At Rest - Nanaimo

We spent the day in Nanaimo doing some “freshie” provisioning. Since both Canada and the USA restrict many fresh food items (e.g., vegetables and fruit) when crossing the border, you have to pick those items up shortly after entering the country.

Besides the food items, we bought a prepaid Canadian phone card for our cell phone so we can make cheaper calls than if roaming on our current T-Mobile plans. We also picked up more beer and wine (you are also restricted on the amount of alcohol you can bring in). We did some of our provisioning at the Nanaimo Costco store, taking the bus to and from the harbor to get there.

Despite the rainy night and morning, the sun burned its way through the cloud cover to be a pretty nice day as shown in the photo of Alpenglow at the dock.The forecast is looking good for tomorrow (5/26) and we plan to take advantage of it and do a long run the length of the  Strait of Georgia to Drew Harbor (Rebecca Spit Marine Park) on the East side of Quadra Island. This will put us in a good position to go up Hoskyn Channel and through Surge Narrows the next day into the Octopus Islands Marine Park. After that we’ll continue North along Okisollo Channel and reconnect with the Discovery Passage north of Seymour Narrows. We’ll probably follow Johnstone Strait until we can cut off to one of the protected routes into the Broughtons near Cracroft Island.

Anchoring will probably be the norm during this section so blog posts will have to wait until we get reconnected in a community or marina.