ZuZu always liked the view from the highest vantage point she could get to. One of her favorite spots was the cap rail on Flying Colours. In the top photo, we’re at Toba Inlet and she’s gazing off to the snow-capped mountains in the distance.

A Requiem To ZuZu (2004-2022).  Every cruising year except one – 2008 when we went to SE Alaska on Cosmo Place, our 42’ Nordic Tug – ZuZu has been our faithful boat cat.  Although she hated almost every minute of being on the boat, she put up with it and cruised along with us like a trooper.  ZuZu was an indoor/outdoor cat, and always wanted to be outside when on the boat – jumping onto the dock and going walkabout every chance she got.  We’d take her for dock walks on a lead, but that wasn’t enough – she wanted to go exploring on her own.

ZuZu is in a better place now – having quietly gone out our pet door at home one night in April and didn’t return.  There’s a small possibility that a predator got her that night (coyote, raccoon, eagle), but we believe she knew it was her time and curled up under a secluded shrub on our property and laid down to die – on her own terms, which is really fitting with her personality.  We miss her terribly, particularly on this year’s cruise . . . when we think she’s just jumped up on the bed in the middle of the night, or when we’re in rough seas (which she hated), or when a noise reminds us of kibbles rustling in her food bowl as she ate.  Thanks, ZuZu, for giving us 18 wonderful years of your life.   

Remember, you can click on any photo to enlarge it (and then use your Back button to return to the blog text.

(In an earlier blog post I did a tribute to Gator (AKA registered name, Emerant’s The Instigator) – June 26, 2017, titled Traveling With Pets.  As with Zuzu, and with Raz a few years earlier (a beautiful tri-color Basenji you see in my earlier blog posts), losing a longtime friend and pet is extremely difficult.  At this point, we just have Jamie on board – our 10-year old Basenji who is the daughter of Gator.  She too is an incredible boat pet, and we really enjoy cruising with her. 

Getting Away From Anacortes.   An often-expressed sentiment from people who spend time on their boat is, “the worst day on the water is better than the best day on land”.  That’s obviously a blustery overstatement, as well as an excuse to justify time away on the boat (and the money you’ve spent on it).  In fact, it’s simply not true.  This summer of 2022, we’ve had some pretty bad days on the water, and the fingers on two hands are needed to count the number of times Kap and I have looked at each other and said, “is it time to just give up on this summer’s cruise and head for home?”.  Each time we quickly got over it and stuck with our cruising plan.  But each time the sentiment was tempting. 

A large part of the problem has been mechanical and electrical cobwebs that grew from keeping Flying Colours in her covered slip at Anacortes from Fall 2019 to June 2022, adversely affecting several of the boat’s systems.  But those cobwebs also seeped into our own brain crevices and muscle memory, creating a surprising impairment for us too.  For Flying Colours, living in salt water is definitely hard on all the systems, but so is inactivity.  It also doesn’t help that Flying Colours is now over 13 years old, with 1,300 hours on her engines, hull, and systems.  And while she is in pristine condition, some things are nearing their life’s end.  And in the fairly remote waters we cruise in, when things break and we lave lapses in our memories, it certainly adds to the challenges.

I’ll get to some of those challenges as I’m writing this post.

Jeff, of Underwater Diving Services and one of our two resident divers at Anacortes Marina, is ready to “dive on Flying Colours” at our slip on the day before our departure. We had a very thick “beard” of seaweed at the waterline of the boat that he cleaned off, and a thick scum of algae all across the bottom that would get washed off as we cruised – but more importantly, our protective – and sacrificial – zincs scattered around the boat’s exterior needed replacing. If the zincs aren’t replaced and wear to nothing, any stray electrical current in the water starts to attack all of the conductive metal on the boat (props, shafts, engine parts). It costs about $700 for Jeff to replace all of the zincs, but this is peanuts compared to the huge costs of replacing boat metal parts.

Preparations.  This was an unusual year.  Over the winter we decided to upgrade our navigation software and pilot house/fly bridge monitors that display course plotting, depth of water below our keel, and radar output.  After years of pussyfooting around the decision, we also decided to swap out our satellite antenna and upgrade our Apple TV devices and other entertainment “boxes”.  As usual, everything related to these tasks was stretched out and took much longer than expected, with the work going on right up to the day before departure.  Which also meant we didn’t get a chance to actually use any of this on our planned shakedown cruise before the main summer cruise.  We also didn’t get our promised “cheat sheets” from our installer on how to use all of the stuff (user guides can never tell you how to use component hardware/software that has to “talk” with various other hardware/software).  

As I write this, we’re now two months into the cruise, and we are still dealing with issues across all of the changes.  Frustrating!  We’re also finding that “things” that worked yesterday don’t work the next time we fire them up, and sometimes they suddenly work an hour later with no changes from us. 

What we learned?  After work of almost any kind is complete, a shakedown cruise is vital – and it must be one that approximates what/where you’re going on your main cruise.

Departing Anacortes, June 15.  We pulled out of Anacortes two weeks later than we hoped – and that always leads to a rushed feeling that the summer cruise was already going to pot.  But we weren’t expecting to return home until early- to mid- September, so it isn’t a big deal. 

The Big Gulp!  First task was to top off Flying Colour’s diesel tanks.  Knowing that diesel was already very expensive in the U.S – what would it be in Canada?  Before leaving Anacortes, we stopped at the Cap Sante Marina fuel dock next door to our marina and got the question answered – $5.98/gal in the U.S. – versus what we later found to be US$7.44 in Canada. 

We have four large fuel tanks, totaling 1,000 gallons, but we’d put the boat to bed back in 2019 with the tanks almost full – the biggest fuel draw during the two+ years was to run the diesel heater to keep the boat from freezing up in the winter.  All told, it took 301 gallons to fill the tanks, and the bill was $1,999.15.  Yes, that’s a big gulp – but when all the tanks are low we’ve seen it pushing $5,000 for a full fill-up.

Flying Colours is at the lower right of this heavily cropped photo taken from the top of the dock ramp at the Port of Friday Harbor Marina. On the other side of the dock from us is huge barge carrying three full size houses on it. The houses were the result of a wealthy Vancouver businessman purchasing three adjacent lots, then loading the existing houses aboard this barge for shipment to somewhere in the San Juan Islands for new owners. We spent one night at Friday Harbor, then headed across to Sidney the next morning.

Short shakedown cruise to Friday Harbor.  The plan was to do a short 3-hour shakedown cruise to the Seattle Yacht Club outstation at Friday Harbor, spend the night, then head over to Sidney (on Vancouver Island) the next day.  But on arrival, every moorage spot on the docks was full.  We called the Port of

Kap at the helm and meeting a Washington State Ferry as we cruised to Friday Harbor on our first day on the water in over two years.

Friday Harbor marina and luckily they had room for us.  Finding the outstation docks full felt like a bad omen, and we were concerned that, after all the local area cruisers had been locked in place for the past two years, maybe this summer would be hell on the water – every place crammed with boaters finally able to get away.  We soon learned this was very true in fact.

Crossing Into Canada.  The big unknown was . . . Canada Customs.  We’ve used Nexus for the past 10+ years, where we just call Customs (Canada Customs when we’re crossing into Canada, or U.S. Customs when we’re returning), answer a few questions, jot down the clearance number, and Bob’s Your Uncle, we’re cleared in.  Since Covid, everything you read gives a different opinion on what it now takes to cross into Canada, and even if you call Canada Customs directly you don’t get a straight answer.  The consensus seemed to be, cross over to Sidney, head straight for the Customs dock at Port Sidney Marina, and it’ll be a face-to-face clearance, with boarding of your boat by a Customs agent almost a certainty.  We were not looking forward to it – and assuming this was true, we had no idea if all the stuff we normally bring into the country would get us crosswise with Customs.  The last thing we wanted to do was risk losing our Nexus cards for 5-10 years because of some screw-up (i.e., not reporting something in our possession and they later find it). 

As we entered Haro Strait, with the U.S./Canada border running down the middle, I could see a large ocean freighter heading towards us from the south.  From our many years of crossing shipping lanes, and knowing how fast these guys travel (at least 18, maybe 22 knots), discretion dictates that you don’t try to outrun them.  I slowed to a crawl, then stopped where it felt safe from the wake he’d leave behind when he passed.  Ahead of us were four other smaller (and stopped) go-fast motor yachts that we’d been following since passing Roche Harbor on San Juan Island.  From their radio discussion it was obvious this was their first ever crossing to Sidney, and three of the skippers were rambling on about whether to shoot across in front of the freighter.  One guy said, in obvious reference to his wife on board, “Sue doesn’t like freighters, so she votes to pour on the coals and get across in front of it”.  Kap and I looked at each other in disbelief, as by now it was obvious they couldn’t make it in time.  The idiots came to their senses and waited it out.

I figured that as soon as the freighter passed, they’d shoot on ahead and slow us down at Canada Customs.  To our surprise, after the freighter passed, all four of them lagged behind, and even though we were only doing 8–9 knots, they slowly fell further and further behind us.  By the time we approached Port Sidney Marina, they were at least 10-15 minutes behind us.

Outside the Port Sidney Marina breakwater we saw a couple of boats already milling around and figured that must be the start of a queue for the Customs dock.  How it worked, though, we hadn’t a clue, as the large rock breakwater was too high to see over.  The next minute explained it, as a young guy from the marina, on the marina radio frequency 66A,  told these two boats that with one boat already on the Customs dock,  they were first and second in the queue.  We made Flying Colours known to him, and he said we were #3 in the queue.

Not long afterwards the four boats from our passing freighter episode arrived and they too were added to the queue, plus another two boats arrived shortly after them.  We now had nine boats in the queue – and the queue outside the breakwater wasn’t moving.  We all bounced around, minute after minute, until more than an hour had gone by.  It was impossible to know what was going on at the Customs dock, so we had no choice but to sit it out. 

Finally, after almost two hours the two boats ahead of us were notified by the Port Sidney Marina guy to proceed to the Customs dock.  It was now almost 3PM.  Again, we waited and waited, growing more and more frustrated.  In the meantime, the four freighter incident boats who came in after us queried the Port Sidney Marina guy about what was going on – and to our surprise he suggested they might want to consider motoring to the Van Isle Marina just a mile to the north to see if they could more quickly get into the Canada Customs queue there.  They must have talked it over on their cell phones as we didn’t hear anything, and the next we knew all four of them headed towards Van Isle.  To add insult, before our own call came in to head for the Customs dock, we heard on the radio that the four boats had successfully cleared at Van Isle.

Within a minute or two of that, we got the call to motor through the breakwater and head for the Customs dock.  When we arrived, one of the two boats ahead of us moved away from the Customs dock and we slid in and took his place.

Expecting to be a boarded for a face-to-face clearing with Canada Customs, it was a huge surprise there were no Customs agents at the dock at all – and instead, the clearance interview was to be by cell  phone – which is exactly how we’ve always cleared for Nexus, when the call was made as we crossed the border and without the multiple hours-long wait. 

The Canada Customs Clearance Number must be displayed on the window while Flying Colours is in Canada.

We then learned that the boat still on the dock had arrived knowing nothing about the ArriveCan phone app that has to be filled out and submitted to Canada Customs at least 36 hours prior to arrival, and they were now in the process of going through that in real time. 

Inside the ArriveCan app, you provide all of your visiting information – arrival/departure dates in Canadian waters, your basic itinerary, passport/Nexus numbers, personal information, your boat information, how much alcohol you have on board (experienced boaters know to tell them you have “our normal ship’s stores” on board and that has worked well for us for 10 years) – and the all-important Covid vaccination QR thingy.

I called the Customs number, and was connected to someone who I believe was probably a Nexus agent working from home due to Covid.  After answering the familiar questions, and within 10 minutes, we were cleared and given our Canada Customs Clearance number to post in the window of Flying Colours.  There was no inspection, there were no questions any different from regular Nexus processing – and no need to worry about being over any limits or with goods that aren’t allowed.  I had worried for naught (and had left a bunch of things behind in Anacortes that I didn’t want to risk our Nexus card over).

Taking Care of Sidney Business.  There were several crucial tasks on our list for Sidney – (1) look into repair of our davit (the motorized crane on the fly bridge deck that’s used to raise and lower the dinghy; (2) recertify (and fill) an expired BBQ propane tank or purchase a new one; (3) provision with fresh galley items that aren’t allowed across the border; (4) get a rental car and drive down to Victoria to stock up on some very favorite popcorn from a shop called Kernels that Kap really likes, and (5) lunch/dinner at our favorite Sidney restaurant – the nearby Stonehouse Pub in Canoe Cove. 

Task #1 proved far easier than we expected.  We were braced for taking Flying Colours over to the Van Isle marina area where Delta Marine is located (the Fleming warranty yard in Sidney) and then spend several days while the problem was worked on.  Instead, when we drove over for lunch in a rental car, we were surprised that two davit expert technicians were dispatched to follow us back to Port Sidney Marina to look at our problem.  In less than 10 minutes they had sorted out the problem – and then helped Kap with some tutorial training on our new navigation software that she was having problems with.

Task #2 was equally easy.  One of the guys from Delta Marine knew of an obscure propane service company located halfway between Sidney and Victoria where an old guy at his residence runs a 3-person company called Vancouver Island Propane Services – and he was known to certify U.S.-inspected propane tanks with a new B.C. certification – which no one else will do. 

The background on this – in brief.  We discovered the day before departure that the tank test certification on our two pony beer keg-sized propane tanks on Flying Colours had expired in 2019.  To hold off departure now would cost us at least a week, maybe two weeks – but with the tanks out of certification, no one in Canada will fill them.  We thought the likelihood of both tanks being full was high, and if so, they would last through the summer.  But on our first boat dinner at Friday Harbor, when Kap lit the BBQ from the tank that was still hooked up to the hoses, it fizzled empty in less than five minutes (from use on our last cruise, in 2019).  Not giving in to the situation, we figured the other tank was still full, and if we could just get over to Delta Marine in Sidney we could buy a replacement tank.  Not so – these tanks are specialty RV tanks, expensive, and hard to find.  After hearing that, we headed for the Vancouver Island propane guy, and sure enough he said he’d get the empty tank certified and back to us by next Wednesday (five days from now – leaving the question, what would we do for those five days?). 

Task #3 is an old standby on every trip to Sidney – provisioning.  Sidney has been our standard provisioning stopover – to pick up all of the food items we can’t bring across the border – fresh fruits and vegetables, topping off our wine, spirits and liquor cabinet supply, and a lot of fresh meat that we don’t want to have confiscated if Canada Customs gets frisky.  Over the course of trip after trip to the store, it’s a wonder flying Colours will float after we load up the galley fridge/freezer, a built-in freezer in the boat’s cockpit, and a very large ice chest that we carry on the dinghy deck.

Task #4 is our most pleasurable – lunch at Stonehouse Pub in nearby Canoe Cove.  It’s very close to the Fleming maintenance facility, Delta Marine, and we always combine lunch there with whatever business we have to do at the marine yard – this time to see about the davit work.  But once at the pub we were disappointed to find they had taken their excellent BBQ pork ribs off the menu due to pandemic-induced difficulty in sourcing them.  They still had their excellent appetizer of Sambucca Prawns (a boat dish full of broiled prawns smothered in a Sambucca butter sauce), and Coconut Prawns – both of which we basically made a meal of in the absence of BBQ ribs. 

Quick Trip To Ganges.  The best use of our time for the 5-day wait for our propane tank fix was to pop up to Ganges to get some things done there.  There are some good things to do in Ganges, most involving food (and it used to be our primary wine provisioning spot).  Before I talk about that, though, a tidbit about the past history of Salt Spring Island might be in order.

Vietnam Draft Dodgers.  Between 1965 and 1975, when the Vietnam War military draft was in full swing in the U.S., the government estimates that upwards of 40,000 draft-aged U.S. males fled across the Canadian border to evade the draft – about a quarter of them to British Columbia.  The reason?  The Canadian government labeled draft dodgers as immigrants, rather than refugees – and didn’t refuse them entry, arrest them, or send them back home. 

At the time, Salt Spring Island was already a hippie haven, and those trying to escape the draft fit right in.  Roughly half stayed after the war.  A pardon was granted to draft dodgers and military deserters in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter.  (In 2007 during our first summer’s cruising, and before I knew anything about this, I visited a chiropractor in Ganges for a serious back pain issue that had cropped up out of nowhere.  In the course of treatment he mentioned that he was a U.S. draft dodger who came to Ganges in 1970 – and wouldn’t live anywhere else.)  One Canadian government report stated that those who stayed make up “the largest, best-educated group this country ever received” – a very high percentage of the draft dodgers were college educated and highly intelligent war protesters that resulted in a brain drain from the U.S. to Canada.

What’s So Special For Us About Ganges?  Well, first and foremost is a gelato cake that we get at an ice cream shop called Harland’s.  It’s made at a “factory” called Salt Spring Gelato on the outskirts of Ganges (and supplied to four or five ice cream shops around the Gulf Islands).  This multi-layer gelato cake (Kap calls it a pie, as that’s more the shape and size of it), called the Galiano Cake, is Kap’s favorite – they have 10 different versions of gelato cake.  On their website is a YouTube video that shows, step-by-step, how it’s made – at   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5cASdrnqP8&list=PLRzPoAgXPXgHJMrYRHWGB881KchktENpV&index=4.  It starts with an Oreo cookie crust, then a layer of Belgian chocolate gelato, followed by salted caramel slathered on, then a layer of whipped cream all around to frost it, a layer of dark chocolate syrup to decorate it, and a final sprinkling of toffee bits.  Kap always orders it 2-3 days ahead of our arrival to ensure one is available at Harlans and her first task is to pick it up and bring it back to Flying Colours.  There, she cuts it into about eight pie wedges, wraps each in a good layering of Saran wrap, and freezes it.  Throughout the cruise, the gelato cake will be in our dessert rotation.  At cruise end, a return trip to Ganges is made, to get a Galiano cake to take home.

The 2nd order of Ganges business is why our stay always must be at least two nights – dinner at Auntie Pesto’s one night, and House Piccolo restaurant the other night.  I did a special coverage of both restaurants in my June 24, 2019 blog post, Summer 2019 Cruise – Sidney, Ganges, and Garden Bay, so I’d only be repeating myself if I did it again.  Dinner at both places was again worth the trip to Ganges.

Cruise To Ovens Island.  After our Ganges business was complete, we made a quick trip back to Sidney, collected the propane tank, and then continued our cruising north – with plans for an overnight stop at the tiny, secluded – and private – SYC outstation at Ovens Island (near Ladysmith). 

As you can see on the annotated map at left (which I readily admit has far too much detail, and absolutely needs to be enlarged to make any sense out of it) –Sidney is at the bottom middle and Ovens Island is at the upper left.  I pointed out the B.C. Ferries terminal at Tsawwassen, which is 20 miles south of Vancouver, so this illustrates just how far the U.S./Canada border drops south as it wraps around the southern end of Vancouver Island. 

Shown in black lines on the left half of the map, our route north from Sidney skirted around the west side of Salt Spring Island.  With the current running in our favor (i.e., flooding to the north, it gave us a “push” of 3-4 extra knots speed through the swirling waters of Sansum Narrows.  We consider this “the back way” to Ovens Island, and from Sidney it’s probably the shorter route by a small bit.  From there it’s a straight shot to the NW to Ovens Island. 

The photo shows just how small the Ovens Island outstation is – maybe 200’ wide, and 1,000’ long, with dock space – that you can see on the right when you click on the photo to enlarge it – for about 10 SYC member boats – depending on boat length.

Ovens Island and On To Garden Bay. 

Just after midday we tied onto the completely empty dock at the secluded SYC Ovens Island outstation.  We always hope for it to be empty, as the seclusion is exactly what we’re looking for.  A month later, the dock that you see on the right of the photo will be completely full, cruisers taking a stroll around the island for exercise on a rugged trail, kids playing on the island, and lots of dog walking.  Now, though, we knew we’d have it all to ourselves.  

Because their squeaky call is so unmasculine for such a majestic bird, we can always tell when an eagle is in the area.  We have always listened carefully for this to ensure that ZuZu wasn’t about to be grabbed up as lunch. This one was in a tree just above us on the dock at Ovens Island.  We never tire of looking at eagles in the wild.

As idyllic as Ovens Island is, there’s an undercurrent of trouble ahead for the SYC’s ownership of it.  The SYC originally purchased the island about 20 years ago from the First Nations band that lives along the shore to the right of the photo, and for some reason a group within the band have now decided they don’t want to honor the sale, and are beginning to exhibit their perspective (remember, “band” is the First Nations term that we call a “tribe” in the U.S.).  If you look closely at the photo (enlarged), you can make out an aluminum boat at the inside far end of the dock.  It had paint markings on it indicating it was once a scuba diving boat – and not knowing if someone was trespassing on the SYC’s property, I called the outstation manager to let him know.  He indicated, yes, he was aware of the boat being on the dock, and that it’s owned by an elder member of the band who was given permission to moor the boat there over the winter months (when the SYC isn’t using Ovens at all) – with the stipulation that he had to remove it by May 1 when our members would be arriving.  Well, here it was now almost the beginning of July and the boat was still here – and our outstation manager said that the band elder seemed to be backing out on his agreement – maybe as a way of defying us.  Also, later in the day a canoe with two young First Nations guys in it showed up at the opposite end of the dock from us, got out with fishing poles and dropped their hooks into the water off the dock.  They certainly weren’t causing any specific problem, but their presence was definitely trespassing on property that is clearly marked as private and for the use only of SYC members.  When we later mentioned this to an SYC member “in the know”, he said these two boys show up almost every day, again as a way to show defiance of our ownership of the dock. 

