Grace Harbor to Comox

We had a short overnight stay at Grace Harbor, dashing out to find cell phone reception so Jason could make it to his many meetings scheduled for the day. Luckily, on the previous day, we had taken the hike up to a lake where we met a super-crusty, old sailor who spends summers on his boat in desolation sound and winters on his motorcycle in Mexico, Guatamala, and Belize. Jason took a "freshwater" dip but I wimped out when I witnessed the muddy, murky waters and was reminded of the resident leech population, even though I was desperate for a rinse since I was on day 11 without a shower. Early the next morning, we headed to Comox where I took the helm and Isaac worked as navigator through the patchy, morning fog while Jason participated in work meetings below. We retraced our path past Mitlenatch, pausing to watch and listen to the sea lions before heading on. We were on day 12 since our last water tank refill and so I was anxious to get to Comox so we could shower (and refill our tanks). Our spacing between refills was perfect as we drank the last drops along the way. After a whirlwind of watery, cleaning activities (showers, six loads of laundry, boat wash down), we headed to the Victoria Volunteer Search and Rescue to be reunited with our dinghy, Rosebud, after long last. We were met by Charles, a cheeky fellow, who retold the story of Rosebud's rescue and showed us on the chart where she was found. After being introduced to the whole crew, we were then treated to a tour of their rescue vessels, with lots of laughing and joking along the way. We had plans to row her back to our marina (which would have been quite a long row) so they told us not to worry about it, they would put her onto one of their vessels and drop her off. We liked Comox so much, we decided to stick around another day so we could explore a little. During the course of two days we managed to get most of our back-to-civilization errands done, eat at a family-run sushi place three times, visited several different book stores, gathered pears from a pear tree, bought salmon (frozen with a saltwater glaze) from a fisherman off the dock, as well as shrimp from the Big Shrimp Rancher who pulls his fishing boat into the docks every night at 6pm to a line of anxious customers ready to slap down $5 for a pound of hour-old shrimp. Yum.

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