Thursday, July 26: Medicine Beach to Ganges, Saltspring Island

We looked at the charts over coffee to decide where to go today.  We considered three places, one that we have been to many times and enjoy and two others that we’ve never been to but look interesting.  Eventually we decided to check out one of the new places and stay there if we liked it, if not go to a fourth place.
After a leisurely morning, we headed through the small canal I mentioned yesterday


to a small bay named Horton Bay, on Mayne Island.  It’s a small, very well protected bay and a photo we saw of it made it look very inviting.  The charts indicate it can be a tricky place to get to, as the narrow, shallow channels leading in are strewn with big rocks.  But in we went, and it wasn’t too tricky as long as we went slow and paid attention.  But once in, we decided not to spend the day there.  It was very pretty, but didn’t really offer much to occupy us and it was a little crowded with a number of boats already on private buoys.

So it was on to our fourth choice, Ganges, which is the largest “town” in the Gulf Islands.  It’s really more of a village.  It’s been a week since we’ve been able to do things we can only (easily) do from a dock – like laundry, grocery shopping, long hot showers, charge our computer and get online, and fill our water tanks.  The dock we like to go to is right in the center of things, but it’s usually crowded and first come first served.  Luckily, just as we approached and saw no room, a sailboat loosened his lines and took off which left just enough room for us.  You don’t really parallel park a boat like you do a car; you need to size up the space to judge if you can fit, then you nose in at an angle and swing the stern toward the dock.  If the wind is blowing the complexity increases.  I’m happy to say we got into this spot on the dock by the skin of our teeth:



The rest of the afternoon was spent doing our chores along with walking the streets to see what had changed since our last visit.  Not much.  In the evening, there are two restaurants at the head of our dock that feature live, outdoor music every night.  The Tree House Café had a solo woman blues singer who was quite good, we enjoyed the free concert.

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