Sunday, October 9, 2011

Pender Harbour Weekend

In flight

It's been about a week since I've gotten back and dudes--I am SO SAD to be back from vacation. I had such an awesome time and man is it hard coming back to reality. (Also I came home and found approximately 30 pears and about 20 apples in my fridge from the CSA share my brother picked up for me--egad!! More sauce on the agenda....) I've got a couple more posts about the trip coming but for this one I wanted to focus on the weekend we spent at our friends' marina. It can be summed up thusly:OMG SEALS!!!

Controls

Although, I'm getting ahead of myself. We took a floatplane up to Sechelt (so much faster than the ferry) and it was super fun. As you can tell from the photo above, it is a very small plane (a 6 seater!) and the pilot is right there with you. And the view is amazing. And before you know it, you're coming in for landing:

Coming in for landing

Airport

And here's the airport! By airport, I mean a series of docks, and a pub. It's pretty sweet actually, you can land, refuel your plane, get a beer, eat some boiled shrimp...not bad. We had to wait around a while for our friend to come collect us, but eventually he arrived and we drove to breakfast.

Boater's Breakfast at Laverne's

If you ever get to Pender Harbour, a must-do is to go eat at Laverne's. That's the boater's breakfast above (I exercise a little restraint and went with a breakfast that only had bacon instead of bacon AND sausage!) and it's just the thing when you've been awake since the crack of dawn and need fuel for a kayak trip. (And after your kayak trip, you can go back for a burger and delicious fries, and a shake. Mmm, shake.)

Salt and Pepper Troops

Plus there are quirky things all over the restaurant, like this army of salt and pepper shakers.

DSCF0484

And here I am, in a kayak for the first time ever!! It was so much fun. It took me a little while to get the hang of paddling (I kept bashing my knuckles against the side of the kayak) but once I did it was tremendously fun. We paddled from the marina to the mouth of the harbour (a lot further than it sounds--a good solid hour or so of paddling!) because I was promised real live wild seals!

seals!!!!!!

And seals there were! (These were taken on a second trip the next day, when we went back in a motorboat; I didn't want to take the expensive camera in the kayak, I mean, what if I dropped it!)

Sunbathing seals

They were just chilling on these floating logs, a whole group of them! It was amazing! I'm frankly surprised I didn't tip my kayak over in excitement. IT WAS SO COOL!!! FREAKING SEALS!!!! (The photo at the top of the post was also taken during our kayak trip--it's a heron flying away.)

Nachos

Ahem. Okay, I'm calm again. Anyway, all that paddling worked up an appetite and thirst so we adjourned to the bar for some beer and the biggest plate of nachos ever (and this is the small portion!) and some interesting conversation with other bar patrons (our friend now has lots of business ideas for his boat). Then it was time to hop in his little motorboat and head over to the nearby town for more food to cook onboard. You can click here to see a short video of the trip over; you can hear me laughing maniacally and mumbling something unintelligible. Dinner was short ribs, which I did not take a picture of because it was too dark!

Morning on the Cape Pine

We woke up on Sunday to rain! I guess that was to be expected, because despite the name Sunshine Coast, there's definitely a rainy season (which seems to last, you know, 9 months). And there were forecasts of a major storm moving in, so that put a damper on my plans to go take another kayak trip. We settled for breakfast (an entire package of bacon! haha) and coffee and I don't know why but coffee tastes better on the boat.

DSC_1407

It was kind of a weird day, weather-wise! And by the time we were getting ready to go and catch the ferry back, the sky had cleared up and it turned gorgeous, if also still windy. (We took another trip over to see the seals, too! Yay!) I'm told we passed a black bear on the way to the ferry but I think I might have dozed off at that point. An excellent time, all around.

More photos from the weekend are here, in case this post wasn't already long enough!

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