I received a letter from former Twin Keeler editor Craig Anderson with some paper copies of articles from the old days when T-K was a paper newsletter. As those issues now are out of print he proposed re-printing them online and I will gladly oblige. The first one is by Phil Teece from Canada who sailed his little twin keeler i British Columbia on the Pacific Coast.
All afternoon I had drifted slowly up Haro Strait in a gentle following breeze. I was not alone on this long, broad waterway, which separates the Canadian Vancouver Island from the American San Juans. The perfect weather of late summer had spawned a fleet of several dozen boats, all ghosting northward in the light airs. By sundown all of us would seek our night anchorage among the nearest of British Columbia's Gulf Islands.
As evening approached, the first of the islands began to cluster around us. I wondered if I might find, somewhere, a haven in which to drop my hook in solitude, for the convivality of a thronging cove has never appealed to me. When in a mere breath of stirring air, I inched past the entrance of Sidney Island's popular lagoon, I saw that most of the fleet of larger craft had already arrived. A crush of vessels all in close ranks along the lines of mooring buoys, lay surrounded by a swarm of outboard-powered dinghies that buzzed like flies about the anchorage. To say the place seemed uninviting would be a profound understatement.
Ahead lay Portland Island, marine park. Approaching it, I saw that its principal anchorage bristled with masts. I passed by, unwilling even in the gathering dusk to end so peaceful a day in a haven so sociable. Up along that island's rocky eastern shore, however, there is a sort of notch - a gap in the wall. Only a bit wider than my boat herself with about two feet of depth at high water over a rough gravel bottom, this was a place at which no yachtsman would even glance in passing. But Galadriel is an 18-foot microcruiser fitted with twin keels that draw only two feet. When the tide withdrew from that little cranny, my tiny twin-keeler would lie happily and safely aground on the firm, stony bottom.
I drifted into that place, anchoring when my little sloop's ironshod heels just touched ground. There, during a warm glowing night at the height of the summer cruising season, I was alone, enjoying a delicious deep silence. While all the larger craft lay pressed closely together in the popluar deepwater anchorages, I had found my way into an alternative world that could easily have been on a separate planet.
Continue to part II
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