Crusty Old Coot - 6/8

It’s been a grim day.  I watched the warm front pass over head on my barometer.  It looks like a 24 hour sawtooth: the pressure a steady progression downward followed by a rapid increase over the last several hours.  It’s been pouring rain all morning.

The crew are scattered in Tofino.  Kevin is mooching off coffee house wifi, taking care of business on the home front. Vi is visiting galleries.  It was hard to go anywhere without getting soaked.  I went to find myself a chai tea latte and had to lean into buffeting headwinds and driving rain to get there.

Hoping to do a little mooching of my own and not seeing many people out, I anticipated finding the coffee house deserted, but of course that’s where everyone was hunkered.  Crowds of early season tourists were pretending to nurse a cup of coffee for several hours rather than go back out into it.  I bought my drink and shoehorned myself onto an empty barstool.  Considering the crowd and the number of laptops, the wifi was surprisingly responsive.  The tea was good too, if expensive.

Tofino is a nice little town with a young population.  It caters equally to commercial fishing, recreational tourism and artistic tourism.  There are a lot of adventure tours, a lot of galleries, and a shoddy little marina.  It is certainly not a destination for recreational boating.  That’s not surprising I guess; we’re a long way from anywhere.

It was stressful getting in here yesterday.  We knew it was going to be tough.  The book said as much and talked about the difficulty of handling the traffic and currents, the paucity of space, the shallow depths.  If all that wasn’t enough the wind was supposed to start blowing in the afternoon.  Winding our way through a double set of narrows studded with submerged rocks on the approach sounded easy by comparison.  So we started off at 5am yesterday morning, getting through the narrows and arriving to refuel and seek moorage shortly after low tide at 7:30am. Low tide is better than strong current or strong winds I say.  I’d also hoped that an early arrival would offer ample moorage, but that didn’t turn out to be the case.

Most of the public dock is reserved for commercial boats.  There is only one finger for recreational boaters, room for maybe a dozen boats, and there are live-aboards taking up most of that space.  Half of what remains is too shallow to be useful for a boat with more than a six foot draft.  When I talked to the harbormaster on the way in, he told me to take anything on E dock that I was comfortable with.  Ha! approaching the dock, still thirty feet away, it was 7.5 feet deep and getting shallower.  WTF?  Rather than continue further, we tied up to a sailboat that was already there at the end of the dock.  When the owner came out to see what was going on I told him the harbormaster told us to raft up to him - a bit of a stretch, unless you interpret “wherever you’re comfortable” to include rafting.  Thankfully he was friendly and helpful.  Our power cord is strung across his cockpit; as was the hose while we were filling the tanks.  It took us four hoses (two from the marina, one borrowed from another boat, and one that is ours) to reach the water tank from the nozzle.  This west coast is a crusty old coot in so many ways.