17 July  - With a good weather window firming up next week we decided to head back into Ucluelet to carry out final prep for our first offshore passage.  The trip back to Uke across the broken group was an uneventful motor in calm seas (which to be fair was very enjoyable in reasonable weather).  Once back we dropped the hook in the same spot we always use here now and after a cup of tea (!) headed into Uke to see about getting a spot on the dock the next couple of days.On arrival though it was clear there was no spare room, and with the only option being provided to us being to raft up with other boats, we decided to stay on the hook.

Once back at the boat we settled down to check the weather and see if this weather window we had seen the day before was still there, and it was.  Once we'd confirmed everything we decided that we would aim to leave Sunday morning with a final go/no-go decision point at 6pm on Saturday - if everything still looked good we will have run out of excuses and go!

18 July - This was our final preparations admin day.  I had to catch a bus up to Tofino to pick up the prop seal from the chandlers there and whilst I was doing that, Heidi cracked on with washing and shopping.  There's only one bus that runs between Uke and Tofino and, as it only took 5 minutes to pick up the part, I was able to catch it on it's return so was back in Uke in just over two hours!

We also practiced poling out the Genoa whilst on the hook - just to make sure we remembered how to!  

19 July - The day before D-Day!! - today we had little planned other than to check everything over.  We did an end to end walk through of the boat as well as a trial run with the Asym sail (it's been a while since we had used it and thought we could do with a refresher!)  Other than that it was just a day to sit and wait.  The weather still looked good for us and so we put together a plan and sent it off to our shore team so at least someone knew what we were thinking off.  All the weather routing estimates to Eureka involved at least 2 and in some plans, 4days of motoring.  We were not confident we would have enough fuel for the worst case scenario so put a plan together with many options depending on how much motoring we needed to do early on.  Whichever, all plans involved us passing the Juan de Fuca strait and heading to the US, the first big step.  That evening we went for diner and had a bottle of wine to help us sleep! Now for the next big step of our adventure