It was a short two hour trip from Todd Inlet and Butchart Gardens over to Port Sidney Harbor, however, we had to hang out in front of the marina at Sydney for a while to wait for a slip to open up. This meant that we didn’t actually get tied up until just after noon. This is a big marina, where we have stayed before, and the transient docks (for short-term visitors) are about a five minute walk down a looong dock to the Dockmaster’s Office and land.
Once we were registered, Elaine took off to walk through town, while I spent a couple of hours washing down the boat. This was the first real exterior cleaning I had done since we started in May. With the wind and waves, the boat gets covered in salt, but all the rain we have run into has washed it off. Without seeing any rain for a while, I had to wash it off myself.
We timed it right for the weekly Evening Street Market in downtown Sidney. They close off the main street for three blocks and have both food and craft vendors lining both sides. It is quite a draw, with crowds enough to make walking difficult at times. We opted for an English-style sausage roll for dinner, which we ate at the park down at the waterfront. After an ice cream cone for desert, we walked back to the boat and discovered we could get over 10 channels on our TV. This, after only one channel a couple of nights in Ketchikan for the past couple of months. It was too much for me - I went to bed, but Elaine stayed up late getting her TV fix…
This morning (Friday) we left Port Sidney Harbor and had a nice, short cruise over to Roche Harbor in the San Juan Islands - back in the USA! This means, of course, back through Customs once again. We totally gave up on our Small Vessel Reporting System (SVRS) participation with Homeland Security. I called them yesterday, asked how to go about doing things the right way, since it hasn’t worked the last four times we have tried. They basically said to forget it, it was a program put together by a multi-departmental Task Force and, even though it was a good idea, no one department ever took ownership of it, so it is now almost completely dysfunctional. I could have told them that…
We decided to do the conventional Customs thing, just like everybody else. We pulled in to the Customs Dock, I went up to the office, waited about three minutes, did the interview and the agent came out to the boat for a quick eye-over. It was all done in less time than it takes to get through the SVRS phone menu.
We left Roche Harbor and headed down to Friday Harbor, thinking we would anchor out there for the night and stop by the grocery store in town while there. We tried to find a place to anchor which wasn’t so full of boat traffic and ferry wakes, but never did. We did anchor for a short while to make a run into the store, but then left the utter chaos of a summer Friday at Friday Harbor for a quiet little bay across the channel on Shaw Island…
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