On our way to Anacortes for routine medicals, provisioning and normal maintenance, we had plenty of time left to enjoy the Gulf Islands.
We decided to spend most of it in Montague Harbour, a superb Provincial Park in a very well protected large bay.
The park provides easy shore access via a floating dock, rustic campsites ashore and 36 mooring buoys in the bay.
We chose to anchor just out of the buoys, and in the beautiful early October weather we had the place to ourselves once Canadian Thanksgiving was over.
In a way we were taking another vacation after "pushing" hard to get to Alaska and back over the summer. Alaska was tons of fun, but there were days were it felt a little like work: Get up early, get Princess ashore, raise the tender, get the boat ready to cruise 8 to 10 hours, anchor, lower the tender to take Princess ashore and stretch our legs, get back to the boat only to start all over again the next day.
In Montague, no more push to cover any distance. Just a nice rhythm centered around our walks ashore, made easy by shore dock access.
Montague is so full of good memories for us. Looking back when we were last here we realized it was the beginning of our early retirement, and in hindsight we were only 15 days away from my cancer diagnostic when we left.
So we had to toast being back here, making new wonderful memories. I'm not done with cancer: I am still under regular medical observation, but the risk of relapse is slowly diminishing, so we'll keep our fingers firmly crossed. More importantly we'll keep living life and enjoying being here, all 3 of us in a place we all enjoy so much.
Princess particularly enjoys the park. There are many deer around, and she's particularly good at tracking and finding them. She's also after all sorts of critters, from small birds to raccoons. Of course we keep her on a leash, so she doesn't catch anything and as importantly, doesn't escape into the wild, running after all the tempting animals.
We had incredible weather for our stay, clear blue skies during the day and unlimited stars at night.
Laying down on the bow in our sleeping bags we watched the immense night sky, cut in halves by the milky way. It's so rare nowadays to have no light pollution.
These last few days our diesel furnace decided to stop working: A quick investigation confirmed that its fuel pump has had it. I'd repaired it temporarily about a month ago so I am not surprised. 2 fuel pumps are on order and should be waiting for us when we next get to Anacortes.
Meanwhile we'll just heat the boat when we run the generator to charge the batteries, running the A/C in heat mode. In this inter-season that works fine.
It's amazing how fast 12 days pass by when you're doing very little!
Anacortes is calling us, so we'll be on our way via James Island where we hope to spend a night at the State park dock.
Marina stops are usually a lot of work for us, as it is when we catch up on maintenance, provisioning, washing the boat and plenty of other small tasks that just add up. The vacation is coming to an end, and we've filled our tank with plenty of new wonderful memories. May we keep doing this for a long time.
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