After a quiet and peaceful night, we departed Ovens Island at noon the next day, timed for the slack at Gabriola Passage and our transit across the Strait of Georgia – headed for the SYC outstation at Garden Bay (in Pender Harbour near the top of the beautiful B.C. Sunshine Coast.  With extra time to spare before slack, we dawdled along at 7 knots, enjoying a bright summer-like sky and a moderate temperature.  From a recent spring tide – which always pulls stray logs off the beach at high tide – we had to watch carefully for an abundance of logs in the water. 

We’ve had one or two “exciting” rides through Gabriola, when we got antsy and decided to tempt fate by entering the tricky and S-curvy passage.  It taught us not to do it again.  This time, as we approached the bay on the west side of Gabriola Passage, Kap let out some expletives with the news that our new navigation software was having problems – the screen image jumping up and down every 1-2 seconds, the boat icon that indicated our position on the screen was frozen, and we had no depth indications.  After fiddling for 10 minutes to see if she could resolve it, she turned 180 degrees to head for safer water.  We then called our technical contact at Delta Marine in Sidney to see if he could help troubleshoot – and sure enough, within about a minute he concluded that the main PC behind all of our navigation software needed to be rebooted, as it had somehow lost access to our GPS satellite antenna.  That solved the problem and we turned around to head a second time for Gabriola Passage – totally pissed that this again was one of those situations where the new upgrades made in the spring were not proving reliable. 

A day later, most of the boats on the dock headed either north to Cortes Bay, or west across the Strait of Georgia on their way south, leaving only us and Couverden on the docks for a day or two before it began filling up again.

Once through Gabriola Passage we set a diagonal course across the Strait of Georgia for the SYC Garden Bay outstation in Pender Harbour on British Columbia’s wonderful Sunshine Coast, on the mainland and north of Vancouver.  All was right with the world – the Whiskey Gulf (WG) Canada/U.S. navy’s joint underwater torpedo test range was “not active” and we could transit right through it.  There were no B.C. Ferries to harass us on their course from Nanaimo to Vancouver.  And the water all the way across the Strait was quite benign. 

We arrived at Garden Bay at 6:30PM – the Strait of Georgia is 15 miles wide at its narrowest point and 135 miles long, and our transit to Garden Bay on a diagonal course was around 40 miles.  There were 3-4 other boats, including our first meet-up with our cruising friends, Steve and Andrea (Shirley) aboard Couverden, a Fleming 55 similar to Flying Colours. 

One day I received an e-mail from Vicky, the SYC full-time outstation manager, attached with this photo from the local newspaper, the Coast Reporter. It was taken the day before of an Orca surfacing and blowing just off the dock at Madeira Park, the small village across the bay where we go by dinghy to shop for groceries and spirits. In the far background is Flying Colours on the dock at the SYC outstation, with a slight glimpse of Couverden behind us. The SYC clubhouse is to the right of the photo – the house behind Flying Colours was where our famous neighbor, Edith Iglauer – author of articles for The New Yorker magazine, and the book, Fishing With John that was made into a move titled Navigating the Heart (2000) – and not to be confused with the TV miniseries of the book’s name of 1991. Ms Iglauer died in 2019 just shy by two weeks of her 102nd birthday.

I’ve covered the Garden Bay outstation in great detail on previous blog posts, and won’t do so again – except to say that we had a very good seven day R&R visit here. 

A/C Failure.  So far on this cruise the weather had been unseasonably cool – never getting above the mid-high 60° mark – all the while we were hearing about scorching temps in the rest of North America.  Then suddenly, we got two days in the 80’s and we were in misery – due to one of our air conditioning zones going out.  We have a system called CruiseAir on board, and it has a control unit that feeds cool air to the salon/galley, another control unit to the pilot house (where we drive from), and a third and fourth to our master and guest staterooms – each controlled by a wall-mounted thermostat.  Well, as luck would have it, the control unit for the most important one – the master berth – failed on those hottest of days.  It was absolutely miserable at night.  Kap tried everything, including swapping out the thermostat from the guest to the master stateroom, but with no success.  A call to our tech guy in Sidney the next day gave us some troubleshooting that narrowed the problem down to a circuit board on the master stateroom control unit in the lazarette.  The recommended solution was to swap out the circuit board for the guest stateroom for the one in our master stateroom.  But Kap didn’t feel comfortable doing that herself – as her last experience with working on a circuit board was with our WhisperGen, and a screwdriver “touch” to a mounting nut had shorted out the whole board, frying our whole control unit.  We decided to track down a mechanic/electrician in Campbell River, and make that our next stop after Cortes Bay.

Garden Bay to Cortes Bay.  When we departed Garden Bay a week later, the outstation was completely full with SYC boats, and it was obvious that the summer rush of cruisers from Seattle had begun – and maybe more so, this being the first year of the U.S. Canada border being open since early 2020.  We were not overjoyed at what we might find at the Cortes Bay outstation, as this is the crown jewel of SYC outstations, being the “gateway” to the incredibly popular Desolation Sound area. 

Nevertheless, Kap timed our departure at 1PM to catch the best current that would give us a push along Malaspina Strait for the 5-hour, 50 mile cruise northward.  The only real town we’d pass on this leg would be Powell River – about midway.  This city, with a population of just over 13,000 is an old (early 1900s) pulp town and built around the largest “pulp and paper mill in the world . . . in its prime, one in every 25 newspapers in the world was printed on paper from the Powell River mill. However, since then it has significantly cut back on production” (quoted from the Wikipedia article on Powell River).  The only serious hazard to watch for along the route is the hourly passenger/car ferry from Powell River across the Strait of Georgia to Comox on Vancouver Island. 

Nothing new to write about for the Cortes Bay outstation.  We had a quiet and relaxing stay of 10 days, moored at our favorite dock spot at the end of the main dock, tied stern out so that we could sit in the cockpit over cocktails and look out over the bay – and simply didn’t do much.  Along the way the outstation filled to capacity, and the last night there we had to accept another SYC member who “rafted” – tied alongside us – which is an SYC requirement at all outstations when they’re full.

Side Jaunt To Campbell River.  On 10AM on July 10^th,  we departed Cortes Bay for the 2-hour run over to the Discovery Harbour Marina at Campbell River to have our A/C circuit boards swapped.  Our tech friend at Delta Marine in Sidney had arm twisted a guy he knew at Ocean Pacific Marine boatyard in Campbell River to relent on his claim of no time open in their schedule until late August!  He agreed to send a guy down to the docks the morning after our arrival to make the switch.

True to their word, as 10AM the next morning the shop electrician was aboard Flying Colours.  He was a big guy, and how he squeezed into the tight confines of our lazarette is beyond me – but he did, and within an hour he had the boards swapped.  Kap started the A/C unit in the master berth, and it worked like a champ.  (Did I mention that more things seem to be going wrong on our cruise this year?  Stay tuned.)

Besides the A/C fix, the other highlight of being in Campbell River was dinner at the Harbour Grill.  It overlooks the marina we were staying at, only a hundred feet from the dock ramp where we were moored.  In a modest setting, they offer a classic French Onion soup, along with my favorite, a New York Steak au poivre with a green peppercorn/cognac/cream sauce.  It doesn’t get much better than that for me.

Gorge Harbour  – our next stop after Campbell River.  We slipped our moorage lines Campbell River on Wednesday, July 13^th for the relatively short two-hour cruise across the top end of the Strait of Georgia to the tucked-away inlet accessible via a narrow steep-walled gorge entrance.  We had a 2-night moorage reservation, with a primary plan to have dinner one night at the Floathouse Restaurant – and yes, it’s named that because the restaurant building is an old float house that, having finished it’s previous life as a floating home somewhere in the area, was hauled a couple hundred feet up the hillside, and with the float logs still visible beneath it, turned into a great restaurant (pictured above).  We always have a great meal here – Kap typically has their salmon special and I always have the striploin (what we call a NY steak in the States). 

Eating Well During Our Summer Cruise.  As part of our departure preparations, we packed the two freezers and a very large ice chest on board Flying Colours chock full of pre-prepared dinner/lunch items – Tandoori chicken/butter sauce/rice for an authentic Indian-style Butter Chicken, all the fixin’s I need for steak au poivre and Steak Diane, ten NY strip steaks (me) and ten beefalo tenderloin steaks (Kap) on the BBQ, pork schnitzel (Kap) and cordon bleu (me), a very special Kümmel Chicken dish, chicken sate with a Thai peanut sauce, a great spaghetti that Kap makes, and several shrimp dishes that feature the shrimp we’d pull up later in the cruise.  And then favorite restaurants at various places we’d stop at.

This sunset photo was cadged from the Dent Island website, looking up Cordero Channel towards Blind Channel.

Gorge Harbour to Blind Channel Resort.  From the Desolation Sound area, many cruisers heading to The Broughton’s will overnight at the Dent Island Lodge, a private luxury retreat that was built as a fishing enclave by the Nordstrom family of Seattle “back in the day”.  When the Nordstrom family discovered it wasn’t being used as much as it should be to justify the expense, they decided to turn it into a high-end commercial fishing lodge, upscale lodge restaurant, and a fleet of 26’ four-pack, go-fast fishing boats with fishing guides.  Their website price list describes an all-inclusive 2-night package (per person) at C$2,100 (US$1,630), including all meals, liquor, and lodging, plus 16 hours of guided fishing.  Moorage at the dock is over C$5/foot, which is more than 2x the cost at the next highest priced facility anywhere in the area.  For non-lodge guests, the fixed price menu at the lodge dining room is C$140/person.  We’re not skinflints, but an absolutely excellent meal for two at Gorge Harbour or Blind Channel is considerably less than the price for one person at Dent Lodge.  We’ve stopped at Dent Lodge 3-4 times on the way north or south, but not for several years now – the clientele of the “big boats”, the ones over 85’, are just too hotsy-totsy for our tastes, and while the service at the lodge dining room is truly Nordstrom-style, the food hasn’t been all that great the past couple of times.  So, no, we didn’t stop here on our trip north this time, but instead, passed it by and continued on to Blind Channel Resort about eight miles further on Cordero Channel.    

I wrote an extensive blog report on Blind Channel way back on July 8, 2011, titled April Point to Blind Channel, https://www.ronf-flyingcolours.com/2011/07/april-point-to-blind-channel/, so it doesn’t make sense to repeat it here.  Suffice it to say that we enjoyed an excellent dinner at the Cedar Post Inn – salmon for Kap, and their excellent schnitzel for me – and were treated like old friends by the 3-generation owners and the staff that we’ve known from the past.

One more detail on this leg of the journey – the three “rapids” that you have to transit, Yuculta Rapids, Gillard Passage, and Dent Rapids are “serious” stretches of water that you absolutely must respect.  All three are passageways that are narrow, and a full flood or full ebb tidal flow here sets up these rpaids.  They aren’t at all like the wild and roiling rapids that you see thrill-seeking kayakers going through, but rather are powerful eddying currents that result from relatively shallow underwater features when the water flow is also restricted by narrowing.  It’s really hard to explain, and even more difficult to visualize with a photo, so I suggest that you go to a YouTube video of the Yuculta Rapids at full flood (or ebb), at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVlJTKTW6rQ.  No one in their right mind would take a cruising boat like Flying Colours into these rapids at full flood or ebb.  (This YouTube video was filmed from a go-fast fishing boat, and you should read the story about a Dent Island client on one of their fishing boats who got flipped into the Devil’s Hole at Dent Rapids, never to be seen again – in my blog post, Cortes Bay to Port McNeill, August 26, 2010, at https://www.ronf-flyingcolours.com/2010/08/cortes-bay-to-port-mcneill/.)  The only safe way to traverse rapids such as these is at, or very close to, slack tide – and obviously these yo-yo’s who filmed this weren’t.

Actually, I have got a better one for you that you absolutely must see – a tugboat towing a barge through the Skookumchuck Narrows (just north of the Garden Bay SYC outstation).  Why an experienced tugboat captain would take a loaded barge through these narrows outside of slack time is beyond me, but this guy did, and his very large tugboat rolled over in the rapids.  The captain was saved by a kayaker who was with a bunch of thrill-seeking kayakers who come here for the standing wave that’s created at this narrows.  You can see it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=QEfUblSDzww. 

Blind Channel To Cullen Harbour (Outside Booker Lagoon).  Our reservation for Blind Channel was for two nights, but before dinner on our arrival day, Kap listened carefully to the weather report on the radio and reached the conclusion that we should leave early the next morning.  I quickly had our reservation changed, and after dinner we made all necessary preparations for an early morning departure. 

Every weather indication was that we’d have fog on our trip up Johnstone Strait, which didn’t thrill us at all.  But with the forecast for strong winds for the following three days – and against the current, which means rough seas – we didn’t feel we had a choice but to leave when we did. 

At just after 6AM the following  morning, when we pulled out into Mayne Passage from Blind Channel Resort, though, the skies were patchy with clouds and no sign of fog.  In fact, we didn’t see any fog all day, which pleased us greatly.  And another lucky factor – the wind was with us all the way, so we had a bit of a push for the long, six hour slog north on Johnstone Strait. 

At just after 12:30 noon we arrived at Cullen Harbour (outside Booker Lagoon),  Kap had calculated slack on the lagoon entrance at 2:30PM, and after nosing into the passage and seeing that the current was still running pretty strong, we decided to anchor for a couple of hours in Cullen to wait it out.  With a blow expected for the next day, we contemplated staying put in Cullen and going in and out of the lagoon with the dinghy to set/pull our prawn pots, but after kicking the idea around we decided to go into the lagoon and stay there.

The next morning when we transited the entrance at slack tide, we were somewhat surprised to find the lagoon completely empty of boats, although there was a single prawn pot buoy that must have been from one of the boats anchored out in Cullen. 

Kap headed straight across the lagoon to a small bay on the north side.  (Note:  The chart at left of Booker Lagoon was from an earlier post of July 20, 2011, titled Prawning in Beaver Inlet and Booker Lagoon, at https://www.ronf-flyingcolours.com/2011/07/prawning-in-beaver-inlet-and-booker-lagoon/. ) On this current visit, instead of arriving from Pierre’s Echo Bay Marina as the annotated chart shows, we came in from the SW (lower left corner) on Johnstone Strait.  And instead of anchoring in the west bay, we anchored on the north side, directly across from the entrance.  Cullen Harbour is the blue water behind the red line snaking into Booker Lagoon.  We had never anchored in this area, and Kap thought it might be an easier location to take Jamie for her thrice-daily trek ashore for her “bidness” (turned out not to be true at all).

We set our anchor in 40’ of water, and started to settle in for what we hoped would be a week of good prawning.  We also patted ourselves on the back for a flawless anchoring, and importantly, a smooth setting of the snubber (a seemingly easy task, but with a couple of technicalities that always give us problems – we now have those worked out).  For a good explanation of the snubber, you can read about it in a blog post on July 6, 2014, titled Roseanne Roseannadanna!, at https://www.ronf-flyingcolours.com/2014/07/roseanne-roseannadanna/.

In the waning afternoon of this first day inside Booker Lagoon, Kap decided there was too much work to be done to get the prawn pots set up and ready to put in the water, so we opted for an early Happy Hour instead.

Next morning Kap worked on the prawn pots and got the pot puller installed on the dinghy.  Mid morning she announced that the motor on the pot puller wouldn’t run, which was a major problem, as there’s no way we can set and pull our pots in 300’ of water without the electric puller.  We both looked things over six ways to Sunday, but no cigar.  We concluded the small sealed motor that was now almost 10 years old had probably failed.  After talking it over we decided there was nothing to do but pull up the anchor and head for Port McNeill where we could hopefully get it repaired or replaced at the large marine store in town. 

Midday slack to exit the lagoon was coming up in an hour, so we needed to work fast.  We hauled the dinghy up to the upper deck on Flying Colours, and brought in the snubber. 

Next up was the anchor.  Working with the handheld windlass control at the bow while Kap was at the helm to keep the boat facing in the direction the chain/anchor were on the bottom, I pulled in the muddy and seaweed covered chain that had been our 3x “scope”.  At 40’ remaining, the anchor should be leaving the bottom – but as I tried to lift it, the windlass motor groaned and slowed under a tremendous strain.  I let up on it to give it a break, then tried again . . . and again.  I figured the anchor was heavily imbedded in muck and mud on the bottom.  Finally, it gave way and I could tell it had started to rise.

As the anchor reached the surface, I was horrified to see that it was also bringing up a large drum – about a 50 gallon-size drum (later I concluded it might have been a metal float used to create the net corral for the fish farm, and then sunk when the Atlantic salmon farm was torn out),   When I saw the reflection of the anchor near the surface, I thought, “Holy shit – have I pulled up a large rock with the anchor?”, as it was gray and studded with barnacles.  As it got to the surface, the weight of whatever it was simply brought the windlass to a halt.  I called Kap forward to see it, but we were both too startled to take a photo of it.

What to do now?!!!!  Running the windlass up and down a few times, I tried to shake the barrel off the anchor – but no success.  I tried rapidly lowering the anchor a couple of times, but again, with no success.  The anchor was indelibly stuck in the end of the barrel.  I lowered the anchor back down to the bottom and let it sit there while we figured out what to do next. 

We knew with this catastrophe that we’d miss the midday slack.  Booker Lagoon is so remote that we had no cell coverage or internet access, and we didn’t think there were any other boats in the lagoon.  What a helpless feeling. 

But . . . I have a satellite phone that I purchase a low volume SIM card for each year just for such emergencies – and for making moorage and restaurant reservations when we’re off the grid.  I spent the next hour calling to arrange some emergency support from a Canadian boating organization called VesselAssist – who have a reciprocal agreement with BoatUS that we have an emergency boat tow/rescue subscription with. 

After we got assistance arranged, I decided to try lifting the anchor/barrel to the surface one more time.  Kap got the engines started, and I worked the remote for the windlass/anchor.  This time the chain came up almost entirely clean from mud, and with about 150′ of chain back on board, I could tell from the jangliness of the chain that all of the chain was off the bottom.  At first, the windlass had to really work hard for the next few feet, but then it became easier.  When the anchor reached the surface, the drum was gone!  How it came free we’ll never know, but luckily it did.

We called off the rescue.  With the chain up, we motored across the lagoon, and at the east end of the lagoon we found our old anchoring spot that we’ve used several times in the past, and settled in for a several hour wait for the next slack at 6PM.  Late afternoon we then motored out through the lagoon passage and re-anchored in Cullen Harbour just outside Booker Lagoon to spend the night before we could head for Port McNeill in the morning.  Whew!  What a mis-adventure!  

In the next post I’ll continue this saga of mis-adventures, as they didn’t stop here. Stay tuned.

Ron

At first glance you probably won’t notice any/many appearance or function differences in the Flying Colours cruising blog.  But under the covers it’s almost a whole new site.  Over the past two months I’ve had two WordPress and internet site experts working on the software behind the blog, and they’ve done a bang-up job of bringing it up to date. 

As you can see from the Archives at right, my blog began in May, 2010, which is essentially the Dark Ages in today’s software world.  To get the site up and running back then I hired the brother-in-law of a young woman who worked in our marketing department at our old software company – a guy who knew what he was doing, but was very troublesome to work with – and he quit just as the project ended and I lost any further support from him.  No matter . . . the site ran just fine, and I continued for all these years without so much as a hint of problem. 

Then last fall, we had our totally cruise-less summer of 2020 due to Covid-19 and the closing of the U.S./Canadian border. We didn’t cruise at all for the first time in over 10 years and I hadn’t made any blog posts for the entire year.  A few months ago I attempted to log into the blog.  What the . . . ?  All I got was a blank white screen, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the blog to open.     

Dang!  I felt like a “former guy” who had just been dumped by Twitter and Facebook!  But how could that be?  For these past 12 years, I’ve just been peacefully trippin’ along, trying not to offend anyone with my writing, and staying within the bounds of civility and truthfulness. 

So . . . could my ISP have decided that I was past my prime?  Did one of the Russian bots that have been relentlessly trying to break into my blog finally succeed (honestly, every time I posted a new blog, they would wake up and dozens of bot attempts would show up, trying to wiggle into my blog code – as an access point to get across to something much larger – like the pipeline ransomware fiasco going on right now on the East Coast).  I had no idea which – of a dozen possibilities – might have triggered this.

When I couldn’t get anywhere with the problem, I enlisted the aid of my good friend, Dave Roeser. a former software developer at my old software company (Mainstar), and who now runs his own PC consulting company to help bloggers like me track how many readers are coming to their site (and help them get more readers).  Dave quickly identified the problem – just about every feature and function in my blog was outdated and now unsupported (“deprecated” is the word he loves to use) by WordPress and my internet service provider. 

My WordPress “theme” – the backbone of the blog that controls the format of it – was no longer supported, the home page photo slideshow that rotates through my favorite cruising photos is not supported, and the software code that my original blog site developer wrote to oversee and manage the user login function was written in a language version that was no longer supported.  In short, my blog was toast!

The last thing I wanted to do was spend a bunch of money getting the blog site totally redesigned and back up to snuff.  At the same time, I didn’t want to give it up completely.  So Dave gave me a suggestion that I talk with a lady named Katie Zech who recently started her own WordPress design and support company (Zech Design, www.zechdesign.com), and she proposed a plan that I felt comfortable with, not only in price, but the scope of what she would do (i.e., not redesign the whole world, when what I really wanted was to get all that I previously had back up and running on fully supported software).  Katie began her work in mid-March, and now at May 13^th she has handed it back to me and I feel comfortable with how it runs. This blog post is a test of that.

As you can see, we dumped the idea of requiring everyone to obtain a username with a password for access to the site. Making that decision was a big bugaboo, as it meant I had to reconcile to the fact that people I don’t know and trust will have access to it.  Instead, anyone can now read it (if they can find it).  If they like what they see, users can now Subscribe to the blog, simply by filling in their e-mail address in the Subscribe box at lower right, and they will then get notice of each new blog post that I make.  Subscribing will cause the blog to send a confirmation e-mail to the subscriber’s e-mail address – and once they click on the confirmation it will tell the person they’ve successfully subscribed.  From that point on, each new blog post that I put up will cause a “newsletter” e-mail to be sent to the entire subscriber list to notify them of the new post.  They can either read the blog post directly from that e-mail, or sign in to www.ronf-flyingcolours.com to have access to the full site.

