Nanaimo to Hornby Island, June 10th, 2015.

The wind was still blowing NW into my face in the morning so I made slow progress again. I went past some islands at the entrance to Nanoosh Bay. These Islands looked nice to camp on, I wished I had done so last night. I continued along to Rathsavers Provincial Park. This had been my original destination the day before. The beach was wide and looked like sand in the Google Earth photos. But it was made of 2 inch round rocks covered on all sides with barnacles. They looked like little planets from "The Little Prince”. Hard on your feet and hard on the boat if I tried to drag it above high tide here. It was still early so I kept going north into the wind.

Each boat in this race has a Spot Tracker on it. This is the 3rd generation tracker and is very mature technology. It has a much nicer user interface than the original. It is SMALL, barely larger in width and depth than the minimum GPS antenna, barely taller than the 4 AAA cells that power it. It is super efficient and lasted me 12 days on a single set of batteries. In tracker mode it finds your position with GPS and sends that to a satellite once every 10 minutes. This was used in turn to create a WEB map that showed the position, direction and speed of every boat in the race. I'm told that I destroyed productivity and Internet bandwidth in the SF Bay Area because all my friends in BASK were pressing REDRAW on their browsers all day long to watch my progress. The tracker has enabled several people to find me down on their shoreline. Several times in one day recently, people have seen me going up the coast on the race map, gone out to a point and waved at me on the way by. One guy took pictures, I thought he was a reporter. Another just wanted to see the reality of what he was watching on the WEB. They all ask me if there is anything that I need.

A little after noon the wind died completely and the water became calm and glassy. I decided to take advantage of this and work hard to get back on my original float plan. I turned to head across the water in a long crossing straight to Hornby Island. My tracker reported my position, direction and speed and my friends in BASK commented on what I was doing. Kate DesLauriers had a copy of my float plan and told BASK that I was making a pizza run. There is a store in the marina on Hornby that sells pizza and I had planned on varying my diet by having that for dinner. Without consulting each other, three of my BASK friends (counting Kate) looked up that store, called them and tried to order me a pizza. When I landed, the proprietor Roberto came out and said "You must be Mike. Your friends are all calling and ordering you pizza. They are arguing with me over who gets to pay for it!” Glen Nunez was the first to get a credit card number to Roberto, so he paid for my 2 pieces of pizza, a soda, a carton of Cherry Garcia ice cream and my campsite for the night.