7/17 Silva Bay

Today Barb and Erin took off headed for the "village", a community 10 miles or so away from here.  We heard of its existence from an "old salt" who was working on his sailboat, which he had built himself back in 1965.  I was commandeered as a temporary worker to operate the windlass so he could use both hands to handle the line that hoisted his helper up the mast in a bosun's chair.  He was a real character who didn't show his 72 years of age at all.  He attributed this to black rum and loose women.  As the story went, he had planned to sail the world in his newly built boat with an all women crew – then he got married and his wife appointed herself admiral, vetoing his crewing plans.  They did sail to many places in the world looking for paradise, and settled here on Gabriola Island.

 

Anyway, he suggested that our womenfolk might like to visit the village, where they could find some "artsy fartsy" shops.  They did just that, by taking the only taxi on the island.  Erin reported that the village was less than she expected, but they both had a good time wandering through the shops.  When it was time to return, they called for the taxi, and he came to pick them up a few minutes later.  He had some other fares, senior citizens he was committed to transport every Thursday, and about a mile from the village, near the Nanaimo ferry dock, asked them if they'd mind getting out of the cab for a few minutes while he went to take care of some other business.  He returned for them a few minutes later to bring them the rest of the way here.

 

In the meantime, I helped Trav with his water maker, rinsing off the filters in preparation for another run.  Once it got going, I got out our hose and ran back to the Bar-T-Na.  When their tank was approaching full we ran about 40 gallons of fresh water from their tank to our tank via his aft wash down faucet, which he had converted to fresh water when he had the water maker installed.  Of course this drained his tank down again quite a bit, so he left the water maker running for another 2 or 3 hours after that.

 

Erin made up a wonderful salmon chowder for dinner tonight.  Trav and Barb contributed some smoked salmon, and we also had a baggie of crab meat that we had frozen last week.  It all went in the pot along with some freshly chopped up salmon meat that we had.  Barb brought over fresh fruit which she cut up and served along with the chowder.  We had a beautiful sunset to view out our front window as we dined in luxury with our friends.