Importantly, there’s now a working Contact tab (at the top right of the home page), where any reader can send a message to me, telling me I’m full of it, or whatever they want to write (and if I don’t like it I have the right not to read it) – and the contact messages are available only to me. 

The only feature that’s not working correctly at this point is the Current Location feature.  Yes, if you click on it you’ll get a map of where I am, but its currently the SPOT map, not the really good Google Map. It defaults to a street map, and you have to manually click on the Map icon (third from the top on the right side) to get it into Satellite mode. Google Maps changed the API “key” necessary to transfer the SPOT map over to Google Maps, and we don’t have that code working yet. 

Even though we haven’t had Flying Colours out on the water much in the past 18 (or so) months, we’ve done a couple of cruises down and back to Seattle for periodic maintenance, and these always produce enough good adventures – and photos – that in a couple of weeks I’ll have my first honest blog post since July, 2019.  Stay tuned.

I hope all of you are well, and have stayed away from Covid-19.

Ron

Nevertheless, being at the Cortes Bay SYC outstation was a good, quiet time, and treating it as if it was our summer’s destination was great.  Normally, it’s just a quick stop on our way north or south, but this time we just hung around and took in this great spot.  By this time in July we expected Cortes to be crowded with SYC cruisers, but some nights we only had 2-3 boats moored, and the docks felt empty (which was just great in our minds).

The Seattle Yacht Club and the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club each have outstations at Cortes Bay – on opposite sides of the bay at the western end. This map makes Cortes Island look big and heavily populated; in fact, the permanent resident population of the entire island is 1,035. Kap’s run was a 19.5 mile out-and-return, to a tiny (half dozen building) settlement named Whaletown. The General Store there has a Canadian Post Office inside. We’ve spent quite a bit of time in Gorge Harbour over the years – mostly at anchor – right about where you see the tiny anchor symbol. There’s a wonderful restaurant on shore, called the FloatHouse Restaurant, very good food, and it’s one of the primary reasons we like to spend time at Gorge Harbour. On the eastern side of Cortes is a wonderful secluded cove, called Squirrel Cove – we’ve only been there once, in 2006, when we spent a couple of nights in this incredibly picturesque cove aboard Paula and Jim’s sailboat, Apt. 5 (about a month after we sold Mainstar). We also met up (rafted) with Paula and Jim in Gorge Harbour for a night in 2007, but it was short-lived, as our Basenji, Gator, ruptured a cervical disc just standing beside me in the cockpit of Cosmo Place, and we had to race over to Campbell River to a vet, and then flew him home for treatment. There’s a halfway decent grocery store at Squirrel Cove, but from Cortes Bay, the only reasonable way to get there is by a 30-minute dinghy ride in fairly open water around Mary Point on the SE tip. We’ve done it twice in our 11’ dinghy, and I don’t hanker to do it a third time.

On Tuesday, Kap “went to the Post Office” and back . . . not that she had anything to mail, mind you, but it just happened to be the furthest point on a 19.5 mile out-and-return practice run for her upcoming marathon.  I have to say, she came back a bit whupped!  Cortes Island is nothing but hills – so it was up and down the entire way, with hardly any flat terrain along the way.  Her Fitbit-type watch recorded that her elevation gain throughout the run was the equivalent of 156 office tower floors.  To put that into perspective, the Columbia Tower in downtown Seattle is 76 floors tall (until 2017 it was the tallest building on the West Coast), and Taipei Tower – which we visited in Taiwan when Flying Colours was being built – is 101 floors!  FYI, in training for a marathon run, you never do the full marathon length of 26.2 miles – instead she’s trying to do an average of 30-40 miles per week – and the largest focus is on getting her pace right.  To maintain the necessary stamina for a run of this distance she needs to slow down just a bit from her pace doing 12+ half marathons for several years.  That’s not as easy as it sounds (as if I’d know, which I don’t).

Don’t forget – you can click on any photo in the post to enlarge it.

Yes, the problem with the Current Location map has definitely been identified as our out-of-date linkage with Google Maps.  When we return home this summer I’ll need to have my tech guy update the linkage to the new API that Google is using.  Nevertheless, you click this link to see where we are located: http://fms.ws/19wmqG/48.65277N/123.39432W,   and then zoom in/out to see the detail or overall view, and you can click on Satellite to see the terrain view.

Also, this post is more readable in the online version, plus you can read any of the posts back to 2010 from the archive – just click on the link above to the blog.  Go to www.ronf-flyingcolours.com.

OK, just for fun.  Watching for interesting boat names is a good pastime while cruising or sitting at the dock (I have a list on my computer that I keep for special occasions – particularly for knocking them when they’re excessively stupid).  This one just fits the description of being fun.  ZERODACUS – spotted  on the next dock from us at the SYC Cortes Bay Outstation.  At first I figured it must be a Greek name – maybe a goddess or something like that, and would be pronounced zer-ah’-da-cus, and rhyming with Herodicus.

Having grown up in Seattle during the 1950s, though, Kap immediately picked up on the true pronouncement and background of it, and she knew it was from the King 5 TV children’s show that starred the corny Scandinavian, Stan Boreson.  So, in fact, this name opens the TV show’s theme ditty (introduced on the show as “songs my Uncle Torvald taught me”).  It goes like this:

Zero-dacus, mucho-cracus / hallaballu-za bub

That’s the secret password that we use down at the club

Zero-dacus, mucho-cracus / hallaballu-za fan

Means now you are a member of: KING’s TV club with Stan.

So to pronounce it correctly, use the pronunciation of “mucho cracus” and apply it to ZERODACUS – as in “zero-dack’-us”.  Obviously, the SYC member who named this boat also grew up on the Stan Boreson Show.

This stay at Cortes Bay turned out to be a long one – longer than we ever stay in one place as a rule.  For some reason – we aren’t alone this year – a surprising number of cruisers are doing the same . . . sticking closer to home, and not going beyond the Desolation Sound area.  It was the same for us.  After a couple of weeks at Cortes, we decided it was time to slowly head south, planning to make it home by early in August.

. 

I grabbed this photo off Google Images, and it just happens to be the Queeqeg. You can see the boat name on the stern, and at the bow it's flying the SYC burgee.

Another good boat name.  Next to us on the dock at Cortes was the Queeqeg, a classic Hinkley 34’ Picnic Boat.  It’s named after the fictional South Pacific island native who became the harpooner in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  It’s pronounced “qwee – qweg”

Hinkley is a well-respected boatyard, founded by Henry R. Hinkley in Southwest Harbor, Maine in 1928 – first building  fishing boats, and then yachts for summer residents on the nearby cluster of islands.  As their website says, “Nothing looks like a Hinckley and nothing handles like a Hinckley.”

Because of their fine construction and dazzling reputation, a Hinkley like this one sells new for around $1M, so they’re only for the well-heeled.  And rather than just “picnic” around Seattle’s Lake Union on Saturday afternoons, the couple who own Queeqeg cruise as far as Desolation Sound and a bit beyond.  From Cortes Bay, they were heading for Dent Island, about 30 miles north – a fishing resort originally created by the Nordstrom family as a private retreat.  With a cruise speed over 30 kts (over 35 MPH), they can be in Desolation Sound from the San Juan Islands in a single day.  The night before we departed Cortes, heading south to Garden Bay and with a planned departure at 5AM for the 5-hour cruise, the owner of Queeqeg asked us, “Why so early?  It’s only a 2-hour cruise.”  Yeah, for him.

Saturday, July 6, Cortes Bay to Garden Bay. Kap‘s favorite pastime is studying the weather.  At home, given the chance, she’d watch The Weather Channel as her favorite program – and something about it just drives her interest level.  On the boat, this is a good thing, as she always knows what the weather should be doing for the next x-days.  The beauty of it is, she knows several days in advance if crappy weather or nasty cruising conditions  – high winds, rain, heavy seas – are about to befall us, and based on that when we should be thinking about a departure . . . or maybe hunkering down.  By Wednesday, she was seeing that Saturday was the best day of the next week to head south for Garden Bay.  Given that it’s a 5-hour cruise – and importantly, we wanted to get there before a hoard of boats crossing the Strait of Georgia could get there – so we elected to head out as close to 5AM as we could.

On arrival at Garden Bay, our good friends, Steve and Andrea Clark on Couverden, were waiting at the dock to catch our lines.  Expecting to find the outstation full – and maybe overflowing – it was just the opposite.  There were three other boats on the docks.  We opted for the outer side of Dock 3, as it’s rather tightly spaced with a neighbor’s dock next door, and with a boat width restriction for that dock area, rafting is not allowed if/when the outstation becomes full.  (In the busy summer months, rafting is mandatory at SYC outstations, and that means people clamoring across your swim step to get on/off, and everything spaced just the width of the fenders between the two boats.

On our arrival the outstation was almost empty, but as the day wore on more and more boats arrived. Flying Colours is at the far upper left corner of the photo, barely visible behind the three boats on the inside of the dock. The boat where the paddle board accident occurred, the Orenda, is on the inside of the dock at the far right, and the second boat out from shore. The boat on the left side of the middle dock is the Queeqeg that was with us at Cortes Bay.

Within a minute of our arrival we got word of an accident over on Dock 1 – a guy slipped and fell as he was stepping off his paddleboard onto the swim step of his boat, and an EMT crew was just arriving.  He had come in at a bit of an angle, causing the paddleboard to bounce back a bit, knocking him off balance, and he fell as he tried to step over to the swim step.  He landed with his full weight on the edge of the swim step, breaking the main bone in his upper arm about 3”- 4” below his shoulder (what a nasty place to do it).

A guy on the boat next to him heard it happen and saw him in the water – not moving – and when he got to him, ashen-faced and not talking.  Luckily he had a PFD on (personal flotation device), and these are designed to keep your head above water.  The guy’s wife was in the front of their boat and didn’t know it had happened.  By the time the next door boater got to him he was in shock – not only from the fall itself, but also from the cold water.  Using techniques he’d learned in boating safety courses, the Good Samaritan knew how to get this guy up onto the dock.  That is usually a major problem when a full grown male is in the water, particularly when they can’t help with the lift.

With only three or four boats at the outstation, it was a bit surprising that we had two medical doctors and one nurse on the docks – but with a broken bone there wasn’t much they could do.  While waiting for the EMT crew to arrive everyone got the accident victim dried off, out of his wet clothes, and poured warm water over him to get him up to normal body temperature.  It was then a 15-20 minute ambulance ride to the nearest hospital.  It was really lucky the situation wasn’t worse.

We had a Green Box Happy Hour that evening, and to our surprise the guy showed up right after his return from the hospital, arm in a sling, cheerful and talkative, and most likely doped up on a lot of pain medication.  The next day, he and his wife departed for home – and recuperation.

Early one morning, on the way back from walking Jamie, I couldn’t resist snapping this photo looking across Garden Bay to the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club – referred to as the RVYC – and the serenity of everything in between. I’m a real fan of work boats, and the little wooden fishing boat in the foreground is easy on the eyes – belonging to the caretaker of the Edith Iglauer estate – the woman that I wrote about in the last post who died earlier this year at age 102.

In the photo at right, you can see the early morning serenity of Garden Bay, looking across to the Royal Vancouver Yacht on the opposite shore.  if you look closely at the sailboat just beyond the little green fishing boat (have to enlarge it to see it), you can spot a yellow line at the stern of it, snaking on the water surface over to the shore.  There, the line is tied to a big rock, providing what’s known as a “stern tie” for the sailboat.  There’s an anchor down from the front of the sailboat, and the two secure it from swinging in close quarters.

We like to think that Flying Colours is a very good sized boat for two aboard – plus a cat and dog. At today’s boat shows, though, our 62’ boat is junior-sized compared to what people are ogling at the docks. At one point in our stay at Garden Bay, the outstation was essentially full with just a half dozen 80’ boats at the dock. This photo shows what Flying Colours looks like when it’s next to an 80’ behemoth across the dock. The couple on board were very nice – yes, just the two of them – but that’s a lot of boat for just two, not to mention how difficult it is to find dock space for it everywhere they go.

There aren’t many photos in this blog of both Kap and I, and this one strikes my fancy. It was taken by Andrea Clark in their dinghy on their return from Madeira Park and they had stopped by to chitchat. When they spotted Jamie watching them from the edge of the dinghy deck canvas extension, a photo was mandatory. You might ask . . . what is that yellow cord snaking out from the enclosure below the “Fl” in the boat name. Well, it’s our 75’ long 50A shore power cord, fed in/out by an electric motor-driven unit at the aft of the lazarette. A 50A power cord is horribly heavy, and having it motor driven is huge.

We spent 10 days at Garden Bay, mostly quiet and relaxing time, with the occasional dinghy ride to the Madeira Park IGA for groceries, or to the local vet for the proper cat food for ZuZu.  Each evening’s Happy Hour time was typically spent at the clubhouse deck with Steve and Andrea, watching the world go by, catching up on their news from Maui and Port Angeles (they split their time 50/50 between the two).  Each morning on the boat, I managed to get in a lot of writing on a new literary tome I’ve begun – for about the fourth time, and maybe this time it’ll come to something (heaven forbid . . . a publisher?).  ZuZu tried her best to get off the boat every chance she could, and she succeeded multiple times.

One concern for us – not only Kap and I personally, but for Jamie and ZuZu as well – was the number of predators on the prowl.  There’s always been a black bear or two that hang around the park within a few blocks of Garden Bay that we need to be aware of when we take Jamie for a walk, plus a bunch of bald eagles that can snap ZuZu up in a flash if she’s walking around on the forward deck, or has gotten off on the dock by herself.  But this summer a wolf (or two) is hanging around, and in the last few days they’ve attacked a dog and chased a boy on a bicycle over near the Royal Van Yacht Club.  And now there’s a pack of coyotes – and we could hear a cacophony of howls one morning as they were making a kill on a hillside not far from us.  When I’m out walking Jamie and she acts spooked, I’m telling you, it spooks me too.

Pender Harbour (with Garden Bay at the innermost within it) is at the top end of B.C.’s Sunshine Coast, which tells you something about the normal weather there. It does rain, though, and this is what it looks like.

Several times we heard helicopters flying overhead and behind us.  We figured it was the result of the fire three weeks earlier, and sure enough, we learned the fire is still burning – but underground, and only rainfall will eventually put it out.  Hopefully it won’t come above ground and start burning out of control again.

Just before our departure this gigantic sailboat came in. At first we were afraid it was heading for our dock, which it would have barely fit on. Luckily, it turned towards the RVYC outstation, and we cheered. We knew, though, that RVYC was almost full too, and it instead docked at the Pub Inn next door to the outstation. Someone said it was owned by Jane Fonda, but we don’t believe it, and if it is, there’s no record of it on the internet. To get an impression of just how long this thing is, note the tiny people on the bow . . . then turn them sideways, and replicate them to see just how many of them would fit end to end.

Andrea took this photo of Jamie from the Couverden on the next dock over at Garden Bay. This is one of Jamie's favorite spots on the forward deck.

Tuesday, July 16, Garden Bay to Ganges (on Salt Spring Island). All good things must end, and spending good quality time in Garden Bay is one of those good things.  At 6:05AM we slipped our lines at the SYC outstation and slowly cruised out of Pender Harbour, heading across the Strait of Georgia – and with our destination actually not known for sure.  It could be Page’s Marina just before Gabriola Passage, or it could be the SYC private Ovens Island outstation on the other side, or hopefully it would be the SYC outstation at Ganges Marina in Ganges.  Slack tide at Gabriola Passage, and the time we would arrive at it would be the deciding factor.  Slack was estimated to be at 10:30AM, and unless we hit unexpected heavy weather in the Strait of Georgia that shouldn’t be a problem.  Two of the Weather Canada weather-reporting buoys have been out of service for over a month, so Kap wasn’t all that confident of the weather and sea condition reports.  The Whiskey Gulf military zone was open – where U.S. and Canadian submarines 1,000’ below the surface test torpedoes – so we’d need to skirt around the south end of it, increasing our transit time.  Otherwise, it was a very good crossing – until we hit a bit of lumpiness on the last 1/3^rd of it.  ZuZu didn’t complain loudly, though, so it must not have been very bad.

As expected, Kap hit the entrance time perfectly at Gabriola Passage, with just 1 knot of current running with us as she powered through at 12 knots.  We met two or three other boats on either side of the passage, but had it all to ourselves as we crossed through the main channel, making it a piece of cake.  (The cruiser’s refrain is, “If it’s boring, you must have done it right!)  We’re both still a bit gun shy of it since the passage three years ago when a whoopsie at the narrowest, shallowest point whipped us 90° in the space of 2-3 seconds, and it was only Kap’s quick thinking and reactions that kept us from a possible disastrous situation.

The Saltspring Marina docks being towed out - possibly for good. The red building at the shore is a pub that was located at the head of the marina docks. At the far right of the photo is Hastings House - a 3-star hotel and restaurant that is probably the most famous place to eat in Ganges - but we've never been to it, because it's a prix fixe menu that never sounds good to us, and until very recently they required a coat and tie for men and a dress for women - which is way too formal for us during summer cruising. We'll leave it to the people who prefer more formality.

From there it was smooth cruising for the remaining 3+ hours into Ganges for our planned arrival at 1:20PM.  All along the way our nerves had been a bit on edge about moorage, as it was now mid-July – the busiest cruising time of the year.  The SYC outstation at Ganges is the first one north of Roche Harbor, and every year the SYC has a major July 4^th celebration there with upwards of 70 boats crammed onto the docks.  School is out, it’s everyone’s vacation time, the weather is typically warm, and it’s time for the cruisers to head north.  All of that argued strongly for Ganges to be full, not only on the SYC docks, but at the only other marina in town.  We braced for a moorage problem.

Ganges is at the head of a long (5 mile or so) inlet that cuts into Salt Spring Island, and we expected to see a flotilla of boats heading in for moorage.  Instead, it was quiet and we only saw a single cruiser along the way.  Strange.  Once inside the slow-down zone we could train our binoculars on the SYC end of the Ganges Marina docks.  And what we saw didn’t make sense – empty docks, giving us the impression we weren’t looking in the right place.  As we neared, though, we could see that a single boat was tied up at the outstation – the rest of it was empty.  The couple on the boat came out to catch our lines, and they hollered, “It must have been something we said . . . we’ve been alone here for two days!”  The rest of Ganges Marina was also sparsely occupied.  Across the harbor from us the rebuilding of the Salt Spring Marina  obviously hadn’t begun, so obviously no boats there either.  Where was everyone?

After our arrival we learned that the Saltspring Marina’s rebuilding plans had been put on hold, maybe for a very long time.  Whatever government (or First Nations) organization that controls waterfront usage had balked at the plans to dredge the marina dock area before installing the new docks.  Somehow it was discovered that the sea floor beneath the docks was “almost alive” with a nursery of crabs, and a dredging operation would be disastrous for it.  Without the ability to dredge, the new marina docks wouldn’t fit.  At least for now, that leaves Ganges Marina as the only real marina in town (there’s a government dock on the downtown side, but it’s quite small).

I snapped this of the Blue Peter just as she was pulling onto the dock across from us. What a beautiful old yacht!

More beautiful boats. In the heyday of Chris Craft wooden boats (1950-1975), you couldn’t find one that wasn’t a piece of art – stylish, well made, and wonderfully proportioned. We had the Blue Peter for eye candy, but there were a dozen pleasing-to-the-eye Chris Craft’s on the docks this week, all making their way from a classic wooden boat show in Port Orchard (across from Bremerton in Puget Sound), and now heading to this coming weekend’s classic show in Telegraph Harbour on Thetis Island (15 miles north of Ganges). This one, the Irrestible, is a 1956, 36’ cabin cruiser that’s based in La Conner. It sure is great that there are people in this world who still care enough about these classics to keep them up. A gentleman across the dock from us mentioned that he essentially re-purchases his Chris Craft every two years – with money spent on keeping his boat “alive”.

Not long after our arrival, a classic – and gorgeous – fan tail yacht settled onto the outer dock.  (Fan tail means it has a rounded stern.)  It turned out to be the Blue Peter from Shilshole Marina in Seattle – a yacht that we had a minor association with a few years ago.  The Blue Peter is a 96’ motor yacht, built in Seattle in 1928 by Lake Union Drydock as a private yacht for an oil company owner in Los Angeles.  After WWII it returned to Seattle in less than stellar condition, but was purchased by a boat and bridge builder (his company built Seattle’s I-90 Floating Bridge in the 1930s) – who had always coveted it and wanted to restore it to its former glory.  With a major rebuild – and a couple of refits since then, the Blue Peter was restored to original condition and is one of the most well-known boats around Seattle.

Our association?  In 2009, Kap and I attended the annual charity auction gala for Make-A-Wish – the foundation that grants wishes to young people who are facing life threatening illnesses.  The gala raises money through donated gifts to finance these wishes.  One donation that night was a 5-course catered dinner for six on an evening cruise in Seattle’s Elliot Bay, to be catered on-board by the chef from the upscale Suncadia Resort in CleElum.  Against the advice of Kap (I’m a sucker for these charity auctions, always bidding way too high above our budget), I won the auction on this.  Later, on a warm evening the following summer, we had an elegant and wonderful dinner on the aft deck of the Blue Peter, along with our good friends, Jim and Laura Kleppe and Marty and Linda Ellison, as we cruised along the Seattle waterfront in Elliot Bay.  Prior to dinner, we had a full tour of this incredible yacht – and at the pilot house, Kap got to take the wheel for part of the cruise.  It was a real treat!

