We’ve spent the last five days anchored out front of the Haida village of Daajing Giids relaxing, resupplying, getting our laundry done, and going to the mandatory orientation required for visitors to Gwaii Haanas. The weather has been mostly gray and rainy, though we had sunbreaks in the late morning on Saturday when we attended the very small farmer’s market, and on-and-off sunshine on Monday and Tuesday. The village is lovely and being somewhere with restaurants meant we could take a break from cooking dinner for a few of the days. Blacktail Restaurant provided us with an elegant arrival celebration dinner (the mushroom pasta was everything I hoped for), and the Korean fried chicken style sandwich Steller’s Jay Community Pub served up was spicy, sweet, delicious, and great with a cold beer.

Since the marina in Daajing Giids has garbage dumpsters for visitors to use, as well as safe oil disposal, we took advantage of these, getting rid of all our garbage and recycling as well as changing the oil, oil filter, fuel filter, and raw water impeller on the engine. Since we’ll be off grid for the next four to five weeks, making sure engine issues are unlikely is a very good idea, and we were getting close to the scheduled time do all that work anyway. Doesn’t hurt to do it slightly early.

The Haida Heritage Center, where we took the orientation class, is a beautiful museum of Haida history, art, and culture. We probably would have been happy to spend an additional hour there learning on top of the time we spent, but our taxi driver had returned to pick us up and there were chores to be done back on Kestrel.

At this point we’re provisioned about as good as we think we can be, filled up on fuel, and feeling ready to experience Gwaii Haanas. The next place on our route that we can buy more food will be Winter Harbour in early August on the northwestern coast of Vancouver Island, which is also likely to be the next place we’ll have internet access. This is going to be a fun month.