20 June

We spent a great day in Ucluelet sorting things out and getting our admin sorted.  We wandered around on a lovely sunny day and also got some clothes with "Round the Island 2024" on them to celebrate.  During the day we moved around to the small boat harbour and did some maintenance on the boat as well as taking things easy.  Syntropy also turned up and we had a good time catching up with them.  For diner we went to the floathouse bar and grill and set looking out over the harbour feeling mighty pleased with ourselves.

21 June

Now fully provisioned we were ready to head out to the Broken group to kick back and relax, knowing that we had no more big unknowns in our journey.  We had a lazy morning and spent a good few hours chatting with some locals who walked past our boat.  Max, one of the foreshore team, owned a Wharran Tiki38 and we discussed my original plans when I left the army which were to build one of these and then sail off round the world (Heidi quickly disabused me of this idea when she pointed out at the time I struggled to work out how to even use a hammer!).  We then got into a conversation with Jeff who ran a charter fishing business.  He was a mine of information on fishing.  He showed us how to tension our reel and even gave us some hooks and spinners encouraging us to just get out there and fish.  In between the conversation we also set up the windvane.  We hadn't felt confident enough to try it before now but being in known waters we were now more confident.  

We left the dock around 11 and headed down the channel and into fog at the entrance.  As we turned east and went inland though this soon cleared and we put up the sails in light winds.  Next we connected up the windvane and for the first time sailed on this amazing simple device.  We can see why people call it a third hand onboard and we still need to come up with a name for him.  As we were coasting along at just 2 knots we also decided to get out the fishing rod and so for the first time got ourselves set up for a gentle cruise

AFter a few hours we got to Brabant Island where we tucked in using a stern anchor to keep us in the small channel.  We soon had the dinghy out investigating the local islands and were astounded at the richness of the Oyster and clam beds.  

That evening we were treated to a beautiful sunset rounding off a great day.