While watching TV in the salon of Flying Colours one evening, Kap turned around to look out the window and exclaimed, “Quick, grab your camera!”. Just as the moon was rising above the horizon I snapped this photo in the waning hours of daylight, looking out the full length of the Ganges harbour. I didn’t use a tripod, so the longer-than-normal exposure meant a bit of camera jiggle – but it’s still a pretty good photo.

In mid-July, restrictions on length of stay begin to apply at the SYC Ganges outstation, so we kept our visit to three nights – and of course, that gave us time for another great dinner at Auntie Pesto’s on the first night, and at House Piccolo on the third night.

When a Brit says, “How ‘bout a curry”, they’re usually talking about going out for a Butter Chicken dish at their favorite Indian restaurant. This recipe is the closest I’ve found for a really good version of this dish.

The second night was reserved onboard Flying Colours for what has now become one of our most favorite cruising dishes – Butter Chicken.  The recipe I use for it is from a recent Cook’s Illustrated, with a wonderful made-from-scratch butter sauce (that isn’t very heavy on butter) – and I grind my own garam masala spice mix for it.  Mixed in the sauce are bite-sized chunks of a home oven version of Tandoori chicken that’s easy to make.  It’s served over an excellent saffron basmati rice with all the right Indian spices flavoring it (cinnamon stick, cumin seeds, cardamom pods, and a bay leaf).  Kap has located a Canadian bakery that has the closest thing to true Naan bread that we like, and we now have a freezer full of it that’ll hold us until I can learn to make my own.  Our oven on board Flying Colours doesn’t have a broil function that’s hot enough to cook the chicken in an authentic Tandoori style, so I cooked up four batches of chicken at home, vacuum sealed each one, and froze them for our cruise.  The sauce can be made ahead of time too, and you can even whip up the saffron basmati rice ahead of time and freeze it in a vacuum bag.

Friday, July 19, Ganges Marina to Port Sidney Marina. Our original cruising plan was to go direct to Friday Harbor from Ganges, bypassing Sidney (which has always been our last stopover in B.C. before crossing back into the U.S.).  While still at Garden Bay, though, Steve and Andrea made us an offer to use their slip at Port Sidney Marina (it’s a condominium marina, and they’ve owned a slip there for the past dozen+ years).  Their plan was to stay another week in Garden Bay, so their slip would be open – and we just couldn’t pass up the offer.

If the sun’s out, Jamie is sleeping somewhere in the fly bridge. This time she’s actually taking a break from the sun and is scrunched down behind the navigation instrument console in the shade – most likely it got too hot in the sun when it really starts to burn.

The new schedule is to spend five nights here in Sidney and then head over to Friday Harbor next Wednesday for the last segment of our 2019 cruise.  Sidney feels like home to us – we know all the restaurants in town, all the grocery stores, and best of all, a lot of cruisers that we’ve gotten to know over the years are also passing through here.

Just look at all of the South Puget Sound possibilities that exist south of Seattle. We spent some time here way back in 2010, and this will be our first opportunity to do it again.

This will likely be my last regular post for Summer, 2019.  After the marathon race in early September, our plan is to resume a bit of cruising – hopefully in the South Sound to the south of Seattle.  We haven’t visited the wonderful waterfront marina – Dock Street Marina – in downtown Tacoma for a bunch of years, and with Tacoma booming as it is, it’s become a pretty lively scene.  We’d also like to stop by Port Orchard, Gig Harbor, maybe get down to Olympia, and a couple of other interesting spots on the backside of Bainbridge Island.  Stay tuned for an update on that.

Thanks for reading my blog of our adventures.

The white wisps rising above the trees behind the Garden Bay outstation are smoke, not clouds. Surprisingly, we couldn't smell it, but combined with the direction and time of travel by the helicopters was a clear sign that it was a very clos-by forest fire. We just couldn't tell how close it was.

Almost immediately another helicopter repeated the water scoop.  By the time he flew off, the first helicopter was already back for another load.  That gave us an indication the fire was quite near, but we couldn’t see anything due to a low tree-covered hill behind the outstation.

Within a few minutes the first whiffs of smoke rose over the treetops to our right.  Not long after that, we heard from a newly-arrived SYC boat that they could see the fire on their way in, and yes, it was quite near to us – maybe a scant mile or so away.

The third helicopter on the scene dropped very close to the water, and we could see what appeared to be a 10'-12' hose, and hovering just above the water's surface, and we presumed it was siphoning water into an internal tank. (You'll have to enlarge this photo to even see the helicopter.)

A half hour later a third helicopter joined the operation, but this one would hover maybe 10’ off the water, and with a hose boom lowered into the water it apparently siphoned water up to an internal tank.  Then a fourth aircraft, a 1950s (or 1960s) era 4-engined/prop water bomber joined in.  Surprisingly, a small business jet then began circling low and fast over the hill behind us, and we figured it might be a command and control aircraft, but it could also be a news crew aircraft.

This activity continued for two more hours until darkness, and then things went quiet.  We could still see smoke rising behind the hill, but we presumed the firefighters had it contained.  We went to bed feeling safe that the fire was being held at bay.

Thursday, June 25, Garden Bay – Cortes Bay, SYC Outstations. For our nearly 6-hour cruise north to Cortes Bay (the SYC outstation on Cortes Island), Kap had wanted to leave at 5AM – timed to get there after the morning’s departure of boats and before the subsequent arrival of new boats.  I’m not a fan of getting up at 4AM just for this, and I managed to talk her into 6AM.  She was reluctant, but agreed.

As we departed the dock the following morning it was immediately evident just how close the fire was, and how much it was still burning. A fire marshal statement mentioned that the fire was burning at ground level and not the trees themselves, resulting in it being a fast-growing fire.

At 6AM, there’s rarely anyone awake on the docks, so we quietly made our preparations, untied the lines, and slipped away from the dock.  Within 200’ of the dock, the sight off to our port side was truly startling – a substantial fire still burning on the hillside, with a huge plume of smoke rising.

Don’t forget – you can click on any photo in the post to enlarge it.

Yes, the problem with the Current Location map has definitely been identified as our out-of-date linkage with Google Maps.  When we return home this summer I’ll need to have my tech guy update the linkage to the new API that Google is using.  Nevertheless, you click this link to see where we are located:  http://fms.ws/19EStE/50.06052N/124.93071W, and then zoom in/out to see the detail or overall view.

Also, this post is more readable in the online version, plus you can read any of the posts back to 2010 from the archive – just click on the link above to the blog.  Go to www.ronf-flyingcolours.com.

The SYC Garden Bay outstation is at the lower left corner of the Vancouver CTV video. Flying Colours is the white speck at the end of the dock out front.

Later that day, and shortly after our arrival at the Cortes Bay outstation, Kap searched around to find if there was any news about the Pender Harbour fire.  Sure enough, it was on the CTV Vancouver News, at https://bc.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=1714950 – and it’s worth watching.  I did a freeze frame from the video of an overhead shot of the area and then created a descriptive photo of it showing the SYC Garden Bay outstation in the lower left of the photo, and Flying Colours is the tiny white speck at the dock.

This triple barge tow, going almost the same speed as us, was ahead on our windscreen for the better part of the morning, only passing it at the north end of Texada Island.

A significant part of our cruise northward was on Malaspina Strait, a mile wide channel that separates Texada Island from the mainland.  After Texada (pronounced tex-ada’, with a long middle “a” and a short ending “a”) is the coastal town of Powell River on the mainland side, with a pair of car ferries that run about hourly to Comox on Vancouver Island.  Powell River is about halfway to our destination at Cortes, so it’s a good marker for us.

I don’t know what it is about a triple tow that fascinates me, but I can’t pass one without taking a photo.  Having been to SE Alaska twice on a tug and single tow – in 2003 and 2006 – I appreciate the level of seamanship required of a towboat captain, but I simply can’t imagine the complexity of a triple tow.  Shortly after this photo, we passed the huge lumber yard at Powell River, and I commented to Kap that the three wood chip/sawdust barges all seemed to be pointing askew from the towboat’s direction of travel.  “Ah, it’s just your perspective”, replied Kap.  I watched it bit longer, and sure enough, the tug had now turned sharply to port to head for the lumber processing plant.  We could see clearly that the barges were all three pointed (equally) at a much sharper angle than the towboat.  I have no idea how/what the towboat captain does to make that happen, and I also can’t imagine the challenges of bringing a triple tow into port and docking them, one by one.

We've never been there, but this photo that I got off the internet shows the well-known Nancy's Bakery at Lund - the end of the road north to Desolation Sound.

Beyond Powell River is the small town of Lund on the mainland.  Lund is significant in that it’s “the end of the road” by car from Vancouver, and anyone who lives up here and arrives by car has to make the last part of their trip by boat (in fact, there’s even a parking lot named “End Of The Road Parking” on the north side of town).  We’ve always wanted to stop in Lund, as it’s relatively famous and popular for its funkiness, and particularly famous for Nancy’s Bakery.  It’s considered a “small boat harbour”, and we’ve never looked into whether we can fit on their docks – and if we don’t, it’s too far to anywhere else, so we’ve just never tried.

Savary Island from the air. The land in the upper left corner is the Canada mainland, and we pass between the 1/2 mile wide gap with the island on our way north to Cortes Bay. The primary population settlement is on the narrow part closest to the mainland.

About a mile southwest and offshore of Lund is an interesting island – Savary Island.  It’s long and skinny, just a half mile offshore, and at its widest, it’s only a mile wide, and five miles long.  At first glance it appears to be uninhabited, with seemingly no docks or shore access by boat.  On closer look you can make out houses set back in the trees at the SE corner, and on the protected north side is a field of mooring buoys set in shallow water.  The island has a permanent population of around 100, but with dozens more summer cabins scattered around the island it must swell considerably in the warmer months.  Supposedly it has tree-lined boulevards that resemble a Hollywood enclave.  Access to the island is by private boat or a water taxi from Lund.

Prideaux Haven, the heart of Desolation Sound, is far too crowded for us at this time of year. This photo was taken in 2010, in early September, and while there were a bunch of boats there, we managed to get the “Chamber of Commerce anchorage spot. It’s hard to believe this place was “desolate” – in Captain George Vancouver’s words in 1792 when he mapped this area, and hence the name he gave to it.

Once we pass Savary Island we know it’s a short distance now to Cortes Bay – maybe another hour at our typical 8 kt cruising speed.  Cortes Bay is a pretty small bay – maybe ¼ mile wide by ½ mile long – and the narrow entrance to it is so hidden that you’d never know it’s there without navigation software.

Of the 10 outstations owned by the SYC, this one at Cortes Bay is undoubtedly the crown jewel. It’s considered the “gateway to Desolation Sound”, as it’s little more than an hour’s cruise to Prideaux Haven, which is the heart of Desolation Sound. The SYC has invested a ton of money in this outstation, and it must be near (or at) the top of member usage for all of the outstations.

The Cortes Bay outstation has a new (about five years ago) gazebo for Green Box gatherings – a longstanding tradition of appie/Happy Hour get-togethers at any outstation, called by any SYC member on the docks, where everyone brings their favorite libation and a shared appie.  The gazebo can hold up to 40 people, and also has lots of BBQ facility at it.  Just completed this spring is the new SYC member clubhouse, with a washer/dryer facility, several shower and toilet rooms, and a lounge area.  The main house at the right of the accompanying photo has now been taken over completely as the resident outstation manager residence.

Dock pilings are one of the best indicators of just how high or low a tide is.

The photo at left was taken at 1:19PM in the afternoon, from close to the very steep shore ramp that you can see in the outstation photo above.  The photo at right was taken from the same position, at 8:14PM – just seven hours later, at high tide.  Looking at the tide book for yesterday at Cortes Bay, the tidal difference was 14’ from high-to-low tide.  That number makes sense when you look at where the actual water is on the shoreline, versus where I put the high tide water mark.

I hope I don’t insult anyone’s intelligence, but in tidal waters the docks are always built as floating docks, with pilings sunk into the shore bedrock to hold the docks in place.  So, the effect is, the dock is rising in relation to the pilings as the tide “comes in”, and lowers in relation to the pilings as the tide “goes out”.

Like triple tows, tides are a phenomenon that intrigue me, and got me to wondering who and when the connection was first made that tied the Moon phases to tidal differences.  Who, what, and when would you guess?

Well, it was a really brainy Greek dude named Pytheas (one of those ancient guys who didn’t have a last name, and actually, he was an astronomer and explorer).  In 330 B.C. he made a very long voyage from the Greek end of the Mediterranean all the way to the British Isles.  Along the way he hit upon an incredibly startling deduction that the tides were in some way controlled by the Moon.  He discovered and documented that there were not only two high tides per lunar day, but also that the amplitude depended on the phases of the Moon.  About 150 years later (around 150 B.C.), another really smart Greek guy, Seleukos, worked out that the two tides per day had unequal amplitudes when the Moon was far from the equator (what’s known as the diurnal inequality).  Interestingly, neither of these two guys could have worked this out anywhere in Greece, as the tides there are insignificant – (about 2” difference between high and low tide), so the voyage to the British Isles helped the studies for Pytheas, and Seleukos did his studies at the Red Sea.

To our surprise, the SYC outstation at Cortes Bay was almost empty on our arrival – three other boats, and our favorite end dock position was open.

Sorella, the classic Franck/Garden 80' yacht at the dock at Cortes Bay outstation.

Sometimes I feel such a piker!  The Sorella, moored just opposite us at Cortes Bay is an 80’ fiberglass yacht, owned by a couple from Yarrow Point (next town north of Clyde Hill where we live).  According to the SYC boat registry, it’s listed as a “Franck/Garden” boat – and just those two names speak volumes about the pedigree of this stylish and attractive boat.

Vic Franck was a famous Seattle boat builder (died in 2005), with a shipyard located on the NW corner of Lake Union (in the area called Fremont) – and reputed to be the oldest boatbuilding company in Seattle.  In his day, Vic Franck built boats for the Nordstrom family, Peter Fonda, Charles See (of See’s Candy), Jerry Lewis, Dick Smothers, and Bobby Darin (to name a few).  His son Dan had taken over the business in the mid-80s, and the yard has now closed down completely.

Bill Garden is just as famous – but as a naval architect, who divided his prolific lifetime of yacht design between the U.S. and Canada.  He’s equally famous in both countries, where he did most of his work in Seattle and the Vancouver/Victoria area.

Judging from other Garden designs like this, the Sorella was probably built sometime between the late 1960s and early 1980s.  You can see a 1966 scaled-up version of the Sorella – the 107’ Dorothea – in a Seattle Times article from 2007 that, sadly, shows the firey demise of the Dorothea not long after it completed a refit in Seattle – at https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/yacht-burns-sinks-at-sea-after-overhaul-in-seattle/ (make sure you scroll to the second photo in the slideshow).  The resemblance between the Dorothea and Sorella is striking.

Speaking of cool boats, one afternoon I was banging away at my laptop in the salon of Flying Colours when Kap hollered out, “Quick, look at the boat coming in next to us!”  I jumped up just as a brand new-looking Canadian Coast Guard boat pulled up across from us on our dock.  It was named the Cape Palmerston and home based in Ottawa, with four “Coasties” aboard – and it looked fast just sitting at the dock!  It was the day before Canada Day, and the Coast Guard and Navy typically “do” something to show the colors in many of the ports we visit.  As they deplaned I asked the skipper what was up, and he said they were just liaising with their Coast Guard counterparts who are stationed here at Cortes Bay and keep their inflatable boat at the SYC dock.  They were finished with their business within an hour and then quickly pulled away.

The Patamar, a classic 34' wooden cruiser has been opposite the dock from us at both Garden Bay and Cortes Bay outstations on this cruise. We can look at this boat and never tire of it.

Ditto for this classic too. It was traveling with the Patamar, but not being an SYC member they couldn't be on the dock. On arrival at Cortes Bay, they came in for just a few minutes, then headed off to Desolation Sound.

And while I’m on the subject of cool boats, during our stay at Garden Bay last week a gorgeous classis wooden boat came in, named the Patamar.  As we always do, Kap and I went over to their dock to catch their lines.  As we ogled the boat, the owner told us it is 34’, and built at home by a Boeing guy in 1937.  This guy has owned it for 22 years, and is the third owner.  Three or four days after we departed Garden Bay, the Patamar  showed up at Cortes.  Right after that, another classic wooden boat – name unknown – showed up off the SYC docks.  The two boats are cruising together, but the second one isn’t a member of the SYC, and not being able to tie up at our docks, had decided to head straight over to Desolation Sound.  Keeping these old boats in working condition is great, and it’s nice to know that some people have the time, talent, and abilities to do it.

We’re stretching out our time at Cortes Bay, and hope that we’ll have another three or four days here before we slowly start working our way south.  The plan is to return to Garden Bay, then after that head across to the west side of the Strait of Georgia to the isolated SYC-owned private Ovens Island.  Then it’s back to Ganges to get Kap’s winter supply of frozen gelato cake that a wonderful gelato place there makes.  Stay tuned.

Container ships like this one are common when crossing Haro Strait on the way to/from Sidney. Their speed is deceptive, and you simply can't be complacent about whether you're going to "beat them out" by speeding up to go in front of them.

Thursday-Friday, June 12-14, Port Sidney Marina. Our cruise to Sidney on the 12^th was mostly uneventful, but it did have its moments in Haro Strait with a large container ship departing from Vancouver and heading south to either Seattle or out the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Pacific.  The photo at right was taken shortly after I’d altered course to go behind it.  Kap had set a radar EBL (Electronic Bearing Line) on the ship’s AIS marker on our radar screen.  With an EBL, you watch the other vessel’s movement in relation to the EBL line on the radar screen, and if it moves “behind the line” it means the vessel will pass behind you; if it moves “ahead of the line” it will pass ahead of you; if it’s “coming down the line”, one of you had better alter course.  It was coming down the line, and since he’s decidedly bigger than us, I prudently steered right to go behind and slowed down.

Don’t forget – you can click on any photo in the post to enlarge it – such as the one above.  You can’t even see the container ship without enlarging it!

Normally I mention about the Current Location link on the blog’s home page, but unfortunately it isn’t working right now.  I believe the problem is with Google Maps, and we’re hopefully working to correct it

Also, this post is more readable in the online version, plus you can read any of the posts back to 2010 from the archive – just click on the link above to the blog.  Go to www.ronf-flyingcolours.com.

More problematic, though, was an oil tanker about a quarter mile behind the container ship, and not yet knowing its speed, it was difficult to tell if we could pass between the container ship and the tanker.  These behemoth ocean-going ships travel faster than one thinks and their speed is really deceptive (watch a 747 on approach to an airport and you’ll think it’s almost stopped in the sky, when in fact it’s rumbling along at about 175 MPH – it’s simply the size that makes it look so slow).  Until our new course heading and speed correction settled down, it wouldn’t be possible to set another EBL for the tanker.  When we did, though, it indicated we would pass in front of it, but not by a prudent margin.  I again slowed down and deviated further to the right.

(As another example of this deceptive viewpoint, when I was getting my on-board Rules of the Road boating training from our good friend, Linda Lewis, back in 2008, I was at the helm of our Nordic Tug as we traversed Seattle’s Elliot Bay from south to north on the way back to our slip at Shilshole Marina.  Linda spotted a huge cruise ship leaving the downtown dock in Seattle, and challenged me to determine by sight whether I should go ahead of it or behind it – and to adjust our speed accordingly.  From the barely perceptible speed of the cruise ship, I figured it would be easy to go in front of it, so I picked up our speed a bit to be safe.  Before I knew what hit me (figuratively speaking), the cruise ship was obviously on a collision course (I say, obviously, as it was easy enough to visually see it was moving forward in the pilot house windows), and in a few scant seconds we’d be under its bow.  Red-faced, I throttled back to idle and sheepishly accepted that I’d really been fooled.  The best thing Linda Lewis ever taught us was to use our radar, and to set EBLs on any boat or ship that might be a factor.)

Kap’s Nexus still hadn’t been renewed – who knows, with the latest stupid order to round up and deport “millions” of illegal immigrants, so many CBP people could be reassigned that her Nexus isn’t renewed before end of summer, if then.  When the two ships passed, we motored on towards Sidney.

On arrival at Port Sidney Marina, Kap steered us to the Customs dock, situated immediately after the entrance breakwater.  There were already two boats filling the Customs dock, so we had to float around for about 10 minutes.  When one departed, Kap maneuvered us onto the dock and I was on the lines to secure us.  I had our paperwork folder and passports all ready to go, so I jumped onto the dock (it’s technically the Captain who does the Customs clearance, and Customs rules forbid anyone else to get off the boat, but it’s something I always do with Nexus call-in, so Kap stayed on board).  There was no one in the Custom’s shack, so I went to a table and phone mounted on a pole – which is how you contact Customs if there isn’t anyone there.

A Canadian Customs officer immediately answered.  I explained that I had a Nexus, but that Kap’s Nexus was still under renewal review.  I gave him my Nexus number and her passport number, followed by our Boat Registration (BR) number when he asked for it.  With that, on the screen in front of him he probably has information about every border crossing we’ve made in 50 years, and hopefully he’ll see that we aren’t violent desperadoes.  He asked if we had any cannabis, firearms, alcohol, commercial goods, or over C$10,000 in our possession.  I answered no to each of them, but to the alcohol question I simply said, “We have our normal ship’s stores on board”.  To the last question he didn’t say anything for a moment, so I asked if he wanted “particulars” – and his response brought a laugh from both of us,  “No, not particularly”.  At that, he asked nothing else, and simply said, “Are you ready to copy down the Customs Clearance number?”  I did – it’s an 11-digit number that must be displayed in our boat’s window throughout our time in Canadian waters.  With that brief formality, our entry to Canada was complete.  We departed the Customs dock and headed directly for our assigned slip in the marina.

