Friday evening, Bear dropped me and our "luggage" off at Andre's. He got to ferry terminal by transit. We (with the car) picked up India pizza for dinner. Ferry to Salt Spring Island was 2.5 hour, we arrived Long Harbour at 10:45 pm. The camp site is about 5~6 km from the ferry terminal. Bear jogged there, due to several reasons (darkness, miscommunication, poor cell phone reception, and Bear personality) Bear ended walking extra 2~3 km. Thanks to Deb who at the end went and fished Bear out from the dark. It was past midnight when we went to bed.
Saturday morning it was raining when we woke up at 8am. Due to the rain, no one was super eager to get on the water. Bear and I cooked bacon, and used the bacon oil to deep fried veggies, then mixed in egg to make deep fried veggie bacon oil egg soup....and Bear took more than an hour to make his Bearish coffee (ie. Bearish coffee is the type that takes very long to make :P). Cleaning up the bacon grease on the pot and pans was a lot of effort, as a result we didn't get to the kayak rental until noon, but luckily the rain had stopped at that point.
It took us about 2 hours to pack everything into the kayaks, Deb prepared us a quick lunch (we didn't finish everything they got for us for lunch, which resulted huge (yes, I really mean "huge") lunch meals in the subsequent days. We launched from Ganges at 2:30 pm, headed to James Bay on Prevost Island.
The current was going in the opposite direction, so it was a bit more tiring to paddling. After 2.5 hours of paddling we finally arrived our destination. Shortly, after we arrived, Soroosh and Kevin went out to put a crab trap in the water. While everyone was setting up the tent, Deb was busy cooking dinner and feeding us cheese, chips, tomato, avocado, cucumber and bread (left over from lunch). Deb made us mushroom, onion risotto and steak!! It was so delicious, all the snacking before dinner didn't prevent us from finishing everything for dinner. After dinner we had hot chocolate, tea (for Kevin who claims he doesn't eat chocolate because his parents were buried by chocolate) and waffle cookies for dessert. It was unbelievable that we had been eating 4 hours continuously.
It was cloudy on Saturday night, I wasn't able to see any stars in the sky. The ocean view was still very pretty. There were a few boats parked near the island. The night was quiet and peaceful, except we were quite loud :P. I had a very good sleep that night, the tent was exceptionally warm compared to my past experience. In fact, I would say that was probably the warmest night I had ever spent in that tent.
Sunday morning turned out to be warmer and sunnier than expected. Deb prepared us bacon then bacon oil poached eggs while Kevin dared Soroosh to climb a dead tree on a cliff. All my friends are so mature :) and guess what Bear was doing? of course he was busy making his coffee :) I was first helping with cutting green onion with my bone like fingers nails, but finally distracted by the tree climb on the cliff. I also climbed it after Soorosh did. After the relaxing breakfast, we decided to paddle around the island and go fishing as well. We also found out that we didn't catch any crab at all.
We paddled along east shore toward south end of Prevost Island. On the way, we saw lots and lots of seals, they were so cute!!!! Shortly before we landed for lunch, Andre and Deb caught a big fish (it's big by my standard, about 50 cm long). We served pizza and blueberries for lunch. Andre and Deb contributed a watermelon. The shore on this part of island had a very exciting bouldering problem, both Bear and Soroosh tried it. My attempt only went as far as I felt the texture of the rock were way too sharp and cutting into my skin a lot. It was sunny on and off, we sat around and enjoyed the sun until 3:30 pm. We paddled back to James Bay along the west shore. Most of the time the current direction was in favour of the direction we were traveling, therefore the looping around island wasn't super hard.
I prepared pork belly kimchi udon soup for dinner for everyone. By preparing I meant I boiled water and reheated everything. I didn't realize the difficult of serving soup while camping. Luckily we have tones of empty tupperware. I really lack experience in cooking meal for large group of people, never know what the amount is right. As a result, I ended up cooking too much food, we (especially Soroosh) were stuffing our face until we felt an explosion might occur. Andre and Deb cooked us the delicious fresh fish. Soroosh went out and put the fish head in the crab trap as a bait. The dinner felt a lot like a Korean meal, except none of us is Korean :P. Dinner was followed by hot chocolate and dessert again. Everyone of us agreed dessert goes into a different stomach, so we were able to consume dessert even after a more than satisfying dinner.
Monday morning, Kevin and Soroosh got up early to prepare oatmeal for us. Kevin was so nice and made Bear coffee. We finished breakfast early and started packing. We started paddling around shortly before 10 am. We caught 2 crabs with the help of the fish head. On the way back it started to become sunny. We had a bit of water flight with the very mature group of two (Kevin and Soroosh). We arrived Ganges around noon. The ferry we were aiming for departs at 3:25pm, however, the ferry was fully booked, Bear was walking on, so he was the only one ended up on the ferry going directly from Salt Spring Island to Vancouver. We drove to Fulford, lined up for the ferry to go to Vancouver Island. While waiting we had lunch, lunch was everything left in everyone's food bag. Some of the food looked and smelled a bit sketchy. Andre and Soroosh were brave (or hungry) enough to eat everything. We all "drank" the yogurt that was sitting for 3 days.
Fortunately, we got on the 3:50 pm ferry without any problem and arrived Vancouver Island at 4:30 pm. Because the kayak sitting on top of Andre and Deb's car, our vehicle was considered over sized which meant we got to line up in the very short oversized vehicle line and greatly increased our chance to get on the ferry. We were lucky to got on the ferry at 5pm. We arrived Andre and Deb's house before 7 pm, it was 5 min faster than Bear :)
At night, we sat in Andre and Deb's back yard enjoyed bubble tea, delievery Taiwanese food, and Andre cooked us the crab. The long weekend ended pleasantly with a lot of food in my tummy. It was a nice get away from the city. Thank you for the good time everyone!!! For Deb and Andre, thank you for planning the trip and inviting us!
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