Very strong Southeast winds were predicted for the 18th, growing stronger throughout the day. We had been pushing pretty hard the previous few days, but knew we wanted to get out of the wind and into Port Hardy before things got sketchy on us, so we made an early start, and quickly rode the wind and growing wind waves around Hardy peninsula into Hardy Bay. The night before, Emily had helped us out by getting us the numbers of some Port Hardy hotels; we figured it would be easier and more efficient to stay the night in town, rather than camping out of town in the commercial campground used by most paddlers.
The biggest adventure of the day turned out to be getting our boats out of the water at the hotel... We stayed at a place called the Glen Lyon, named after a local creek. Nice place, located on the shoreline, but without any easy kayak access. The hotel staff very nicely allowed us to use a rear entrance and storage area to get our boats out of the water and our gear up to our room. We were a real novelty for them, which helped a little, no doubt. Took a while, but we were all settled in by Noon.
Since it was Sunday, we weren't able to pick our resupply package up at the post office, but we were able to run a few other (important) errands, including some grocery shopping, a visit to the marine electronics place, which netted us a badly needed replacement for my waterlogged handheld VHF radio, and amazingly, a pair of neoprene gloves at a loca surf shop that was for some reason open on Sunday. We also had a good lunch at the hotel restaurant, and a very nice dinner at a First Nation-run restaurant elsewhere in town. Very good, although running errands was, in some ways, far more exhausting than paddling all day.
No comments:
Post a Comment