Whew!  No matter which way we’re crossing the border, or whether it’s using Nexus or a face-to-face entry, via car, boat, or plane, it’s always a relief to have it behind us.  I don’t know what it is about a Customs clearance that invokes that feeling, but having done it at least a thousand times over the past 50 years of my life (seriously!), it’s never become commonplace.  It’s effectively a police encounter, where they are trained to question you in unknown ways, to get information out of you that you may not want to give, they do their damnedest to keep you in the dark about what’s allowed and what isn’t, and worst, not knowing what the consequences will be if you’ve broken any rules.  It’s a strange aspect of travel.

Kap is technically violating Happy Hour here - by not having anything in her hand . . . but a few minutes later she did. It was our first warm day in a long time, and good to sit out in the cockpit.

Our stay in Sidney was three nights, but we didn’t have that much to do, so about 2/3rds of it was spent relaxing.  One day we rented a car and drove down to Victoria for a bunch of errands – pick up several bags of Kap’s favorite popcorn at a mall store called Kernels, pick up some sweets at a British shop behind the Empress hotel, pick up some pharmaceutical stuff that we can’t get in the U.S., and importantly, pick up a catnip plant for ZuZu at a nursery on the way back.

On the way back was a mandatory lunch at the Stonehouse Pub in Canoe Cove north of Sidney.  The main reason for going there is not only their BBQ ribs, but to share their incredible appetizer, Sambuca Prawns.  If there’s nothing else I’ll accomplish on this cruise, it’s to perfect my own version of the Sambuca butter sauce like they make it.  It’s an appie on their lunch and dinner menu, along with Coconut Prawns – that we alternate ordering.  I’ve tried it at least twice, never coming out the way it should be, but I think I’ve finally found an Internet recipe that might work.

Lastly, Kap always like to schedule our summer trips to Sidney to include the Thursday night farmer’s market that fills the downtown main street, and seems to be attended by every resident of Sidney.  There are a dozen street vendors where you can graze your way through a meal, and Kap stocks up on the summer’s hard cider that she really likes from one vendor.

And of course, it’s where we provision for fruits and vegetables that we can’t bring across the border, and that’s ostensibly the main reason we come to Sidney before anywhere else.

Saturday-Sunday, June 15-16, Sidney – Ganges, Seattle Yacht Club Outstation. In years past, Ganges was our popular libation stop, for wine and spirits that would last us through the summer.  We knew the owners of a local liquor store quite well, and a month or two before departure each year I’d send them an e-mail with our local B.C. wine order.  They’d fill the order and deliver it to the boat on our arrival.  They had access to some of the best wines made in B.C. – both coastal and as far inland as the Okanogan Valley– and by reserving it ahead we could make sure we could get it.  B.C. wine isn’t available in the U.S. due to some kind of trade friction, so this is our only chance to get it.  Unfortunately our friends sold their wine store and retired, drying up our source for the really good stuff (Burrowing Owl Meritage, Osoyos Larose cab, Oculus cab).  Nowadays, I take a bit of a chance and stock up more and more on the really good stuff in our own wine cellar at home, including it in our “ship’s stores” that I say to Customs.

Even though Ganges is less than a 2-hour cruise north of Sidney, we still like to stop here on our way north just to get to two of our most favorite restaurants of each summer – House Piccolo and Auntie Pesto’s.  Besides, the Seattle Yacht Club has now upgraded their outstation situation at Ganges, leasing slip space for upwards of 10 member boats at Ganges Marina, and that makes staying here free, assuming there’s room on the docks.  This time, even though the docks completely filled shortly after our arrival, we got a primo end-tie spot.  (Before this, the SYC has been leasing dock space at the next door Salt Spring Marina, but the docks were so disheveled and rickety it was dangerous to walk the docks.  On arrival this time we found the docks to be completely ripped out, ready for new docks to be hauled in.)

The House Piccolo is in . . . well, an old house, so the dining room(s) meander through all of the main floor rooms. It's been here since 1992, and it's an institution in Ganges.

House Piccolo is easily the finest restaurant on Salt Spring Island and booking well in advance is mandatory (we booked two weeks in advance and had to take an alternative time they could get us in).  Kap had a Spring Salmon dish, pan-seared and finished in the oven, with a wonderful tarragon-cream sauce.  I had Beef Tenderloin slices bathed in an incredible au poivre (green peppercorn brandy) sauce, preceded by a Beef Carpaccio appetizer.  I like both of these dishes well enough that I’ll do some rather outrageous things to get them.  I wasn’t disappointed – and it all went well with a very nice Osoyos Larose that we ordered.

Auntie Pesto is the other restaurant institution in Ganges, with a very different menu than House Piccolo - well, except for their Beef Carpaccio. This raw sliced beef tenderloin dish is more available in Canada and elsewhere in the world, probably the result of our rather stupid liability laws (that always assume the other person is at fault).

This is what a good Beef Carpaccio dish should look like (I say that because there are some really bad examples at some restaurants). Antie Pesto's is excellent, and looks a lot like this.

Sunday night we had reservations at Auntie Pesto’s, a very nice – but more casual – restaurant that fronts onto a working marina (i.e., fishing boats) on the other side of downtown from our marina.  Kap usually has their Pork Medallions – this time it was the Beef Tenderloin Medallions, with some kind of wonderful sauce and vegetables.  For me, I can’t get past the Beef Carpaccio appetizer and their absolutely wonderful Spaghetti Carbonara for a main dish.

If you do a search on “Beef Carpaccio images” you’ll find dozens of way to serve it, but whatever . . . it’s raw (and very high quality) beef tenderloin, sliced paper thin, usually arranged in concentric circles on a large plate, maybe with some argula piled in the middle, drizzled with an aioli or truffle olive oil, with shaved Parmesan cheese, and a good dose of capers spread around.  One totally unique presentation with Auntie Pesto’s version is, they lightly sauté a good-sized batch of capers in olive oil – which causes them to “poof” like popcorn, making them slightly crunchy, and much tastier.  Their Spaghetti Carbonara is a huge dish, with enough to take home that I have a great lunch of it the next day.

Salt Spring Island is just off the east coast of Vancouver Island, and somewhat oddly shaped due to the deep NW-SE harbours that were left after the Ice Age glaciers receded. You can see Ganges Harbour on the NE corner of the island.

This stopover took two extra days out of our cruising schedule, but we both agreed it was well worth it.  Salt Spring Island itself is an interesting place, and the 1960s/1970s hippiness of it is still very evident.  It may be before many people’s time, or may not be remembered, but Salt Spring Island was a popular destination for potential Vietnam War draftees to head for.  Sparsely populated (much more then than now), fairly remote and situated off the east coast of Vancouver Island, with a population that was decidedly progressive, it became one of the five (or so) most popular places in Canada to head for if you were an American who wasn’t about to head to Vietnam.  Many of these Americans stayed on after the war ended, liked the culture and way of life they’d found here, and became Canadian citizens.  Ganges is still more of an artsy/craftsy place than anything else, and life is pretty easy here.  As you can see from the map at right, Salt Spring Island is a mere 6 miles long (north to south) and about 4 miles wide (east to west), with very remote mountains, and mostly covered in trees.  There are lots of vineyards, and lots of remote farms, with only a couple of small towns and villages.

(Me?  While attending the University of Washington I got my Army draft notice in 1966, decided the last thing for me was to go to Vietnam as a 3-year draftee, and instead enlisted for four years in the U.S. Air Force (then re-enlisted for a further four years) to qualify for a choice assignment.  Overall, I “sat out” the Vietnam War as a lowly sergeant in a top level HQ command post (Langley AFB in Virginia), then a 4-year stint at NATO/SHAPE HQ in Mons, Belgium, and ended up with an incredible 1-year last assignment at a huge computer center in the bowels of the Pentagon.  I wouldn’t have missed any of that, but there were a lot of serendipitous things going on that made it all possible (and none of my time throughout all this involved family money or position, bone spurs, or anything else that I’d be ashamed of today).  I’m forever toying with the idea of writing my memories of that time in a book I’ve titled (in my head) as The Vietnam War:  My Way.  That whole time period developed who I am, what I believe, and how I live, more than any other aspect of my life.  And just to be clear, I have no negative opinions about the guys who slipped into Canada to “do” Vietnam their way.  I just can’t stomach or tolerate a draft dodger who purchased a friggin’ bone spur letter with rich family money.)

Cruising Decisions. By this time, we’ve settled into our cruising enough to give us time to rest, plus time to think more seriously about where this summer is taking us.  As you may know, Kap has been doing a lot of Half Marathons this past 2-3 years, having completed a Baker’s Dozen as of this writing.  One of the planned destinations for this trip has been to Wrangell, in SE Alaska, where she wanted to run a Half Marathon in their BearFest Festival.  The conundrum has been the timing – the race on July 29^th – and the ability to get up there and back within other constraints.  I’ve always supported Kap’s drive and determination for the Half Marathons, with the belief that this was the maximum endurance test for her particular situation.

Kap has professed all along that she had no interest in doing a Full Marathon, and in fact, I always said I wouldn’t provide any support for a Full Marathon.  You know what, though?  She now wants to do The Cascade Marathon on September 8^th, starting at the Hyak Trail Head at the top of Snoqualmie Pass, then five miles of relatively flat course around Keechelus Lake, through the famous 2½ mile long Snoqualmie Tunnel, then 17 miles of gentle downhill terrain on the old train bed that comes down the mountain to North Bend.  The minute she said she wanted to do this, I was all in.

Trouble is, getting south from the Wrangell Half Marathon on July 29^th, then getting enough training in to do a Full Marathon on September 8^th is a real challenge.  Sure, we can get back in time, but where to train for it?  There are some spots along the way to get some decent runs in, but is that enough?  (I did the math – she’d have to do some 330+ laps around the boat deck just to get in a 6-mile run, and that’s obviously out of the question.)  The decision was, bag the Wrangell run in favor of the The Cascade Marathon.  So that means we’ll forego the Alaska cruise this year, and it also means we haven’t a clue what we’ll now do for the next month and a half – other than to really enjoy that time aboard Flying Colours.

Monday-Saturday, June 17-22, Ganges – Garden Bay, Outstation to Outstation. Kap wrestled (and wrestled) with how and when to head out of Ganges.  With our new decision for the summer, we both knew we wanted to spend some good quality rest time at the SYC outstation at Garden Bay –  on the other side of the Strait of Georgia, and tucked deep into Pender Harbour.  But the weather was looking like we’d either go on Monday, the 17^th, or the wind and waves would lock us down to the dock at Ganges for four days.  The decision was made to depart at 6:30AM the next morning, head for Gabriola Passage and our entrance onto the Strait, and then point directly across the Strait of Georgia for a late afternoon arrival at Garden Bay.  It would be a 66 mile route, with waves potentially rising above ZuZu’s rough-o-meter level.

Trincomali Channel is the usual route on our way north, starting out near the north end of Mayne Island in the south, and splitting into two separate channels at the top end of Thetis Island.

The trip north from Ganges, if not spectacular, is always interesting.  It’s a series of long, thin islands, that viewed on a chart (such as the one on the right), indicate that these NW-to-SE running islands were created by Ice Age glaciers.  The coastlines we passed are almost completely void of settlement, and there are no towns or small villages along the way (except inside Montague Harbour at the south end) – so it’s peaceful to cruise through here.

This area near the north end of Trincomali Channel is sort of a holding pattern for ore ships bound for the Orient. This only started a few years ago, so there must be a mining operation that's started up somewhere south of Chemainus.

After passing the northern end of Salt Spring Island the waters widen out and in the distance on the right of the photo we can see an industrial area that’s south of Chemainus.  It’s a large lumber operation, as we often see tug and tow log booms – and the occasional large barge loaded with logs – being pulled into it.  There must also be a large mining operation there too, as we’re seeing more and more of the massive ore freighters at anchor along here, presumably waiting their turn for loading (and riding high in the water).  On this passage there were four freighters within sight, and probably more tucked around the corner at the entrance to Ladysmith Harbour.  The ship at right is the Kyoto Star, so likely it’ll be headed for Japan after loading – but the ship is registered in Monrovia.

In the past our route out to the Strait of Georgia was through Dodd Narrows and north to Nanaimo. About four years ago we tried Gabriola Passage and found we preferred it, so that's our standard route these days.

As we approached the south end of Gabriola Island, Kap jiggered the speed (I was driving, taking Captain’s orders from her), in order to arrive at Gabriola Passage at 10:15AM, hopefully finding the current at 2½ kts against us.  We’re never wild about non-slack passages, given the strong whoop-de-doos we’d find in the middle of the passage (our last passage through here in this direction a couple of years ago scared the daylights out of us when we unexpectedly hit 4 knots current against us and it slewed the boat almost 90° in a channel that’s barely wider than our boat.  Luckily, this time another SYC boat passed us just before we got to the passage, allowing us to follow it about 300 yards behind, and we could see how it handled the current before we had to.  It turned out to be almost exactly 2½ knots current against us, and there was no problem getting through.

Once out in the Strait of Georgia, the trip across was just long, but uneventful.  This was our longest cruise so far of the summer, giving us lots of time to run the water maker and test it out.  It worked fine, filling our 400 gallon fresh water tank to the brim.  We almost always have fresh water on the docks, except when we’re at anchor or in the Broughton’s (where the marina dock water is often not potable) – but we need to know that before we get there.

The Northern Expedition, heading north, crossed in front of us about halfway across the Strait of Georgia. Our guess is, it was in Vancouver for repairs or maintenance. Normally it's on a Port Hardy to Prince Rupert run.

Halfway across the Strait of Georgia, at just after noon, we were passed by the very large and impressive-looking Northern Expedition, a B.C. Ferry passenger and car ferry.  This was unusual, as we only ever see her north of Port Hardy and on the Inside Passage up to Prince Rupert, where she does a daily 7-hour overnight trip each direction.  The Strait of Georgia is not her normal route, and we’ve never seen her around here before, so maybe she was in Vancouver for vessel maintenance and they’re repositioning her.  I could find nothing on the internet about goings on.

The entrance to Pender Harbour is somewhat protected by Texada Island, with Malaspine Strait between the island and mainland. As I've noted on the chart, it's about midway between Vancouver and Desolation Sound, making it a good stopover spot for American and Canadian cruisers heading north.

Almost the full distance between here and Vancouver is known as The Sunshine Coast, and it lives up to its name. As a result, the whole area is full of second homes for Canadians from Vancouver and as far East as Alberta (plus a few Americans).few

You can see our route from the Strait of Georgia here, plus the route to the Garden Bay outstation. Our provisioning IGA grocery store is across the bay at the tiny village of Madeira Park, and it's an easy 10 minute trip by dinghy. When in training, Kap runs the 10 miles on a menadering backroad, and it's rather hilly.

I talk a lot in the blog about the Sunshine Coast, Pender Harbour, Garden Bay, and Madiera Park, but without any reference information about where they are it’s probably difficult to keep anything in perspective.  The second map at right shows the Sunshine Coast, stretching from just north of Vancouver to Jervis Inlet (not market on the map, but just to the left of Irvings Landing).  It’s hard to tell from this map exactly what Pender Harbour looks like, so later I’ll have a map of Pender Harbour that shows a lot more detail.  Except for Gunboat Bay – which seems to go forever to the NE – we’re about as deep into the harbor at Garden Bay as it gets.  There’s a pretty good IGA grocery store at Maderia Park, about a 10 minute dinghy ride away, plus Kap can get a good stock of her favorite hard cider at John Henry’s Resort – #6 on the map, and we get to it by dinghy across Garden Bay, tying up at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club dock, then walking 100 yards over a little ridge to the resort/marina.  I think overall, this is our favorite SYC outstation, with no time limit on how long we can stay here, and believe me, I could stay here for a month.

The first map shows the overall area of Pender Harbour.  Just north of our intended entrance to the harbour is Jervis Inlet, which we’ve never explored but need to someday.  Near the entrance is a side inlet that goes off to the south just a mile or so inland from the main mouth – and it’s called Skookumchuck Narrows.  According to Wikipedia, “Skookum is a  Chinook Jargon term that . . . means “strong” or “powerful”, and “chuck” means water, so skookumchuck means “rapids” or “whitewater” (literally, “strong water”), or fresh, healthy water”.  This narrows definitely falls in that category, as at full tidal flood it creates a standing wave that would be terrifying if you tried to go through it.  It’s a well-known haven, though, for kayakers, and they flock here from all over the world to ride that standing wave (a standing wave is one that stays in place, never rolls on, and you can get positioned in/on it and just ride it for a good long time.

To see what that can do to a boat, you need to take a look at this YouTube video that an SYC friend sent to me several years ago.  The link came up broken some time back, but after researching it a bit I contacted the author and he sent me this link:  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QEfUblSDzww.  It goes on for 5:46, so don’t quit early on it.  Keep in mind the videographer is a surfer dude, as are all the people around him making comments, so they get pretty salty at times.  If you don’t like what you’re hearing, just turn your volume off, but definitely watch the video.  And make sure you watch it all the way to the end, as the kayaker explains how he rescued the tug boat captain.

I cadged this photo from the internet. It definitely shows this to be a very scenic trip, and we must do it with Flying Colours one of these days.

When this photo was taken at the public dock Chatterbox Falls at the head of Princess Louisa Inlet it must have been a very unusual day - only a single boat or two at the dock. Normally, photos show the dock completely full, with upwards of 20 boats tied up and no more will fit.

Several miles north on Jervis Inlet is another smaller inlet, named Princess Louisa Inlet.  Kap and I have never been there, but it’s a must-do scenic spot in this area, and someday when we’ve exhausted everything else we want to do, we’ll make time for it.  It’s almost like one of the Seven Wonders of the World, ending at a spectacular waterfalls.  It’s pretty remote, but also very crowded at times, and I think our big fear is that we’ll find it crowded on the day/overnight that we just happen to be there.  You should do a search on Princes Louisa Inlet and drool over the incredible photos.

This rather simple map out of a local tourist magazine shows the lay of the land pretty well. Yesterday, Kap made a 10-mile training run, starting at Madeira Park. I dingied over with her, dropped her off, grabbed some groceries, and returned while she ran back - the long and hilly way. It was 10 miles, and her GPS indicated she had climbed the equivalent of 37 stories. Her route started at the 90 degree bend at Madeiira Park, then wound around to the east through Kleindale, around the top by Garden Bay Lake, then south along the lake to return to the SYC outstation.

For most of our week here we've been the only boat at the dock, and that's just the way we like it. So many boats these days are tall behemoths, and when we're stuck with one of them across from us on the dock they block out the sky.

But back to today’s cruise.  Just after 2PM we pulled into Pender Harbour and made our way to the SYC Garden Bay outstation.  We expected the docks to be full and maybe we’d have to anchor, but to our amazement there were only two or three other boats on our arrival, and our most favored dock spot was available – for a bow-in port tie on the outer end of the middle dock.  The outstation manager, Vicky, as always came out to help tie our lines.  This is our 13^th year coming to Garden Bay – starting with our very first cruise in the Nordic Tug in 2007 – and it’s always good to be back.  For whatever reason, the cruising season with everyone else just seems to be later this year, and for much of the time that we’ve been here so far, we’ve been the only boat on the docks.  You just can’t beat having your own marina.

Yes, we’re still having problems with ZuZu.  It’s good that we’ve now established she has the start of a kidney failure, and we’ve changed her anti-inflammatory med that likely caused it from Meloxicam to Gabapentin – which had the added benefit of calming her a bit for several hours after each twice-daily dosage.  It doesn’t always work, and we think some of it is coupled with some kitty dementia that is possibly giving her a bit of Sundown Syndrome.  Either that, or as Kap has jokingly surmised, she’s developing Tourette’s and she’s shouting out random obscenities, or on her cell phone she’s playing out the Verizon loud call every couple of minutes with “Can you hear me now?”  On nights when the Gabapentin isn’t working, she can be so loud and restless that we get as little as three hours of sleep.  Hard to believe from that sweet-looking cat sleeping in her helm chair bed, huh?

The past week since our visit to the vet has improved somewhat.  We’ve experimented with the dosage (now we’re breaking the ½ pill morning and night into a ¼ pill and learning how to bury it better.  We also got some “GooFurr” at the local vet in Garden Bay and it seems to help get her to eat the pills better.

Part of the problem too is that she wants off the boat – and very badly sometimes.  Once she’s in the cockpit, she’ll be over the side and onto the dock in a heartbeat, and sashaying towards shore.  Surprisingly, though, all I have to do is step onto the dock, say “Back on the boat” in a somewhat stern voice, she meows quietly, runs back to the boat and jumps over the side.  Next time I let her out, it’s all over again.

This is ZuZu's third escapade under the docks on our cruises north - once at Kwatsi Bay Resort and another time at Lagoon Cove.

But yesterday took the cake!  While Kap was finishing some laundry at the clubhouse, I was in charge of watching ZuZu.  She’d been particularly troublesome, continually jumping off the boat the minute I let her out – and meowing loudly and angrily if I didn’t.  I relented and opened the salon door to let her out.  She immediately ran to the side rail of the boat, jumped up and off onto the dock.  I put my sandals on as fast as I could and headed after her, but just as I was stepping off the boat, she ducked down the piling hole in the dock, directly across from the boat.  She was out of sight in an instant.  This is the third time over the years that she’s gone under the dock or float structures, and if we managed to get her out, it would be difficult.  Looking down the hole there was no sign of her, but as I watched it, about five minutes later she poked her head up for about five seconds and then ducked back out of sight.  It’s slippery and slimy down there, and there are often shag-nasties living under the dock – such as otters that would just love to get their claws into her.

Kap returned a few minutes later and we talked through our strategy.  As you can see in the photo, there is another set of piling poles about 100’ toward the shore, plus a half dozen more on the adjoining docks.  We had no idea what the structure was like below the decking, so no way to tell just how far she could go, or where she might pop up next.  There was nothing to do but contact the outstation manager to see if we could get help – such as pulling up a few of the dock boards to have a look below.  At 4PM the husband of the outstation manager came home from work (his name is Rod; her name is Vicky) and Vicky asked Rod to immediately head down to our dock to help.

