Cowichan to Montague

We're suckers for good food. So when we read that there was a delicious organic bakery and a gourmet cheese store in Cowitchan, we just couldn't resist making a quick stop. However, we found ourselves in a quandary when trying to choose the marina. One had a five star restaurant on the dock and the other has the bakery, and, they are a good distance from one another. Since we were coming in close to dinner time we opted for the five star restaurant with plans to head to the other marina the next day when the bakery would be open. I know. We have to make tough decisions when out on a sailboat. Now that we have experienced both, here is my piece of advice, skip the restaurant, head straight for the bakery and cheese store. We had perfect bakery/coffee shop, rainy, drizzly weather while we were there. So after eating lunch at the cheese store, we gobbled delectable pastries at the bakery, and then the boys and I hunkered into a coffee shop and played a game of Rummikub. We then found a fresh fish market where we bought salmon mousse, salmon filets, smoked salmon, and sea asparagus to go with our fresh bread for dinner. It was awesome.

So after Cowitchan we headed to Burgoyne Bay where we had plans to hike up the mountain that rises out of the bay. Burgoyne Bay turned out to be the weirdest anchorage we've ever been in. In Canada, you can anchor anywhere and live there for free, forever. Burgoyne Bay is home to quite a few of these people. We saw nice little cottages, a floating greenhouse, and a floating camper lashed to a mostly-sunken sailboat to name some examples. As we sat anchored there, I felt oddly like an outsider looking in at a mental ward in a hospital. First, a man, who didn't seem to have his wits about him, stepped out of his greenhouse boat, boarded his dinghy standing and sang real-loud, real-Bob-Dillon-like, as he slowly rowed to shore. He did not seem fit to operate a row boat, especially standing. Next, another man rowed to shore slowly, sitting at the very bow of his boat with his feet sprawled and dangling over the sides of his bathtub-like vehicle, but somehow all I could see was a man padding down a hospital hallway in his pajamas. It had a weird feeling about it...but maybe having a sunken-sailboat-lashed-to-a-nearly-sinking camper-van as a neighbor (Is the universe trying to tell me something? Is this where we're headed?) colored my mood and interpretations of the bay.

The following day started very foggy and we found ourselves feeling quite lazy so we opted out of the hike to the top of the mountain we couldn't see in the fog, turned on our radar and cruised to Ganges for a little provisioning and then onto Montague Bay. Isaac and Jason quickly put our new crabbing gear to the test. I watched from the cockpit as they lowered it to the seafloor just behind our boat as visions of crab dinner danced in their heads.

Click here for photos.