Leaving Calvert Island

July 8th (Monday)
Today we headed to the beach. It was a cloudy morning, but lovely anyway for walking the shore. We took our time on all of the shorelines, and on many of the beaches we took off our packs and strolled around looking at whatever had washed in. We enjoy looking at all the colourful shells and rocks and seeing what we can find. We have found some very beautiful shells. 

We slowly made our way out to 7th beach where we enjoyed our picnic lunch. As the afternoon progressed the clouds broke a bit and it was nice to be on the beach. We had our slackline set up and had a lovely afternoon.  We saw some whales from shore, but they were too far out to tell what type they were. It was still nice to see their blows from a distance.

July 9th (Tuesday)
This morning, partly because we have decided that we will leave Calvert Island, for the time being at least, we had some stuff we had to take care of while we still had access to the internet. All those little things like banking, or just looking something up, becomes a lot harder when you have to take everything with you over to the dock, up the dock to black fly territory, then try to get everything done with a limited amount of gigabytes. It is particularly annoying when your computer decides to do an update without asking and uses up all your allotted data. Ah the struggles :).
After dealing with that stuff we went to pull up our prawn trap. We had put it down in about 400' of water, and to do this we had attached our two 300' lengths of weighted line. I pulled up the first half, and J pulled up the second. It sounds even, but if course it was not. The first 200' of my length was just line before I started having to pull up the trap as well. Jason's full 300' was all weight. With the line being weighted and then the additional weights of the trap and its resistance coming up through the water it does feel quite heavy, and it is nice that we can split it between us. We were very happy when we got it up to find that we had prawns!!! Yay. 

Sheya with one of the bigger prawns.

I would say it was our best catch yet, not by number, but by size. We got 20 that we would consider regular size, and then 13 big ones, for a total of 33 prawns! Our biggest one was over seven inches. Yay!

One of the big prawns.

When we pulled up our crab trap we had nothing, but our spirits were still high from all of our prawns.
We finally got acceptable conditions to do a repair to the tiny hole in our tender. Now we just have to hope it lasts.

Sheya prepping Kiki for the patch.

We went out for a paddle in our kayaks and stopped on our fish-cleaning island to pick some sea asparagus. I picked us two full sandwich size ziplock bags in about half an hour. We then went paddling down into the shallow area at the end of our bay. 

A very large area of our bay dries at low tide. We saw a couple of king fishers in the trees, and then saw the water along the shore erupt in a boil of many fish suddenly jumping. As we slowly approached, we saw that there were hundreds of 4"ish fish hanging out in the shallows along shore. We continued to see them as we made our way along the shoreline. We are not sure what type of fish they were, but there sure were a lot of them.
For dinner Jason made us the most epic prawn and crab pasta with soba noodles. The sauce was made with a coconut milk and evaporated milk base. He put the regular sized prawns in the pasta, and we had the large ones just pan fried with butter on the side. 

Prawns ready for cooking.

You remember how there used to be scratch and sniff books for kids? Well now is a time I wish that one of the pictures of dinner could be a scratch and lick, and that all of you could taste the sweetness and juiciness of the prawns, and the mouth watering flavours of the pasta. It was exquisite!!

Pasta and prawns.

Tomorrow (July 10th) we plan to leave Calvert Island. It has been almost three weeks that we have been here, and although we love it here, we also have gotten the itch to move on. I think if the weather were nicer we would probably stay longer, but with the forecast being for rain, showers, and cloud we have decided to leave. 

We plan to head across to Fish Egg Inlet and check out a couple of places before starting to make our way up towards Shearwater. If the weather were to get nice I could totally see us coming back here to Calvert Island. 

So once again we will not have cell service or wifi for a while, but you should be able to follow our boat position with AIS if you want to.  

(Sheya’s mom writing – For those of you who are not already familiar with the AIS tracking system, one web site that you can use, even if you don’t have an account is: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:5558841/zoom:14

In the search box you can search the vessel – “Red Witch” and choose the sailing vessel from Canada. You can then use different aspects of the web page to see their current location or to see their past track, and other details. Some parts of the web page do not work unless you have an account. When the box pops up with the details of the Red Witch you might need to drag the map a little to the left or right in order to find them as the information box often covers their current location. They are usually marked with a dotted box around them. If you “X” out of the larger "details box", you potentially lose where they are on the map. I believe that you can also choose the type of map that you view them on – nautical, standard, satellite, etc.)