Rod showed up with a hammer and various crow bars in hand.  He felt there were only two places ZuZu could pop up – and only on the side of dock where she went down.  Supporting the dock boards are two continuous stringers that run the length of the dock (shown in front of Rod’s shoes in the second photo), and where each dock meets there’s a facing board that would keep her from traversing to the next dock.

Rod quickly pulled up two boards next to the hole she went down.  Peering under it in both directions, ZuZu was nowhere to be seen, and that surprised Rod.  He went down past the next piling pair towards shore, wrestled out the half dozen nails that fasten the boards and took up two more.  Again, no sign of ZuZu.  We stood there talking, wondering where she could be.  Suddenly Rod asked me what color ZuZu is – and I told him she’s tiny, and a gray spotted tabby.  He turned and point towards the ramp from shore to the docks (upper left corner of the photo), and said, “Is that her coming down the ramp?”  Sure enough, it was ZuZu.  She was coming back from shore leave, with a jaunty bounce to her step, headed straight down our dock, and jumped aboard Flying Colours.

Kap and I were dumbfounded.  We’d been continuously watching the two piling holes that she could have come up from, and never spotted her.  Whatever, she totally fooled us, and now she was back safe – and it gave us some assurance that she’d come back if she got out again.  This morning by telephone I ordered up a generous gift certificate for dining at the best restaurant in the area and had it mailed anonymously to Rod and Vicky (Club rules prohibit members from paying any money or gifts to outstation managers, but this was special).

Edith Iglauer's house sits about 100' back from the shore, just to the left of the photo center. It's her dock and boat house at the shore, and her son is there almost every day work on restoration of the tiny fishing boat that's tied to the dock. The entrance to her property is on a separate lane from the SYC's property, so there's no way to communicate with anyone there. Surprisingly, no one waves from dock to dock, or yells hello back and forth. It's too bad.

Another piece of local lore.  The SYC outstation’s longtime next door neighbor, Edith Iglauer, died earlier this year, just two weeks shy of her 102nd birthday.  I never met her and knew very little about her, but from what I know, she would have been one of my most favorite people.  An American, raised on the U.S. East Coast (Cleveland), her interest in Eskimo culture led to several freelance writing assignments with The New Yorker magazine beginning in 1966.  As a freelance journalist she wrote dozens of articles for it and other magazines over the decades, plus four books.  While in Vancouver in the early years she met and married a commercial fisherman, and they set up life here in Garden Bay, tucked deep into Pender Harbour.  Her first full-length book, Fishing With John, was about her experiences learning to fish on her husband’s tiny boat.  After he died, Edith stayed on in their small cottage by the bay, and lived out a very long life.  In 2007 she starred as herself in one or more of the early episodes on the History Channel series that ran for eleven seasons (2007-2017), titled Ice Road Truckers, about “the activities of drivers who operate trucks on seasonal routes crossing frozen lakes and rivers, in remote Arctic territories in Canada and Alaska”.

To my knowledge there was never any socializing between Edith Iglauer and SYC members, and in fact, relations with the SYC were a bit frosty a few years ago when the club added a new dock that she felt encroached on access to her dock, but that somehow got resolved with some smooth talking by an SYC committee (the dock is the one you can see in the photo at right).

This is a photo I took in 2011 on a visit to Garden Bay. It's easily one of the two or three best photos I've ever taken, and it was totally a grab and shoot photo, with no time to prepare. The lady in the rowboat was returning home after delivering dinner that evening to Edith Iglauer, who would have been in her early 90's at the time.

In her later years, Edith Iglauer wasn’t able to cook her own meals, and each evening we’d see an elderly British lady (also a widow) who lives a half-mile or so around the corner on Gunboat Bay rowing a tiny boat over to deliver Edith’s dinner.  On our Fall 2011 visit to Garden Bay, one fine evening Kap and I were sitting in the cockpit watching an unbelievable sunset.  As I was snapping photo after photo of the sunset, this lady was returning home and came into view about 50’ off our stern.  I never take someone’s photo without asking, but I knew the time she’d be in the frame would be short – so I decided to snap the photo and ask permission afterwards.  She heard the camera shutter click and looked over – giving me an opportunity to mention what I’d done.  She rowed over to our stern and we chatted for about a half hour.  We learned she was British, she told us of her friendship with Edith Iglauer, and the story behind her meal deliveries.  We found out her name was Anne Clemence and got her e-mail.  She ended up inviting us down to her waterfront house, which regrettably we couldn’t because we were leaving the next morning on our journey south.  We later communicated via e-mail and sent a copy of the photo so she could send it to her brother in England.  These sunsets in Garden Bay are not unusual, and we have no idea why they occur so frequently – but this sunset has given me one of the best photos I’ve ever taken.

We’ve now spent a bit over a week at Garden Bay, could easily spend another week relaxing, but instead we’ll likely head north tomorrow (Tuesday) for the Desolation Sound area – specifically the SYC Cortes Bay outstation for a few days.  Stay tuned.

This chart shows our normal cruise route from Anacortes to Friday Harbor.

Monday, June 10; Anacortes Marina to Friday Harbor SYC Outstation. The cruise over to Friday Harbor was short, sweet, and uneventful – at 2 hours, 18 minutes total time.  As you can see on the chart at right, our route took us due west across Rosario Strait, where it’s vital to pay close attention for large oil tankers heading to and from the Cherry Point refinery at Bellingham and the two refineries at Anacortes and near our marina (Marathon and Shell).  The shipping lane is shown on the chart in red dashed lines, and to the south it leads out to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  According to the Wikipedia page on Rosario Strait, more than 500 oil tankers pass through the strait each year, so this is indeed a busy shipping lane.

Don’t forget – you can click on any photo in the post to enlarge it.

If you want to see where we are now, or better yet, monitor our route progress as we cruise along, you can go to www.ronf-flyingcolours.com and click on the Current Location link in the upper right corner of the home page.

Also, this post is more readable in the online version, plus you can read any of the posts back to 2010 from the archive – just click on the link above to the blog.

The Washington State Ferry routes through the San Juan Islands. The large blue dots indicate ferry terminals, with the main terminals being at Anacortes, Orcas, and Friday Harbor, with minor ones at Lopez and Shaw Islands. An international route is run in the summer months between Anacortes and Sidney (B.C.), with an intermediate stop in Friday Harbor.at Orcas

Washington State ferries are all car ferries, and tend to be behemoths. With their frequency of runs, it would be unusual if we didn't meet or get passed by four ferries on any cruise through the San Juans. We listen closely to the Vessel Traffic frequency, as the ferries report their departures from any terminal and that gives us a pretty good heads-up.

Once across Rosario Strait, and between Blakely and Decatur Islands, we transit Thatcher Pass, then turn NW to round the northern tip of Lopez Island – that nicely hides a WSF terminal that ferries suddenly pop out from.

A turn to the SW on Cattle Pass takes us to the south end of Shaw Island – and the tide that meets here as it goes around the top and bottom of the island always deposits lots of wood debris to watch out for.

It’s then a quick shot across the San Juan Channel that separates Shaw from San Juan Island.  At the opening to Friday Harbor sits Brown Island, creating two entrances to the harbor, the main entrance at the north that has the WSF ferry terminal, the Customs dock, and the main downtown of Friday Harbor (for some reason, really good harbors seem to have an island that almost plugs the entrance, creating a good protection for boats moored and anchored inside).  The south entrance is quite narrow and shallow, but smaller boats our size can transit it, and it takes us to the SYC “outstation” that’s located at that end of the harbor.

On most cruises ZuZu "goes to ground", either under a blanket or inside her covered oyster bed. She usually has something sticking out, either a paw or her tail. If we don't hear from her we assume everything's OK, but if we hear a low growling-type of meow, we know the waves are serious enough to kick off her "rough-o-meter".

Nevertheless, the crossing was smooth.  It must have been, because our reliable and very vocal “rough-o-meter” – ZuZu – slept in her “oyster bed” all the way across – with her long tail sticking out.  Along the way, we met the usual 3-4 Washington State Ferries, but other than having to allow for their large wakes, they aren’t a problem – being behemoths in the first place, and traveling at 23 knots, they can put up a 5’-6’ wake when they pass close by.  As you can see from the accompanying Washington State Ferry map, the main terminal for the San Juan Islands is at Friday Harbor.

(If you’re not familiar with how the crazy border between the U.S. and Canada ended up with the San Juan Islands being part of the U.S., you should read about the infamous Pig War of 1859 that finally got the long-running dispute resolved in the U.S.’ favor – you can find it on the opening page of my June 23, 2018 blog post   – titled Cruise 2018. . .  You can find it in the Archives.)

The Seattle Yacht Club is an asset-rich club, including a main clubhouse (called the Main station in club parlance) that contains two restaurants, several meeting rooms, and staff offices. The real crown jewels of the club, though, are its outstations, scattered from the lower end of Puget Sound all the way north to Desolation Sound. The use of the outstations are strictly for club members (no reciprocal privileges). Moorage at any outstation is free, and the allowable length of stay is generous (if not unlimited).

Arriving at Friday Harbor. Our late start from Anacortes put us at risk of finding the outstation full.  Kap and I both had our binoculars trained on the SYC docks, hoping that our usual (and preferred) outside side-tie dock was available.  Alas, it wasn’t, with a 65’ Ocean Alexander and a 55’ Ocean Sport taking up the full dock.  As we got closer we could see several other inner docks open that we could fit into, and our blood pressure dropped to normal.  With the help of about six people who jumped off their boats to help us dock, we were tied up in short order.

The Friday Harbor outstation is very well equipped. With moorage space for at least 20 member boats, there's also a club house, a laundry room, shower room, restrooms, and a deck area with BBQs for the club's famous "green box" appie/drink get-togethers. The main building at left in the photo is the full-time live-in outstation manager's residence.

Walking to or from the outstation on the road to town, I never tire of this view, and probably have five photographs from every one of the years we've visited the outstation. On a clear day, Mt. Baker is visible through the south entrance to the harbor, and we watch for ferries passing by the entrance. The club's moorage dock is only the furthest one away in the photo, and the near dock is for another club next door to us. Flying Colours is the third boat in, on the opposite side of the dock, with the yellow kayak slung along the side of the dinghy deck.

The Friday Harbor outstation is one of our most favorite outstations of the 11 facilities that the SYC has (including the Main Station Clubhouse at Portage Bay between Lake Washington and Lake Union).  It’s almost always our first outbound and last inbound stop on each summer’s cruise.  The level of facilities at each outstation are quite different, with five of the ten having full-time live-in managers that the Club employs and houses right at the outstation – and Friday Harbor is one of the five.  (Three are leased dock space at privately-owned marinas, one is at an un-manned facility, and one is simply a dock alongside a very small SYC-owned island near Ladysmith (B.C.))  These outstations are the crown jewels of the Seattle Yacht Club, and for many of us who cruise a lot, they’re the single biggest reason we joined the Club.  Moorage at all of the outstations is free, and easily makes up for the monthly club dues.)

The 2-day stopover was intended to be our shakedown cruise for testing any remaining systems to ensure they were working – a good solid test of the BBQ propane tanks, pinging of the satellite TV dish by Direct TV to get it working again, and check out the dinghy outboard motor to make sure it ran OK (we failed to winterize the motor when we brought it back from Lake Union so that was a critical test).  On the way over, Kap felt comfortable that the new trim tab control box was working OK, but we had decided not to test out the water maker until a longer cruise (the system needs a long time to start up and shut down, so Kap didn’t feel comfortable with the short trip over from Anacortes).

At dinner, Kap found the BBQ propane tanks were again failing to supply a good propane flow to the BBQ, and in fact, it was no better than at Anacortes.  Getting this resolved became the overriding task for the next morning.  I asked around, and found that San Juan Propane was considered the only game in town for reliable propane service.  The next morning Kap removed both tanks from their storage brackets in the fly bridge, I hauled them to the top of the steep driveway to Warbass Drive that runs by the outstation and rendezvoused with “Bob’s Taxi Service”.  For a pricey $10 fare for about a mile and a half we drove to the propane shop on the edge of town.  Unfortunately, the really knowledgeable propane guy was out on a long service call at Decatur Island (the closest island to the Anacortes area) and wasn’t expected back until late in the evening.  The more inexperienced service guy, Chuck, was left back at the shop to hold it down, but he promised me he’d take a good look at it.  Not feeling a lot of confidence that I’d get the problem sorted out in a quick day, I walked back to the boat.

The 2PM ferry, the Elwha, was just departing for Sidney (B.C.) as I walked by with a load of groceries. The car waiting lot is oftentimes full, but this time it was almost empty. The big sign identifies the five destinations from Friday Harbor. From here it's about a 3/4 mile walk to the SYC outstation and a quarter mile to the main downtown street intersection.

When I returned, Kap was readying the dinghy for its outboard motor test.  We lowered it into the water, but kept the davit hooked up to it, and Kap jumped in to see if the motor would start.  The battery was fine, it cranked and started in about two seconds.  After letting it run a few minutes to ensure it was pumping cooling water, we shut it down and raised it onto the dinghy deck.  One more checklist item completed.

Middle of the afternoon I called the propane shop and got word that the tanks had checked out OK, and after bleeding off the overfill they were at correct pressure and I could pick them up.  Another pickup by Bob’s brought me back to the propane shop – and a surprising no charge for their work – and returned to the boat with the heavy tanks.  Sure enough, they ran the BBQ just fine this time, and we felt comfortable removing this from the checklist.

The big problem of the afternoon was the satellite dish pinging task.  Anyone who has a satellite TV dish probably knows that if you leave the TV turned off for a period of two months or more, both of the satellite TV companies – DirecTV and Dish – consider the satellite to be inactive and they suspend access to it (but they still keep charging their monthly service fee – duh – why is that not surprising?).  To restart service you have to call their 1-800 number to have them ping your system – and wouldn’t you know it, the 1-800 number only works within the U.S. – so before we cross into Canada at Sidney, we have to make sure each year that this gets done.  Steeling her patience and nerves, Kap got a DirecTV technician on the phone and began what she knew would be a frustrating time of it.  This time was no exception.  The first box – in our salon (identified as our living room to DirecTV – was successfully pinged without a hitch and we had PBS up and running on it in a record 15-20 minutes.  Then Kap had them ping the second box in our main V-berth – and it didn’t go well.  The DirecTV technician finally admitted the problem was somehow out of his depth and passed the call over to someone above his pay grade.  Not!  The twerp cut the line off, and when Kap rang back – waiting at least a half hour in their stupid support queue – she had to go back through all of the identification rigmarole.  She again spent over a half hour with someone who didn’t know any more than the first one, who then passed her “upstairs” to a supervisor.  After a total of three hours on the call, getting absolutely nowhere, Kap gave up in disgust.  At least we have the salon TV working (we think).

With that, it’s time to head over to Sidney – still without Kap’s Nexus card being renewed, so we’re looking at the unknown of a face-to-face Customs clearance at the marina dock.  Stay tuned.

Don’t forget – you can click on any photo in the post to enlarge it.

Here's what the SPOT map looks like if you click on Current Location in the upper right corner of the blog Home Page, showing each of the position tags from our Anacortes departure, across to Friday Harbor, across the U.S./Canada border to Sidney, and then north to Ganges.

If you want to see where we are now, or better yet, monitor our route progress as we cruise along, you can go to www.ronf-flyingcolours.com and click on the Current Location link in the upper right corner of the home page.

Also, if you’re reading this post in the e-mail version, it’s much more readable in the online version, plus you can read any of the posts back to 2010 from the archive – just click on the link above to access the blog.

For ten years now we’ve relied on our Nexus cards for crossing to/from the Canadian/U.S. border.  Nexus is also known as the Trusted Traveler Card to both U.S. and Canadian Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) – allowing us to cross the border in each direction by simply telephoning a special 800-number when our GPS on the boat tells us we’re crossing the border.  This is hugely beneficial to us, as it allows us to bypass the Customs dock at the nearest port of entry on our crossings, and because we’ve already had extensive background checks with CBP years earlier, the fuss with the border agents is always very minimal and much more worry free.

(Having a Nexus card also makes life significantly easier in other ways.  You automatically have TSA Pre-Check status for the otherwise huge hassle at airport security – which can easily save an hour of frustrating wait time in the long airport security lines these days.  It also means a special Nexus car lane on both sides of the border crossings between the U.S. and Canada, and with the frequent, and incredibly long wait times at our crossings near Bellingham, having Nexus can easily cut an hour or more at each crossing – crossings we’ve made several times this past year.  And entering the U.S. from any international flight, having a Nexus card gives you access to the Global Entry kiosks at Passport Control, allowing you to scan your card at a self-service kiosk and you whisk through the otherwise long lines in minutes (if not seconds).  The whole process of getting a Nexus card can take up to six months, but if you’re doing any of these travel options, it’s well worth it.  If this information piques your interest, you can begin the application process by going to https://ttp.cbp.dhs.gov/, and click on the Get Started link under the Nexus heading.  It costs $50 per person, which is a real bargain, given how beneficial it is.)

As soon as our renewal mistake was realized, I logged onto our online CBP account and filled out the renewal form to see if a late renewal was possible.  It very clearly wasn’t, and making it worse, the Nexus renewal page indicates that the government shutdown last January has created significant delays in new Nexus applications as well as renewals – and now a renewal can take months for completion.  (My guess is, the government shutdown created an initial lengthening of processing time, but shifting people off to other duties to cover for the contrived, stupid, and unnecessary border crisis is the real cause.)

Anyway, since early April I’ve checked the CBP web site daily to see if Kap’s renewal has come through, and it hasn’t.  That means an at-the-dock Customs clearance into Canada on this trip would be necessary, something we haven’t done for the last 10 years of cruising on Flying Colours, and that raised my anxiety level.

Preparations For Departure. Since it’s really crucial to have all of our ducks in a row by dock departure time for the summer’s cruise, I’ve created – and added to – an extensive Excel spreadsheet checklist that’s now at 160+ To Do items.  Starting in the Fall, the checklist identifies all of our annual maintenance items for the boat – such as engine and transmission maintenance and oil changes, repair and maintenance on all other mechanical or electrical systems, and upgrades and maintenance for our electronics – navigation and otherwise.  It also includes general boat repairs and maintenance, such as teak rail varnishing, carpet cleaning, minor fiberglass ding repairs and anything that’s had a problem during our most recent cruise.  Every other year we require a haul-out to check things below the waterline, including hull cleanup and bottom paint, and replacement of zincs that protect us from “hot” marinas.

As part of the haul-out for bottom paint, we had the dinghy removed by crane, then drove is out the Ballard Locks and north to Edmonds to have a new (smaller) outboard motor fitted.

Doesn't that 40 HP Yamaha outboard motor look too big for the dinghy? It was great for getting us up to 22 MPH on the way out and back to set and pull prawn pots, but it had its problems. The new 25 HP motor will hopefully be much better, albeit slower.

This year, given that Flying Colours is 10 years old, we had some special things done.  We’ve regretted it for years, but when we visited the huge Fort Lauderdale Boat Show just before taking delivery of Flying Colours in 2009, the East Coast Fleming dealer at the show talked us into getting our inflatable dinghy from a Florida manufacturer – who turned out to be a real shyster, and we were glad to hear, is now out of business.  The dinghy itself is OK, but he convinced us to get an outboard motor for it that’s too large (heavy) and powerful (40 HP) for a dinghy of its size.  As a result, it’s never been easy to get the dinghy up on a plane – which is necessary when you transition from about 10 MPH to anything higher – because the weight of the outboard keeps the nose of the dinghy too high in the air.  Kap has always had to lean way out on the nose to get enough weight there to bring the nose down.  Worse, the motor weight somehow makes the dinghy skittish at higher speeds (18+ MPH) and we/ve just never felt safe.  Last fall, we found that a local Yamaha dealer would take our outboard in on trade, and downsizing to a brand new 25 HP motor would cost us only $3,000 – which was far lower than I expected it to be.  So, while Flying Colours was “out on the hard” for maintenance, we had the dinghy taken off by crane, put in the water just inside the Ballard Locks.  It was then driven north to Edmonds to have the replacement motor installed.  What a hoot taking a dinghy through the locks!

Here's our new entertainment system rack of gizmo boxes. They're now state-of-the-art digital devices - which really means that it'll take us months and months to figure out how to work things. Behind the boxes is a tangle of cables that would confound a Double-E PhD.

Another big ticket item (actually, one of several) was our entertainment system – the stack of electronic equipment, hooked together with a maze of wires inside a single cabinet in the boat’s salon (living room) that provides our TV and music throughout the boat.  At 10 years old, it too is long in the tooth, with several analog “boxes” that are now digital in today’s world, and are so far out of date that parts and repair aren’t very easy at this stage (imagine getting service on your old Apple iTouch music player which is from the same era).  We bit the bullet (to spend about 10 grand) on several new components, most of which make no sense to me whatsoever, as we decided long ago that oversight of the myriad of clickers needed to talk with all of this is something I want no part of.

While we had the A/V guy on the boat to do his thing, we also had him upgrade the WiFi system so that we can better access the internet, not only by connecting up with each marina’s WiFi system, but also using the cell towers within a 40-mile range while on the move.

Lastly, we had the boat hauled out and every-other-year bottom paint was applied – a special “anti-fouling” paint that keeps barnacles and other crud from sticking to and growing on the bottom.

On a crisp early December (2018) morning, Kap is turning us down the fairway to our slip at Anacortes Marina.

The last 60' is the trickiest - but over the years Kap has become a pro - spinning us 90 degrees into the narrow slip that Flying Colours lives in. Theslip roof is only 20' off the water line, so it's critical that we lower the 16' tall radio antennas and the radar arch that's on a clever motorized hinge that's operated with a handheld remote.

