Victoria, BC, 27-SEP-2018 – There’s no denying we’re back in civilization. The drop boards are in the main cabin way to keep out the noise, not the cold. The sirens sounded throughout the night. Jennifer slept soundly.
While Victoria is an old, well established city, we see the spread of Vancouver’s and Seattle’s wealth establishing beach heads along the island’s southern coast. Port Renfrew, where we stayed the night before, had been a quite inlet with a public dock and not much else when a transpacific sailor we met in Neah Bay visited six or seven years ago. Now there is a cottage development with ads advising us to buy now as each phase will sell out quickly.
There is also a democratization. The new houses along the water have been mansions; the older houses, tiny little cottages that could have been built by the owner. Now we see condos and housing developments. The empty, rugged coast along the strait is disappearing.
Sooke is a short drive from Victoria or a twenty mile sail. From the water, it is a town growing into a city. From Google maps, it might be a suburb.
Victoria is our last stop before Port Townsend and Seattle. We’re in home waters.
We contacted Shane and Kendra, who we met repeatedly during May and June.
In high school, I read Steinbeck’s The Pearl, about a european (American?) traveling down the yellow river on a junk. The family and crew that own and work on the junk become his family. He meets them again when he asks them to visit his hotel. But now the magic is gone. He’s a westerner in a western hotel; they are Chinese boat people. The gap is too wide to bridge.
I wondered about this with Kendra and Shane. Shane is an MD and Kendra works for the BC government involved in policy.
Kendra showed up in business clothes and laughed about stepping from the dock into the cockpit. Shane, who was on call, wore clothes to be worn under scrubs with soft-soled shoes. He stepped easily across.
Like a magician, Kendra pulled a bottle of wine from her bag.
We never keep soft drinks on board but I didn’t want to offer Shane water. At a gift shop on the waterfront, we bought one of each kind they stocked. Jennifer asked, ‘‘What if Kendra asks for the same thing?’’
‘‘I’ll apologize and say that that was the last one.’’
We four talked solely about our trips, and where we all had been. Shane lamented that this was a once-in-a-lifetime trip and there was so much they would do differently.
We spoke about Patrick and Isabelle on L’excursion, who worked in the oil patch and retired at forty-six and fifty years of age. Kendra commented that education was clearly the wrong the path.
The sail from Sooke was the first wonderful sailing weather we’d had in a long time. Jennifer timed the currents to have them with us most of the way. It was an easy beat to windward with winds at eight knots or so.
With Victoria in sight, the wind evaporated. We motored the last few miles.
I’ll leave you in the capable hands of the Kinks in this live version:
