Thursday, Sept. 9th

Hamada and I rolled out of the driveway at about 6:30pm, and met up with Jim at a rest stop along I-5 about 45 minutes later. The drive north was long but uneventful, save a stop on the highway when a hold-down strap broke free and was sparking behind my rig. We arrived in Bellingham at about 11:30pm or so, and headed over to a Wal-Mart parking lot to spend the night. Wal-Mart encourages RV'ers to stop in their parking lot, and this one was no exception. The parking lot was a lot quieter than nights I've spent in rest stop parking lots, where big rigs roar in and out all night long.

Friday Sept. 10th

The morning dawned bright and sunny, but the forecast called for heavy rains later in the day, so we got a fairly early start for the border, hoping rig and launch before the rains came in. Crossing over to Canada was very easy, with just a few questions about boat and trailer ownership, and where we were going. The drive to Vanier Park in False Creek was very straightforward, but the directions I had downloaded from Yahoo were awful, as the final mile dragged us through a residential street that had been narrowed and obstructed in order to make into a bike route. It was not a good place to drag a double axle trailer!

Once in Vanier Park, we easily found the launch ramp. Two cement ramps with floats, and a large parking lot. A pay machine, cantankerous in accepting credit cards, finally gave us parking passes for the week. The charge was $8/day so $56 parking for the whole week. Rigging Hamada took about an hour, as there was much cruising gear in the way and some last minute items to load into the boat. The ramp flattened out as it got down to the water, and Hamada almost didn't come off the trailer even after backing all the way till my front tires were wet. I wasn't too excited about the saltwater dunking of my car, but after several quick stops, the boats finally floated free. I would not recommend using this ramp without at least 7 or 8 feet of water on it!

After launching, we motored straight over to the dock at the Granville Island Public Market. The market was jumping, with live music and lots of people. The weather was starting to look threatening, but it didn't start raining until we sat down for lunch later that afternoon. Since the weather didn't look too good, we wandered around looking for a good place to moor the boats. Most of the moorages on the Island were pretty expensive, as they were all owned by the various charter companies on the Island. Walking down the harbor a couple of hundred yards, we ended up stumbling into the False Creek Harbour Authority and got a couple of slips for cheap. Hamada's was $7.50, and Esmeralda was only $5. Not a bad deal! We setup our tarps for the increasing rain, and walked back over to the public market for some shopping and to get out of the rain.

Friday night the rain came down in buckets. Using my whisker pole, I was able to create an a-frame structure over the cockpit utilizing the boom as the peak. Jim's tarp structure was a little less taught, and as a result began to pool water and sag badly. He was able to partially fix the problem by wedging his boat hook under part of the tarp, but it was a temporary fix. I had mercy on Jim and invited him down on Hamada for a gam in the relative comfort and warmth of the oil-lamp lit interior of my HMS-18.

The author relaxes down below on Hamada

Hamada was not impervious to the rain however, and I discovered that the cockpit locker hatch that I hadn't resealed was leaking badly. A Rubbermaid container became the permanent catch basin for this leak, and the next morning I dumped out at least a quart of rain water.