All in all, it took us over three months for this work to finish up, and it wasn’t until December 3^rd that we took Flying Colours back home to Anacortes.  By then, the days are really short – too short for a comfortable one-day cruise, so we turned it into a leisurely 3-day cold-weather cruise, first to Bainbridge (the town that used to be Winslow, on Bainbridge Island), then northward to Port Townsend, and finally across Admiralty Inlet (that connects to Puget Sound) to Anacortes.  Basically, it was a shakedown cruise after all the maintenance, to ensure that everything was now working OK.

Then the checklist moves into the Spring, where every detail necessary to get ready for our upcoming cruise is identified and kept track of.  Each year we offload a bunch of things from the boat and store them in our rented storage shed at the Anacortes Marina – things like bicycles, kayaks, prawning gear, and lots of renewable supplies.  All of those have to go back aboard.

On a related worksheet – that I’ve named Pantry – I have an extensive list of every consumable pantry item on the boat, updated and accurate as of each summer’s departure.  There are 6-8 cupboards around the galley area where pantry items get stored – crammed in tight is a better term.  The last thing I want to do every time a box of spaghetti, or a can of chicken broth, or a package of taco spices has to be located, is to rummage through these cupboards looking for it.  The Pantry spreadsheet lists every item and identifies where it’s located.  Because we’re out for at least two months each summer, I stock the pantry for everything we’ll need throughout that time, and as we use up these consumables I update the spreadsheet.  It’s all a pain in the butt, but it’s well worth it when it keeps the pandemonium down when I’m in the middle of cooking or getting ready for shopping.

In the weeks and months before departure each year, I also use the Pantry worksheet as a shopping list.  It typically takes over a half dozen trips in the spring to get the boat provisioned and loaded, and on each trip the car is usually loaded to the gills.

Away, For Summer 2019 Cruise

On our arrival at Anacortes Marins on departure day, an ominous thunderstorm build-up didn't promise good weather. Next morning, though, all signs of it were gone.

Monday, June 10; Anacortes Marina to Friday Harbor SYC Outstation. Finally, after what seemed like an interminable process of getting Flying Colours ready – including several delays due to various situations – we declared it time to go.  Our long-settled plan has been to head north fairly quickly, bypassing or spending minimal time at our usual haunts in Desolation Sound and The Broughtons, in order to be in Wrangell, SE Alaska, for Kap to run in their Bearfest 2019 Half Marathon on Sunday, July 29^th.  Until our departure, though, so many things were going wrong that we weren’t sure if we’d get anywhere close to SE Alaska on this summer’s cruise, so our entire float plan has been up in the air.

The last big problem before departure was our BBQ – which seems like this should really be a minor problem, but it wasn’t.  We BBQ a lot on the boat, and our freezer is packed with “stuff” that is planned for BBQ’ing throughout our cruise.  As a  prelude to this problem, last fall we’d realized that our two RV-type 2½ gallon propane tanks on the boat were due for re-certification (U.S. law is that new tanks have to be re-recertified 12 years after manufacture, and our tanks on Flying Colours were at that age).  During our fall maintenance we took them to a marine supply store in Seattle.  They were returned to us recertified, full of propane, and ready to go for another 5 years.  (Complicating it, Canadian law is different on this, and with our tanks already out of certification in Canada, we can’t refill in Canada with propane until we get that sorted out – and in the meantime we need to enter Canada with enough propane to last the summer.)

We moved aboard Flying Colours on Friday night, hopefully needing just Saturday to get our last minute details sorted out, then depart Sunday morning for Sidney (B.C., on Vancouver Island).  On Saturday night, we decided to BBQ and eat on the boat, but when Kap fired up the BBQ it was obvious something was wrong.  Switching tanks didn’t help, even swapping out our brand new BBQ with our backup BBQ didn’t fix the problem.  There was no evidence of a leak anywhere along the gas line between the tanks and the BBQ.  That left the regulator as the likely culprit, even though we’d had that tested last fall too.  Dinner was instead prepared on the cooktop.

Saturday morning I drove over to Mt Vernon to a propane service company that we’d worked with several years ago.  From the description, the service guy felt that the likely problem was the propane tanks – maybe overfilled – but just in case, he replaced our regulator for a mere $13 (which is cheaper than anything else you ever replace on a boat).  Back at Flying Colours, sure enough the new regulator didn’t solve the problem, and by now the weather had deteriorated and Kap wanted to delay until Monday morning.

Besides, it was unthinkable to leave without this problem resolved.  At midday I headed off with the two propane tanks to the local Ace Hardware (where we normally have them filled).  I managed to get Jerry, the most experienced propane person at Ace, to look at the tanks, and she concluded that one of them was definitely over-filled with propane.  She felt the other tank was half full of propane at the time the recertification was being done and they somehow filled it the rest of the way up with plain old compressed air – and then somehow filled the other tank twice by mistake.  (This was all speculation, so who knows?)  By safety regulations she couldn’t help with either problem (too volatile and dangerous) – but she demonstrated exactly how I could purge the compressed air out, and suggested that we hook the overfilled tank up to our BBQ and just let it run until the overfilled propane was resolved.  Back at the marina parking lot, I took the compressed air-filled tank to a remote part of the lot, cracked open the valve, and spent the next half hour listening to the hissing air bleeding off.  When I thought it was almost all gone, I headed back to Ace to have it filled properly.

On return to Flying Colours with what I thought was a success, Kap hooked the tank up to the BBQ, and sure enough, it appeared the problem was resolved – enough so that we felt comfortable heading out.

Early Monday morning we made our last minute preparations, and by 9AM we were ready to go.  As Kap did the normal engine warm-up, I unhooked us from the shore power at our dock and got our moorage lines untied.  Kap put both engines in gear, and rather than the smooth and easy pull away from the slip the whole boat gave a shudder and a heavy vibration – obviously, something was going wrong between the engines and props.

Geez, Louise!  What else can go wrong?  Kap immediately shut down and we re-tied Flying Colours to the dock cleats.  She then restarted the engines, put one engine at a time in gear for just a second as we tried to determine which one (or both) was causing the problem.  It was obviously the port-side engine/prop.  We’d had a similar experience several years ago after the boat was sitting in our slip unmoved for several months, we figured it might be something similar – kelp, barnacles, whatever – that had grown on the props or prop shafts in the past few months, causing things to be out of balance.  But that didn’t make sense, as we’d just had our local marina diver dive on the boat the previous week to check our zincs for wear and tear, and he said the bottom looked in beautiful shape.  We then called Chris, our go-to service in Seattle, and he had some ideas, but didn’t point to a solution.  Kap was resistant to my idea, but with Chris’ concurrence I managed to talk her into more securely tying to the dock, and again, one engine at a time, putting it in gear for a longer time to see if the problem would work itself out.  Sure enough, after doing this about a half dozen times the port engine/prop smoothed out – and we now felt much more comfortable to head off.  What the problem was, though, we’ll never know.

We still had to top off our main diesel tanks at the next door marina fuel dock and by the time we got away, it was almost 2PM.  With a 2+ hour cruise over to the Seattle Yacht Club Outstation at Friday Harbor, I was concerned that we’d be the last arrivals of the day, and it made it iffy as to whether we’d get a moorage spot.  This stopover at Friday Harbor was intended to be our shakedown cruise, where we’d spend a couple of days testing out as many systems as possible to ensure that everything was working OK.

So finally being away from Anacortes, at least we got some water under our bums, and even if it came with a lot of frustration, the worst day on a boat is better than the best day on land.

Next up:  Two days at Friday Harbor, then over to Sidney.  Stay tuned.

After the long, straight, and narrow channels that define the northern end of the Inside Passage, from Prince Rupert to SE Alaska is a final 50-mile expanse of open Pacific Ocean known as Dixon Entrance. Foul weather is frequent, and so are large ocean swells and uncomfortable waves – not to mention fog. We always treat Dixon Entrance with a huge amount of respect, and Kap frets over the weather forecasting here more than anywhere else in our cruising areas. At the north end of Dundas Island are anchorages you can duck into at Brundige Bay, and then again at Foggy Bay once you’re across it – but other than that, if you stick your nose out, it’s pretty certain you’re going to go all the way. If you’re crossing to the north and you’re a slow boat – many full displacement boats only travel at 7 knots, and can’t reach Ketchikan from Prince Rupert – the anchorage at Foggy Bay is used by many – but you’re breaking U.S. CBP laws if you don’t call in to say that you’re on U.S. territory.

It seems like an exaggeration, but we’ve made serious plans to return to SE Alaska every year since 2010. And each year something has happened to frustrate those plans.

We were the closest to achieving our goal in 2010, and of all the years, our problem that year was the most dramatic reason for not getting there.  The night before our departure Kap took a nasty header onto her face on the sidewalk at our Anacortes marina while walking Gator one last time before we turned in for an early night.  The scrapes and bruises everywhere were the minor problem – the big problem was she broke her wrist trying to stop her fall (it was the hand with Gator’s lead on it and her knee suddenly collapsed as she started to run with him, causing the wrist to be at an odd angle).  Landing awkwardly it caused a nasty bone compression at the wrist end of the radius bone, requiring serious surgery to fix it.  After recuperation from surgery, we managed to recover our cruising season, but didn’t get any further north than The Broughton’s – with Kap flying home every two weeks on Kenmore Air for physical therapy.

Don’t forget – you can click on any photo in the post to enlarge it.

If you want to see where we are now, or better yet, monitor our route progress as we cruise along, you can click here to go to www.ronf-flyingcolours.com, then click on the Current Location link in the upper right corner of the home page.

Also, this post is more readable in the online version, plus you can read any of the posts back to 2010 from the archive.

As a teaser, make sure you go all the way to the end of this post, for photos and stories about eagles during this summer’s cruising adventures.

Saturday, July 21^th; Butedale Cannery to Prince Rupert. We have a lame cat, in a lot of pain, and if we don’t get her tended to as soon as possible we’ll run out of the “happy juice” that’s helping her with the pain.  But Prince Rupert is over 100 miles away, so are we going to make it in one long “stretch” day or stop off at anchor at one of the four bays along the way, delaying ZuZu’s visit to a vet.  I vote to press on, and in the end Kap agreed.

Almost every valley behind the waterline on either side of the channel has a lake that flows out to the channel, producing a hundred waterfalls that are wonderful eye candy for our cruise.

With that decision there was nothing to do but buckle down for a long day, establish a drive/rest schedule to get through the long hours, and keep plodding along at 8 knots for the next 12 hours.  Trouble was – and for reasons we’ve not been able to explain – our tide and current tables for this area didn’t match reality.  Instead, where she’d calculated our arrival time based on a current of 1-2 knots going with us, we were actually finding a current against us most of the way.  If that continued, we’d have a hard time making it all the way to Prince Rupert, and that left us with the unknown about whether we’d have to stop in an anchorage for the night.

Flashback: On our trip through here in 2008 we were following our friends Bucky and Christy in Undoc’d.  Suddenly Bucky said on the radio, “There’s a bear swimming across!  He’s right in our path!”  We trained our binoculars on the dark lump in the water just off their starboard side, and sure enough it was a brown (grizzly) bear swimming across.  And it was swimming pretty smartly, passing just off Un’Docked’s stern and in front of us.  Before I could grab a camera he was too far away to get a good shot.

ZuZu spends about half of each cruising day sleeping in her clamshell, and the other half wedged between the windscreen and pilot house dashboard. This is her safe spot and where she goes whenever things get too rough – and when she’s had a bit of happy juice. . .

Throughout the day’s journey, ZuZu slept quietly in her clamshell bed on a perch in the pilot house.  Once in a while we’d get a glimpse of her tail sticking out, but only once or twice throughout the whole day did we see any sign of consciousness due to the strong medication.  At least it didn’t appear she was in pain – not that we could see anyway.

This map shows our route northward across the complicated 6-way intersection of waterways that connect a bunch of channels. The B.C. Ferry that sank here in 2006 was going exactly opposite of our route. By not making the left turn as they left Grenville Channel, the ferry continued across Wright Sound, just missing a direct head-on collision with Gil Island, but rather sliding along the NE tip that juts out from Gil Island, and then running aground on a reef that juts out a mile or so along the coast of the island – then sinking with tragic results.

For the next couple of hours we made our way north on Fraser Reach, with Princess Royal Island on our left.  At the end of Fraser Reach we entered an unusual 6-way intersection that leads into a very large sound, and across the top of Princess Royal Island.  Our passage through McKay Reach and into Wright Sound was uneventful, but it got a bit lumpy, as the channel that winds westward around Fin Island leads directly out to open water of the Pacific.  It wasn’t a problem, but just a bit bumpy (and it was a good thing ZuZu was zonked).  The best part of the transit was, we had a short span of cell phone reception as we passed the entrance to the side channel leading north to the village of Hartley Bay (tucked in behind Gribbell Island).  It was our first link to the outside since departing Shearwater, and it’s always good.  (These days, on outages like that I have upwards of 200 e-mails stacked up to download – at least 150 of them totally junk spam e-mails, maybe 25 of moderate interest, and another 25 that are of actual value.)  At the northwest corner of Wright Sound we turned north to enter Grenville Channel, the last long channel before the final open water stretch to Prince Rupert.

The MV Queen of the North was the B.C. Ferry that struck a reef and sank near Hartley Bay in 2006 with the loss of two lives. She had a passenger capacity of 700 and 115 vehicles, but on the night of the sinking she carried 101 souls. Launched in 1969, she was 375’ long and cruised at 20 knots.

Hartley Bay Ferry Sinking. It’s late at night – 12:25AM to be exact – and the B.C. ferry, Queen of the North, heading south on her every-other-day scheduled run from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy has just exited Grenville Channel into Wright Sound.  From Wright Sound there’ll be a sharp left turn into McKay Reach that crosses the top of Princess Royal Island, then a sharp right turn into Fraser Reach (which feeds into the various channels that pass Butedale Cannery and onward towards Shearwater).  For some reason – that’s still in dispute today – the first left turn to McKay Reach wasn’t made, and in total darkness it wasn’t noticed.  The ferry continued across Wright Sound, just missing a straight-on crash into the northern tip of Gil Island.  Her hull snagged the rocks jutting offshore at the NE tip of Gil Island, ripping it open and causing it to sink in over 1,200’ of water.  A mayday call was put out on VHF, and long before the nearest Coast Guard vessel could arrive to rescue passengers, a small contingent of First Nations fisherman leaped out of bed and raced across with a fleet of fishing boats to get the rescue started.  All but two of the 101 passengers aboard were rescued, and it was later theorized that the two missing passengers were trapped in their car on the lower deck.

The mystery was, what went wrong on the bridge (the driving and navigation station) of the ferry that caused the crucial turn not to be made.  The fourth officer was at the helm at the time, and it’s undisputed that the ship’s female Quartermaster was with him on the bridge during this time.  It was alleged they were having sex – they had previously had an affair – but they claim they were instead having a serious argument that distracted them.  The fourth officer was subsequently convicted of “criminal negligence causing death” and sentenced to four year in prison.

In any case, the small village of Hartley Bay has so far gotten the short end of the stick on the disaster.  There were 40,000 gallons of diesel fuel in the ferry’s fuel tanks and 8,000 gallons of lubricating oil aboard (by comparison, we carry 1,000 gallons of fuel and essentially no lubricating oil).  In addition to an oil slick that blanketed the entire sound right after the sinking, the wreck is still deteriorating on the bottom, periodically releasing toxins that float to the surface.

I grabbed this aerial photo from a “screen scrape” of a YouTube video of the Hartley Bay area. Obviously, this is quite a small village.

The Gitga’at First Nations band has been trying for over a decade to get the B.C. government to raise the wreckage to protect the marine environment – which is their livelihood.  So far, nothing has been done.  When we visited in 2008 a new ferry terminal had just been built, supposedly in appreciation of the assistance the locals gave to the rescue effort that night (a small ferry operates between Hartley Bay and Prince Rupert, and with no roads in the area, this is their only access to the outside world).

On our 2008 overnight stop in Hartley Bay, several First Nations kids from the village came down to the docks in the evening, and with no prompting from us, asked if they could use our swim step on Cosmo Place as a diving platform. We said sure, and watched with smiles on our faces as they dove, climbed back aboard, dove again, and repeated that for at least an hour. Obviously these kids were used to the cold water.

Inside the village itself there are no roads or streets (so there are no cars either), and all of the houses and tribal buildings are linked by raised boardwalk – and ATVs are the preferred mode of transportation, as is walking.  On our overnight stop in 2008 we were extremely impressed with Hartley Bay, mainly the spirit and attitude of the people.  We were encouraged to visit the salmon hatchery on a large stream behind the village, and everyone we met on the boardwalk was very friendly, with a big smile and shouts of “Hello!”.  At the salmon hatchery the operator enthusiastically showed us the various tanks for the Coho salmon as they progress in age and size.  What was very obvious was his disdain of the B.C. Fisheries support for the commercially farmed Atlantic salmon hatcheries in Lower B.C. – and he stressed (with great contempt) that this is the result of appointing a land-based agricultural bureaucrat to head the Fisheries Department.

One of our five computer monitors on the dash is always scrolled out for the big picture view of where we’re going (the most practical reason for it is to give us a sense of where we can cut corners to save time and fuel). Kap always likes to keep one monitor scrolled in very close, as a precaution that we won’t miss seeing a rock or shoal that could spell disaster.

Back to Our Cruise Up Grenville Channel. With our need to get to Prince Rupert, we decided to give Hartley Bay a miss on this trip.

Not long after we entered Grenville Channel we heard Traffic talking to the Northern Expedition, a B.C. Ferry that runs every other day between Port Hardy and Prince Rupert. It was coming towards us, and when she was about six miles out we started to see her on AIS. This photo shows our passing.

We’ve seen the Northern Expedition more than any other vessel so far on our trip.  It’s been on this run from Port Hardy to Prince Rupert since 2006, when the Queen of the North sank in a tragic accident just a few miles south of here near Hartley Bay.  It must be eerie for the crew as they transit through Wright Sound, knowing that their predecessor is at the bottom, 1,200’ below them.

I doctored up this computer screen shot photo so that I could explain it a bit (and you’ll have to click on the photo to enlarge it).  On our rightmost navigation screen, it’s always set up in split-screen mode, with different zoom settings – the right half zoomed way out to show maximum scale; the left half zoomed in to show local scale.  On the left half, I’ve pointed out the AIS signal for the Northern Expedition, and both of us seem to be nicely spaced apart (laterally) in the channel.  When you look out the window, though, it looks like the ferry is way off on the other side of the channel from us, and a (relatively) huge distance between us.  Keeping everything in perspective is an important task in watching the electronic monitoring of what’s going on versus looking out the window.

We know for miles and miles in advance when we’ll be meeting (or being overtaken by a significant vessel, as “Traffic” – the waterways equivalent of Air Traffic Control for commercial jetliners – is talking to all commercial vessels over 70’ about their current location, plus their ETA for their next waypoint.  When they’re within 6-10 miles they also show up with their AIS marker on all of our navigation software screens.  This time as we approached, Traffic made the following comment on the VHF radio frequency:  “ . . . and there’s a nonparticipating AIS vessel, Flying Colours, such-and-such distance ahead”.  At first, that sounds rather negative and judgmental about us – referring to us as “nonparticipating”, as if we just aren’t playing by the rules, but in fact, it just means that we haven’t filed a “float plan” with Traffic and they are not monitoring us as they do for “participating” vessels.)

We met this sailboat a further few miles up Grenville Channel. It won’t win any awards for being sleek and beautiful, but it’s probably very functional for long distance cruising. This photo gives a really good impression of how dense the trees are, right down to the water (and how few the "bear beaches" are). The scarf at the top of the mountain behind is a slide that took out trees along a big chuck of real estate as it crashed down the mountain..

With mountains just like this on both sides of the channel, plus having a fairly constant water depth below us of 600’-1,000’, you really get the sense of being in a significant fjord-like valley that we’re cruising in.  As we can see on our navigation charts (and confirmed by Vancouver’s soundings over 200 years ago, where the mountains meet the water, their sides continue the same steepness to the bottom, and the valley floor is quite flat.  With our depth sounder readings, we can see that the depth below us remains virtually constant for long periods, indicating a very flat floor to the valley.  These deep valleys were certainly carved from the glaciers that formed here in the Ice Age, then filled in with water from the channels that lead out to the Pacific.

Mid-afternoon we passed the last two of the duck-in anchorages before we hit the open water to Prince Rupert – Baker Inlet and Kumealon Inlet.  I think Kap felt that caution dictated a stop, but with daylight until late in the evening I was of a mind to go on.  What complicated matters a bit was that it was Saturday, and even if we did get into Prince Rupert, we’d have to wait through Sunday before any vet would be open.  Stopping, though, meant getting the dinghy down after setting the anchor – always necessary when you have a dog that needs to go ashore – and then getting it back up in the morning before departure.  After talking each anchorage through, we made the decision to go on.

Finally (and I don’t mean that to sound as if I wasn’t enjoying the day), we reached the northern end of Grenville Channel, where it again starts to widen.  And even though we found more and more current against us, and it increased our worries that our reduced speed over the ground would push back our arrival time.  In fact, our Nobeltec software was beginning to show a very small reduction (5 minutes) in time.  Just as Kap was starting into the open water after the end of Grenville Channel – and feared that it could be rough, we met the Ocean Titan – a Western Towboat tug from Seattle – and knowing that our friend Cap’n Doug had been the skipper on it a month earlier, we thought he might be on it now.  We radioed to it and asked to switch to frequency 68 where we could chat.  It wasn’t Doug on the Ocean Titan, but the good news we got from the Skipper who answered our call was that the seas ahead weren’t as bad as we feared.  That was good news, and it further validated our decision to press ahead with the day.  I also telephoned the Cow Bay Marina on my satellite phone to confirm our reservation, giving them our anticipated arrival time, and the young lady said she’d be waiting on the dock to take our lines.

