Nanny mo

Hey Y'all!

Guess what's awesome about Nanaimo: they have buldings which have no rain inside! And food, too!

A couple days ago in Chemainus, we bought a broken banjo for 30 dollars at a yard sale, made a bridge and nut for it, and took all the frets off. Fish & Bird now has a mascot! I wish I could show y'all a picture of it. It sounds amazing! Yesterday we boated over to Ladysmith from Chemainus and played a nice little house concert there to a few adults and a bunch of rowdy kids. We met Meg there and she came down to the dock and crammed onto the boat with us for the night.

Today we took off from Ladysmith harbor at about 8:30 in the morning as it started to rain. We got to Nanaimo at around 12:30 and stopped for gas and a burger. We took off again from Nanaimo harbour at about 2 o'clock and actually headed into fairly open waters for the first time (check it out on a map - everything thus far between Mayne and Nanaimo has been pretty sheltered). As we turned our faces to the pounding rain, big grey sky, and huge ocean swells, we heard a cold robotic voice on the VHF issue us a wind warning, and had to quickly weigh our maturity level against the reality of the situation, and how far it was to the next place to moor. We decided at that point to make like Sir Robin and bravely run away away. We pulled back into the harbour at Nanaimo, a ragtag group of soggy sheepdogs. When Adam went to pay for overnight moorage, the wharfinger told him that we'd made the right decision. I'm happy we made that call. We probably would have made it, but we don't really have anything to prove, so we decided to go for definitely won't drown rather than probably won't drown.

Anyway, tomorrow night we're booked to play on Hornby Island. At this point, even if it's a beautiful day tomorrow making it there in time for the show by sailboat isn't really doable. We're considering leaving the sailboat here til we have to sail to Vancouver after Lantzville, and taking a greyhound and a ferry tomorrow morning to Hornby and seeing where we're at from there. Right now all I can tell you is Nanaimo is awesome for its buildings that rain doesn't get into, which have big warm mugs full of coffee. The coffee shop we're in right now has an open mic night tonight which we're gonna play at, and hopefully sell a couple of CDs. So hey, this is what the world has thrown our way for now and we'll see what happens from here.

I sincerely hope you're all a lot less soggy than we are.

See you at Hornby, Courtenay, Lantzville, Vancouver, or a next life!

Taylor