We were to leave God’s Pocket on Hurst Island in great anticipation of sailing around Cape Scott, the northern tip of Vancouver Island, before venturing offshore for a couple of days followed by exploring the west coast of Vancouver Island.

Conditions were perfect, a boisterous north westerly blew into Goletas Channel, blue skies and Neptune was smiling on us. At the same time, just a couple hours of sailing south of us, the fleet of about 50 boats participating in the biannual VanIsle360 race crossed the start line in Port Hardy.

With the race fleet bearing down on us, and having a front-row seat to watch some world-class racing action in Goletas Channel, we raised the sails.

Just as the wind filled the big white canvas, our engine quit. So much for a great start to the day. I headed down to check out the engine room and realized that one of the valves on the fuel filter was turned ever so slightly from the correct position, likely the result from a previous filter change. This caused the engine to starve of fuel. Fantastic, now we had the fuel lines full of air instead of diesel.

Bleeding fuel lines at the dock is one thing, doing it in one- to two-metre waves with the wind blowing through the rigging at just under 50 km/h is way more fun though. It took 10 minutes of fiddling around in the engine room with my trusted crew member, Jamie, before the engine was running smoothly.

Not that we needed the engine in this wind, but we thought that perhaps it would be a good idea to have it running again before we really needed it.

In the meantime, the fastest boats of the VanIsle360 race caught up with us. Dragonfly, a mighty catamaran, flew by us and soon disappeared over the horizon.

By the time the rest of the fleet caught up with us, we approached infamous Nahwitti Bar. The ebbing tide pushes against the strong winds that enter Goletas Channel, and a sharp drop in the seabed creates impressive waves. Some of the smaller race boats disappeared behind massive waves while we were beating our way to windward, spray flying over our teak decks.

Clearing the bar and then rounding Cape Scott was the icing on the cake. While the race boats popped their colourful spinnaker sails, we headed offshore, into the sunset. After all, this was an advanced sailing course with an introduction to offshore sailing.

We sailed southwest and passed the Coast Guard cutter shadowing the VanIsle fleet. As we sailed toward open ocean, perhaps it was unsettling for some of our crew to leave the company of other boats and the Coast Guard as they headed for Winter Harbour.

We spent the next two nights more than 100 kilometre offshore of Vancouver Island. The sea was ours, not one other boat around us. Nothing but the blue sea, the sun by day and the stars by night and the wind. It was a wild ride in strong to near gale-force winds. This is exactly what the crew of five intrepid sailors joined this expedition for.