island and then over to the Cattle Point side of the bay. On our way back to the beach we stopped by and chatted with the folks on the Pacific Grace. The paddle was followed by a "debrief" in Smugglers Cove! Hopefully the evening paddles will become a regular SISKA feature.

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7 km, YTD 328 km