On July 4th, we headed back over the bar for Campbell River with Finn full of food, fuel and water. We saw lots of military aircraft coming and going into Comox. Jerome was terribly excited to have a huge Hercules fly right over us. It looked promising in terms of wind for sailing but once out past the harbour, we realized that it was dead calm….again. We motored all the way up in the calm water to Quathiaski Cove on Quadra Island (directly east from Campbell River). It was an incredibly hot but pretty trip up…you could see the fish jumping and there were many large jellyfish. With such calm conditions, there were no sailboats out at all….just lots of fishermen!
Quathiaski Cove or “Q-Cove” as the locals call it, turned out to be an incredibly complicated anchorage. There is a very strong current and many eddies in this cove, the ferry that runs between Q-Cove and Campbell River comes in every hour and stirs the water up even more, a rocky bottom that doesn’t like to grab the anchor and a single power line that supplies power to the entire Quadra Island sitting somewhere down on the bottom of the cove…all of these combine to form a really sketchy place to be. We hoped that we could anchor there and dingy across to Campbell River to get supplies . We did that twice and it wasn’t much fun with the strong current and wind in the Discovery Passage and there is not room in the dingy for a lot of groceries, three people and a dog.
We did explore Q-Cove and found the library, grocery store, Timbr-Mart, bookstores, health food store and garden centre. We even went to the Farmers Market on Saturday and looked at the wide variety of goods for sale (hardly any food though). We were advised by the Information Booth employee to take the nice, easy, 1 mile walk up to April Point Resort to see that bay and get refreshments before we come back. The scenic walk ended up being over 3 miles one way! April Point Resort was a beautiful resort with a great lawn where we looked out over the Discovery Passage and ate our lunch. On the way back, though, Yas decided that she didn’t want to walk anymore. Luckily with the help of both Nancy and Marie, two compassionate islanders, we managed to get Yas back from April Point Resort.
On July 9th, we decided to bring Finn over to Discovery Marina at Campbell River for a temporary stop while we provisioned. It cost us $20 to dock there for an afternoon while we got the mail, bought rope to replace our main sail halyard, got groceries, had showers, took Yas for a walk and got fuel and water. There was no room for us to dock there for the night and even if we wanted to, it would have cost $100 for one night to stay there. Too extravagant for us! (On a special note, the two gentlemen that helped us dock Finn at Discovery Marina were named Kevin and David. Very easy for me to remember!)
After provisioning we headed north against the current for April Point on Quadra Island. Even though the current was against us, we made it and anchored snugly in behind their 
marina. It was a very well protected anchorage and we were the only ones in it. It was the perfect spot to replace our main sail halyard (a big, scary job), do some laundry, Jerome did some kayaking all by himself and we even took Yas ashore and let her stay there for awhile (we could see her the whole time while she slept) and returned later to pick her up. She was quite pleased with herself.
On July 13th, we weighed anchor at April Point to catch the slack through the Discovery Passage and headed for Heriot Bay on the east side of Quadra Island to meet Ray, Dianna, Bella, Jodi and Jen.