We departed Prevost Harbor on Stuart Island around 10:30am this morning to head for Canada. It was a smooth, uneventful and fairly short passage in overcast and rainy weather.
Our first stop would be Bedwell Harbor to check in at customs. We arrived at the customs dock a little worried that we’d be waiting for a while but were excited to see that there was only one other boat at the dock. I went ashore with all of ourr papers to use the phones to call Ottowa and answer any immigration-related questions they had. We had all completed the ArriveCAN app ahead of time which, in theory, sped up the process. For some reason, they still asked me to provide some info over the phone that we had entered into the app, but no big deal.
After check-in, we were off to our first stop in Canada…Ganges Marina on Salt Spring Island. It was an even shorter trip to Ganges and before long we were tied up at the dock and ready to go explore the island.
The first thing we did was grab a cab to head over to Salt Spring Winery. Only Tom had any loonies at this point and he only had enough for a one-way trip. We assumed we’d figure something out later in order to get back to the boat and spent the cash on a 20-minute (ish) cab ride.
Tasting wine at Salt Spring Winery was fun and we enjoyed the variety of wines we tasted and some great meat and cheese selections.
There were some locals tasting at the same time and we had fun talking and joking with them. By the time we left, we were feeling great and, as we would find out, this was only the beginning of a long afternoon of local beer and wine!
After leaving Salt Spring Winery, we walked to Garry Oaks just down the road. The vineyard was beautiful.
There we tasted more enjoyable wine and met Michael and Katie working the tasting room.
More wine consumed, more wine purchased to go, and more fun had by all. In the course of chatting with Michael and Katie we also managed to finagle a ride back to the boat with Michael who was heading home. Really nice people and very kind of him to offer us all a ride in his pickup.
After a brief break at the boat, we headed off to Moby’s for beers before dinner.
We enjoyed some local beers and some appetizers, because you can’t go to dinner on an empty stomach, and then headed out for the Tree House Cafe in the center of town.
The Tree House Cafe turned out to be our favorite spot for dinner and live music in all of the Gulf Islands. We have not been able to verify this, but our cab driver from earlier told us this place is owned by one of the founding members of Bachman-Turner Overdrive (I believe he said it was Bachman). The great thing about the cafe is that they have live music every night all summer. Often people come downtown and set up their lawn/beach chairs in the square outside the restaurant and just enjoy the music, as the restaurant is mostly open to the outside. This night, we saw a duo couple playing acoustic guitar and singing. They were great and we were sitting at the table right up front, under the plum tree.
