Wednesday, August 1: Cadboro Bay to Sidney Spit, Sidney Island

The wind kicked up again as the night went on, and we didn’t sleep real well.  But it was calm again first thing in the morning and we decided to leave before things got too fussy out in the Strait.  It was about a three hour cruise back north, against some current in Haro Strait, and we were relieved to have relatively calm water.

We headed to Sidney Spit, which is another huge park in a very interesting area.  The sand spit itself extends about a mile from the rest of the island appears and disappears as the tide falls and rises.   There's a 10 foot monument at the end that you can't really see from here, it's so far away.



Low tide

High tide

We like it here because it’s a beautiful place and because it’s close to our re-entry point:  the customs dock at Roche Harbor.

We took a couple of long walks ashore, past a big grassy meadow and the remnants of an old brick manufacturing plant:


In the evening, we came across some people who busily doing something on the dock and we stopped to take a look.  It turned out they have built several nests for birds called Purple Martins (new to me) that are native to the area, and they are conducting a long-term study of them.  At the moment, they were putting ID bracelets on the legs of the babies, which they estimated at 12 days old.  Interesting people to talk with.  Apparently the birds can’t fly until they are 25 days old, so the researchers can just climb a ladder to the nest, reach in, put all the babies in a sack, bring them down, tag them, and put them back.  The parents are flying around squawking like crazy, obviously not pleased.  But as soon as the babies are back in the nest everyone is happy.  I asked if the human scent bothers them, and was told that they can’t smell, so no.

The evening was super calm in tonight’s anchorage, and we were looking forward to a good night’s sleep.  Tomorrow we re-enter the US and start working our way back to Seattle.