Day 9 ~ Hartley Bay, B.C.

The next day Dad ventured out to get pictures for Judy, when he learned that Hartley Bay has 200 residents, no liquor, no cars and no roads – guess they don’t have anywhere to go. They did have very nice wooden, raised treated walkways. The dock is run by the Federal government, so mooring and the 15 amp power was free. Dad said that Simba had never been on 15 amp power, but she did just fine. The rain poured most of the day and Dad and I were content sitting at the galley table catching up with our families and our offices, during which time I found out that between streaming the news, the office connections and uploading videos to Facebook for everyone’s viewing pleasure we had already spent over $1000 on internet usage in the first 6 days. I immediately applied the brakes to uploading videos to Facebook.

At one point during the day I just sat there shaking my head in amazement. I always thought that I liked to talk on the phone more than anyone I knew. Well let the record stand that Dad is the king of using the phone. Since we left Seattle, Dad rarely passed up an opportunity to use his phone and when his phone stopped working he quickly learned to use my smart phone and started giving people my phone number as an alternate to his!  Typically, he would end a conversation with one person only because someone else was calling.

We used the crabs that we had caught in Bottle Neck Inlet to make crab melts for lunch. As the rain trickled down we noticed our new friends on the Celtic Song were arriving in the harbor. After they got fuel they came over and invited us for adult beverages and we gladly accepted.  I’ve never really been on a sail boat and it seemed so small compared to Dad’s boat. We split a couple of bottles of wine and listened to their story. What an interesting pair, he is single and she is married with a kid and they cruise all over the world together. They were heading north as well and decided to follow us to our next destination, Kumealon Inlet which is at the top of Grenville Channel.

Upon returning to the boat, Dad decided that it was time to disassemble the upper hatch in an attempt to fix the leak and rid ourselves of the drip buckets that were decorating the salon. It might have been a better plan to have worked on it a few days ago in the sunshine and before we had been drinking. After we got it all put back together, we both stayed up until the wee hours in the morning trying to get our last fix of technology for we knew we would be unable to connect again until we arrived in Prince Rupert.