The Tide Goes In, The Tide Goes Out

We’ve been back from Copenhagen for six weeks, enjoying our beautifully renovated house on Galiano Island in the Salish Sea (for those who read my last post and have been wondering, I did receive my backpack from Helsinki with my passport intact).

It’s been a somewhat busy time with a revolving series of house projects, guests, and local events and friends. We’ve played (poorly) in a golf tournament, done lots of hiking and biking, and finally started to use our kayaks on a regular basis. John has prepared many delicious and healthy gourmet dinners while I have focused my baking efforts on scones and cookies.

One topic of conversation that has come up several times is whether we will buy a boat. Living on an island does lend itself to boating and many, though not all, islanders have boats. If we go that route we know we’d want a motor boat that is 18-20 feet long. The difficulty is where to keep it, both during the summer when we’d want to use it and during the off-season when we wouldn’t. Montague Harbor has slips but has a 10 year waiting list. We’ve been on the list for 2 years and are now #78 so that seems unlikely to be our solution. The other options for summer storage are keeping it on a buoy in the harbor or finding someone with their own dock who would rent us space. In the winter, we hope we could find a resident with enough land who would rent us a spot to park it.

Then there’s the questions of choosing and finding a boat. Should it be new or used, aluminum or fiberglass? If used, can we find one with a fairly new motor since we are not handy with engines? Some have advised us to stay away from boat ownership altogether (it being a hole in water that you pour money into) and simply rent one each time we want to go out. This appeals to my frugal side but I know we would likely do so rarely. Our neighbors, Lawrence and Janusz, and our friends, Trevor and Gillian, each took us out on their boats last summer and our neighbor, Gary, took us out this summer. We had a great time on each excursion, lunching at a different island each time.

In addition to allowing us to explore surrounding islands and entertain visitors and island friends, having a boat is another way to reduce island fever, a phenomenon I mentioned in one of my blogs last year. On that note, I have started to implement my “one week a month off island” plan that I formulated last year. I just got back from a trip to Portland to see Kelsey (who is pregnant, due in early January!!!) and Garet, followed by a boondoggle trip to Western Colorado to attend a ladies pickleball weekend at the ranch owned by the parents of Julia, my son’s fiancé. It was a blast, despite my feeling very fatigued and getting a headache due to the 7,700 ft. altitude. It was fun to spend some time with Anya and Howard, my son’s future in-laws. They were fabulous hosts and we all had fun playing pickle ball, hiking, fishing, playing board games, and eating delicious food. I enjoyed meeting Anya’s pickle ball crowd and getting to experience the beauty of Western Colorado, an area I had never visited.

Now back from that adventure, we are keeping an eye out for orcas. While we were playing poorly at the golf fundraiser, several orca were breaching right in front of our house. When I saw the video (our house is the last one you can see on the clip, behind the whales) of what we had missed, I was beside myself. Since then, we had another orca display on Wednesday morning which was well timed for John’s friend Ken, who was visiting us at the time. Most guests stay for about 3 days and so their chances of seeing the beautiful whales are maybe 30-50% as we tend to see them about once a week or a bit less. Ken was a lucky one, though his wife Donna missed the show as she was sleeping in. You snooze, you lose or so I hear.

The title of this blog came to me because we have been very focused on the tides lately. Compared to the extremely minimal (2 foot) tidal range in Copenhagen’s inner harbor, our tidal range here is 12 feet. This has a number of repercussions for us, the most negative being that we are having a hard time figuring out how we can put our kayaks into the water from our own property given we have no beach. The fact that we are situated on Active Pass, one of the more treacherous bodies of water in the area, doesn’t help. It is a narrow pass with dangerous currents due to the tidal action and it also is on the ferry route resulting in significant wash coming up on our rocks from the passing ferries. We like all the action because it adds interest to our view but it is not conducive to easy kayaking or to easily putting a kayak into the water from the rocks and cliffs that separate us from the water. We are adept at putting our kayaks on top of the truck and driving them to one of the public docks on the island but we’d also like to be able to go in from home without risking a terrible accident. Wish us luck!

Finally, a crisis is brewing here on Galiano. There are three grocery stores on the island but one is head and shoulders above the others when it comes to the quality of the offerings. It is Daystar Market.

When we were choosing which Southern Gulf island on which to buy a house, having a resource like Daystar with abundant fresh fruits and vegetables and many other excellent products was a huge lure. Now the proprietors have said that they will close, due to the difficulty of finding labor, on Labor Day weekend (some irony there). Unless someone purchases it, we will lose our beloved grocery, the source of so many ingredients, including fresh local berries, and a place we often ran into friends. The community is very upset but so far nobody seems to want to take over the business as they will have the same difficulty sourcing workers as the longtime owners are having. We are all hoping for a savior to appear in the next 5 weeks (a business broker has been retained) but are bracing for that not to happen. On a small island, this is a big deal for those of us who like to cook (and eat). Of course, to John this is yet another reason we MUST buy a boat as that will allow us to zip over to grocery stores on other islands if we can’t find what we need in one of the two remaining groceries here. I guess there can be an upside to a crisis if you frame it correctly. :-\