This is the typical grain freighter that we see around Prince Rupert – the Ruby Indah, home ported in Singapore and anchored near to our marina. (And no, I did not use a wide angle lens to make this ship look a mile long - it was just a standard 50mm lens.) She’s obviously empty at this time, as the “bulbous bow” is almost all the way out of the water (a bulbous bow “modifies the way the water flows around the hull, reducing drag and thus increasing speed, range, fuel efficiency, and stability” (Wikipedia article). Way back at the aft end of the freighter, note the small orange “thing” – it’s an escape pod that serves as a lifeboat in an emergency. Often the escape pod is launched from the “mother ship” by a ramp (like a carnival ride), but at close up this one seems to be lowered by a winch.

Just after the open water stretch, we navigated a myriad of small islands, winding our way past shallow (but safe) areas that shaved considerable distance from our day’s overall route.  (Kap’s original course line skirted around these islands, but given the lateness of the hour, this change really helped our expected arrival time.

Here’s a closer view of the escape pod, presumably positioned so that crew in the living quarters and bridge have quick access to it in an emergency.

The approach into Prince Rupert is long and slow, with a deep water harbor that services a lot of freighters – container and grain seem the most – plus a large commercial fishing fleet, a cruise ship or two, and a lot of cruisers passing through (to/from SE Alaska).  It’s slow because they have a posted Go Slow/No Wake zone that’s several miles from the downtown docks, and they enforce it (mainly for the out-of-area boats like us) with a municipal Port Authority boat (that’s based at the Cow Bay Marina where we were heading).

The enforcer is a small nondescript aluminum boat, maybe 20’ in length, with very unobtrusive markings that hardly show up at 20’, let alone 200’.  Kap picked it up running along the shore about a mile outside of the Go Slow point – and she only spotted it because it was transmitting an AIS signal and the boat name indicated in the data block “Port Authority”.  It wasn’t long before we were sure it was shadowing us – for whatever reason we hadn’t a clue.  As we went by the container facility where the Maersk Line ship was being loaded, the Port Authority boat lagged behind us and we thought maybe he’d found better fish to fry.  Another minute later, though, and his AIS signal on our navigation screen sped up and his track was clearly headed straight for us.  I discreetly watched him with my binoculars, as he first came up on our starboard stern, and then crossed over our wake to the port side.  A moment later he was alongside us, maybe 10’ away from our pilot house doors.  He watched us; we watched him.  We assumed he was about to make some indication of boarding us – but he didn’t – and the stand-off continued for a minute or two more.  We made every effort to not give him any reason to harass us further.  Moments later he sped up, veered away from us, and raced across the harbor, ostensibly to catch up with some other villain – and yes, raced at top speed, putting up a wake that their own No Wake zone is supposed to stop (reminded us of cops who use their siren to cross town for lunch).  You can bet we watched him with our binoculars, and sure enough, on the other side of the harbor he slowed down in the shallows, all by himself, and just puttered along.

We continued into the harbor at the legal speed.  We hailed the marina harbor master, a young woman named Mona, and she directed us to the slip she had reserved for us.  As we tied up she gave us a rundown on the marina rules and procedures and we got her to write out the name and phone number of the sole veterinarian in Prince Rupert (plus another that was 60+ miles away in a town called Terrace).  The next day was Sunday, so we knew the best we could do was to keep ZuZu doped up on the Buprenorphine – and wait things out until Monday morning when they opened.

After two long days getting to Prince Rupert – a cruise distance we’d normally do in 3-4 days – so Sunday was a total down day.  Well, as much of a down day as my Energizer Bunny Captain can tolerate.  For my part, I relaxed, dozed, and went through a long stack of e-mails; Kap washed the boat to get off the salt spray of the last several days and talked me into drying the teak cap rails so they wouldn’t spot.

This photo is taken at about the midway point up the hill to the city’s central business district. Cow Bay is a waterfront area that had something to do with cattle shipments long ago, but more recently it was a salmon cannery – and in fact, the white building at center is the old cannery building, built partly on pilings and sticking out into the harbour. It now houses a museum, and on the other side of it is the Cow Bay Marina. It’s a large deep water bay, and some grain ships anchor in it for loading. Directly to the left of the photo is a cruise ship terminal, and a fairly small cruise ship from Vancouver calls in about once a week.

Cow Bay Marina, Prince Rupert. On our stopover in Prince Rupert in 2008, the best marina for cruisers was the Prince Rupert Rowing and Yacht Club, located very conveniently in a waterfront area known as Cow Bay that long had a salmon cannery.  The cannery building is still here, but now turned into a museum, and at the foot of the old wharf is the new Cow Bay Marina – where we decided to moor this time.

In 2008 when we were departing Prince Rupert on our route south, we had dense fog that gave us virtually no forward visibility (it looked fairly good at the dock, but closed in around us within a few minutes). Just as we approached a harbor channel navigation red buoy, Kap suddenly spotted a fast-moving radar blip to our right and stopped us dead in our tracks. Seconds later a pilot boat exactly like the yellow one in this photo crossed our bow going at least 20 knots, not 20’ ahead of us (in incredibly dense fog). (About all I could see was the large word PILOT on the side.) The idiot had apparently mistaken our blip on his radar screen for the buoy and was “turning around us” to return to his base. Not only did he come incredibly close to smashing into us, but his wake completely buried our bow in the water. I wish like hell we’d followed him and reported what he’d done, but we were just too green to do it in those days.

Monday morning I called the vet’s office – and I didn’t like what I  heard:  “We don’t have any openings this entire week.”  The desk person barely gave me the time of day, and basically told me they weren’t accepting any new “clients”.  I was incredulous – a town of 12,000 and they only have one vet!

I waited a few minutes, then called back.  “I have an emergency with my cat – it looks like she dislocated her shoulder or has a broken bone.”  Nothing doing – they wouldn’t budge on getting her in, even for a declared emergency.  I asked what people in town do when they have an emergency and was told that they either drive the 60 miles to Terrace, or an even further 60+ miles beyond that to Kitimat – that they each had a single vet clinic.  I was dumbfounded.  We obviously didn’t have any way – other than renting a car – to get ZuZu to either of these places – but I took down their telephone numbers and called the one in Terrace.  An answering service intercept in Terrace told me that the vet was away on holiday for two weeks, so Kitimat was my only bet.

In desperation I called the vet clinic a third time, and to my surprise the head nurse who answered the phone this time said they could get ZuZu in if I came right away and dropped her off for the day – that they could possibly look at her in a spare moment (but couldn’t guarantee anything).  Kap and I scooped up everything I’d need  – her soft-sided travel Sherpa, her meds (Meloxicam and Buprenorphine), and her shot records.  I immediately called a taxi for pickup at the marina, and headed to the top of the dock to wait.

Of course, the vet clinic was on the far western outskirts of town (along the highway to Terrace) and the one-way taxi fare was C$20 (US$15).  Because I’d gone around the front desk staff, my reception on arrival wasn’t the greatest, but after waiting almost an hour for other pets to be checked in, they gave me some paperwork to fill out and collected ZuZu.  As usual when she goes anywhere near a vet clinic, she was fit to be tied, and screaming at the top of her lungs.  Since I had to leave her for them to handle when they had time, I explained how difficult she can be, even in getting her out of her Sherpa, but they said, “Oh, we handle stuff like that all the time.”  Yeah, right.  They’ve never seen ZuZu at the vet…..

After my C$20 taxi ride back to the marina all we could do was wait.  Within an hour they called to say that ZuZu was totally unmanageable and they asked for authorization to lightly anesthetize her for the examination and x-ray.  I said sure – but then they told me I’d have to return to sign the authorization form, as they couldn’t/wouldn’t accept an electronic signature.  So it was another C$40 taxi ride back out to sign the paper.

Mid-afternoon the vet clinic called and said that the exam was complete, ZuZu was awake from the anesthesia, but that the vet wanted to discuss with me in person the results of what she found – and could I return at 4:45PM, just before they close at 5PM.  That made us nervous, but I said I’d be there.  Another C$40 taxi ride, and I may not even be able to bring ZuZu home – but what else could we do.

After all the drama with ZuZu, once we got her out of the vet clinic, she’s acted like her old self – even playing on the chart table with her left shoulder and leg – where she’s supposed to have arthritis that makes her limp. It could be selective, as a way to let us know that she doesn’t want to be on the boat.

On my return they got me into a face-to-face meeting with a very nice vet, who immediately brought up several x-rays on her computer screen.  She showed me ZuZu’s shoulder, then her left front leg and foot, and then the rest of her body (even pointed out a stool that was working its way through) – and then said, “I can’t find a thing wrong with her.”  She also said that ZuZu was so out of control before the medication that they had no idea how to even see visually what her problem might be, and once they got her anesthetized, the only exam they could get was the x-ray.  Maybe now with me here I could get her to walk a bit and they could observe what her problem might be.  In an exam room I got her out of the Sherpa – without much problem at all – and she walked and walked around the floor of the exam room.  With me there, ZuZu let the vet physically examine her and she could find nothing but the arthritis in her shoulder.  Other than that, there was no indication of the injury that we’d seen for the past several days.  After lots of discussion, the conclusion was that ZuZu’s problem was most likely soft tissue damage from the fall on the boat, and maybe all the downtime from the Buprenorphine had healed it up.  I paid C$240 for the day’s visit to the vet clinic, scooped ZuZu up, and called for a taxi back to the marina.

Whew!  What a long story for such a nothing burger.  (And since then, ZuZu’s shown no indication of any problem other than the arthritis….)

But a good outcome of it was a new freedom to head north to SE Alaska, at least as far as Ketchikan.  Quicker than you can blink an eye, Kap checked the weather and sea conditions across Dixon Entrance for the next day – Tuesday, July 24^th – and we made preparations to depart at first light.

Across the dock from us we got to know a couple from the Seattle area on a boat similar to ours named Cape Fairweather (an older DeFever 49 that has lines very similar to a Fleming).  They cruise to SE Alaska almost every summer, and Kap was eager to talk with them about weather forecast details to listen for about Dixon Entrance, the 50 mile stretch of open water that we’d have to cross soon after departing Prince Rupert.  When we learned of their departure time in the morning we decided to follow them, particularly since the first part of the cruise would take us through Venn Passage, a very twisty and shallow area in a cluster of small islands that would cut at least an hour from our cruising time.

Fog! The bane of our existence on the water. We hate departing in fog, but this could last for days. By now, our radar skills are good, and while that doesn’t bring our risks down to zero, it keeps it at a manageable level.

Tuesday, July 24^th; Cow Bay Marina, Prince Rupert to South Bar Harbor Marina, Ketchikan, AK. Wouldn’t you know it!  After no fog for the time we’ve been at Prince Rupert, we awoke to thick fog for our departure.  Almost immediately the decision is made by us and the couple on Cape Fairweather – that it’s too risky to go through the shortcut called Venn Passage that would reduce our cruise time by an hour.  The fog is going to slow us down too, so we know already that it’s going to be a long day.

This is what "less than 1/4 mile visibility" looks like. Just after the container port at the entrance to the harbor there’s a fairly narrow channel, with navigation buoys on each side to guide us, but in the fog they aren’t visible until you’re actually at them (although they show up on radar). Right on queue, we are forced to overtake a slow fishing boat, and both of us are meeting a tug towing a barge. You just hope there isn’t an idiot like the pilot boat driver our here.

Right on queue, we are forced to overtake a slow fishing boat, and both of us are meeting a tug towing a barge.  You just hope there isn’t an idiot like the pilot boat driver from 2008.)  On our right is Digby Island, and once we pass the south tip of it we’ll be out in Chatham Sound where we’ll turn right and head north.  We’re in open Pacific Ocean waters for a bit, and luckily we just have 4-5’ swells to contend with – well, except for a mysterious cluster of about 100 closely-spaced fishing buoys in a random pattern – and we’re in the thick of them before we hardly know it.  Cape Fairweather has steered outward of them and we wonder if he knows something we don’t – and if he does, why didn’t he warn us of them on VHF?  Through a lot of jigging and jagging we manage to miss them, and sure enough after we’re through them the guy on Cape Fairweather tells us on the radio that, indeed, he was aware of them and thinks they’re part of an experimental shellfish farm.  Duh!  We wish he had mentioned it earlier.

Dixon Entrance is the trapezoidal-shaped outline. Prince Rupert is located just below the word Stephens, and Ketchikan is just above and to the right of the word Prince at the top. The so-called A-B line shown here is the disputed international boundary line between the U.S. and Canada. In 1903, arbitration between our two countries established that line across the top of Dixon Entrance as the “maritime boundary”, and Canada claims it’s therefore the international boundary (and therefore, also marks territorial waters), whereas the U.S. says, no, it just marks the division of the land masses between the two countries – and the U.S. claims the international boundary at the mid-point of Dixon Entrance. (Give Trump another year and he’ll try to start a war with Canada over this…..)

I had hoped to get a good photo of a very picturesque lighthouse station as we passed Dundas Island, but not only was the lighthouse totally obscured by the fog, so was Dundas Island on our left,  It looks like we’ll be heading out into Dixon Entrance in the fog.

As we passed the northern tip of Dundas Island we were still in the fog, and we heard a couple of boats on the radio that were coming out of Brundige Inlet and heading south after spending the night at anchorage.  Kap raised the possibility of ducking in there to wait out the fog, but after a discussion we decided to press on.  By now, since Cape Fairweather was a displacement hull boat – and therefore with a top speed of about 7 knots – we had outpaced them, and even if the fog lifted we wouldn’t see them again today.  We were making 8 knots in the fog.

Once in Dixon Entrance, the seas became decidedly rougher, but not terribly so.  One nice thing about fog – you only have it if there’s no wind (or little wind), and in this case, the lack of wind kept the seas manageable – but it’s a damn long time to have one set of eyes glued to the radar screen and the other watching out the windows to see that we aren’t about to hit something we might have missed on radar.

Here’s a more detailed map of our route from Prince Rupert (at #1) to Ketchikan (top left corner).

At the point where our navigation software indicated we were crossing the international border between Canada and the U.S. (the U.S.  considers it halfway across Dixon Entrance), I saw that we had AT&T cell phone coverage – and a fairly good signal too – so I called the 800-number for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to see if we could clear Customs via Nexus.  I was told very politely that Nexus clearance into the U.S. only works for crossing into the Lower 48, and was given the Ketchikan CBP number to call.  I called and got an extremely friendly guy, who explained that they don’t do Nexus clearances, and that they have a near-100% boarding policy at Ketchikan upon arrival.  But, since he had me on the phone right now, he’d be happy to take down all of our clearance stuff (passport numbers, boat id, pets on board, liquor, currency limitations, etc), and then when I called in once we were at our moorage in Ketchikan, they’d decide if they’d need to board us or not (they didn’t, and we were happy).

Finally, we were in the shadow of Duke Island – and the fog began to lift (at #4 on the map).  It was now coming up on 3PM, and we felt as if we’d had blinders on for 30 hours, and not the eight hours that it had actually been.  From there it was just a nice walk in the park to angle left into Revillagigedo Channel (pronounced rev’-ee-le-gig’-a-doe) – and also the name of the island that Ketchikan sits on.  Ketchikan is about halfway up the west side of “Revie” (as the locals call it), and we arrived about 4PM.

Meeting this cruise ship was our welcome sight to Ketchikan – and there’s another one back at the docks also departing. (For a story about the Bridge to Nowhere that I’ll describe in a couple of paragraphs, take note of Gravina Island opposite Ketchikan) All of the marinas in Ketchikan are commercial boat marinas, municipally-owned and operated, and for the most part they are “hot-berthed” – meaning that many of the boats don’t have permanently assigned slips, it’s first come-first served, and commercial fishing boats take precedence over pleasure cruisers. (There’s probably a large difference in moorage cost/ft, but nothing about that is ever mentioned, and that’s OK with us.

Several miles out, I called Ketchikan Port Authority Harbor Master on VHF, identified us as Flying Colours, our length, and that we needed 50A dock power – and we were requesting moorage at the Bar Harbor Marina – South.  There are various other marinas closer to downtown Ketchikan, but the last time we were here it was overshadowed by the cruise ships – and we intentionally stayed about a mile and a half north of town at Bar Harbor Marina (separated by a North and South Section, and the boats of our size are usually assigned to the South).  This is also where the only large grocery store in town is located – quite a good Safeway – and it’s only a 5-minute walk from the top of our dock.  We were happy they had space for us, and we were assigned to Dock L, slip 42.

This is a good aerial photo of Ketchikan that shows just how small it is (it’s a photo I cadged off the internet). It only shows the northern half of town, but it gives a good understanding of how the town is hemmed in along the water by the mountains. All day long the fleet of floatplanes roar on take-off and landing, ferrying cruise ship passengers on flightseeing trips, mainly across the island to get a close-up of Misty Fjords. The main drag of Ketchikan is on the opposite side of the wharf buildings in the foreground, and two or three residential streets run along the hillside for the houses. Our marina is just beyond the multistory white building at the extreme far left of the photo. The line of moored cruise ships begins just after the extreme right of the photo. At first glance it’s pretty amazing how busy the main street is – until you realize how many cars there are in town, with nowhere to go but up and down the main street.

You pass downtown Ketchikan on the way to our marina, and we got a waterside view of the changes since 2008.  Then, there was room for a maximum of three cruise ships – now it’s seven, and they are the really big ones, 4,000-5000 passengers!  One day while we were in Ketchikan we decided to have lunch in town, and boy what a mistake!  From our marina you can’t see how many cruise ships are in town, and when we got there we could see that it was six of the really big ones.  The streets were clogged with passengers – and barely passable.  We were really surprised to find a single table available in a tiny pizzeria, and that was probably only possible because everyone planned on eating back at the ship.

I also cadged this photo from the internet, and it’s obviously taken from a cruise ship, showing four more cruise ships ahead of it, and room in between for at least one more. Imagine the number of people these cruise ships disgorge – into the streets of a small city of barely 8,000 people, with a main downtown area that’s less than three blocks long and two blocks deep. In my estimation the cruise ships have completely destroyed the small cities of SE Alaska like this – all except Wrangell and Petersburg, which have both agreed not to allow cruise ships, and last we heard Sitka only allows a small cruise ship.

It’s almost like walking through Disneyland on its busiest day of the year – and the atmosphere matches it too.  We picked up the couple of items we needed and head back to Flying Colours as fast as we could – and that was our one big visit to the city in five days!  For the 20,000 cruise ship tourists in town on the busiest days it may be an interesting place to visit, and I would say the same about any part of it outside of the downtown, but I could do without the changes that have taken away the charm of an old fishing village.  (On future cruises north to SE Alaska we don’t have any option for bypassing Ketchikan, as it’s the required first port of call for clearing Customs, but it means we’ll likely spend minimum time here and quickly head north (and hope that cruise ship passengers haven’t inundated all of the other cities.

Flying Colours safely moored at Bar Harbor Marina - South, next to the commercial fishing boat, Tuckahoe.

When we pulled into our slip, though, it wasn’t a 60’ slip like we assumed it to be, and Flying Colours stuck out at least 6’ past the end of the dock (and the dock itself was in pretty shabby shape).  At most marinas a boat isn’t allowed to stick out – causes problems for other boats coming and going – but not here, as when we radioed the harbor master he said not to worry.

We were surrounded on all sides by interesting boats – which is definitely the allure of SE  Alaskan marinas that were mostly made up of commercial fishing boats.  The Tuckahoe arrived in her slip on our port side just moments after we arrived, and we started off with a good chat with him.  The owner came down to the dock almost every day from then to do some work on the boat – and boy, did it ever need it.  Turns out, the owner’s originally from Seattle, a graduate of of UW, and moved to Ketchikan many years ago to escape – from what, we never learned.  Nice guy.

This pair of photos is a good study in contrast – Flying Colours and Tuckahoe.  The Tuckahoe is a bit rattier than most – and I never could figure out the multitude of pullys in the frame contraption near the stern – each seemed to have fishing line in it, but how they worked is beyond me.  When the guy unloaded his salmon box at midship we saw that whatever he’s doing . . . it works.  He must have had 30 or 40 good-sized salmon in it.

Our neighbor on the other side with the sunken Selene that he’s restoring, told us this used to be his boat, but when he got the Selene he sold this little work in progress to his best friend at work. What’s interesting about it is, he built the hard-sided fly bridge enclosure, and the sliding side windows that he installed in it are from a Greyhound bus at the local junk yard. Now that’s ingenuity!

The boat on the other side of us is a privately and locally owned cruiser.  It’s a 53’ Selene, which is quite similar to our Fleming.  But it had an interesting history and the local owner told us all about it in a very lengthy conversation one evening.  It was purchased by a couple from Washington State, and on their first year cruising to SE Alaska they hit a rock and it sank (partially sank, but he said it filled the engine room and the salon with salt water).  The owners took the insurance money and . . . whatever.  The guy who now owns it bought it for salvage from the insurance company – he said $80K – and spent the next several years restoring it from all the salt water and rock damage.  From 15’ away it looks quite good, but that’s as close as we got to it.  Given that his previous boat is the one in the accompanying photo, it might not be as spiffy as we thought at first glance.  He loves this boat, though, and couldn’t stop talking about how wonderful it was.

When you’re this far north the sunsets come really late – my camera shows the time on this photo as 10:33PM and the sun isn’t quite down yet. When we were about 20 miles south of Ketchikan on the cruise in, we heard a boat calling the marina for moorage – it was named Misty One - and you can see that name on the stern at the dock in the photo. That boat owns the slip next to us in Anacortes, and every year the couple who own it cruise to SE Alaska just to fish – and now it’s docked one dock away from us here in Ketchikan.

The Bridge To Nowhere. You’ve probably heard about this bridge . . . but I’ll explain about it anyway because it was to be here in Ketchikan.  The Ketchikan airport – second largest and busiest in Alaska – is located across the Tongass Narrows from Ketchikan, and anyone flying in or out of the airport has to get across the Narrows via a ferry that crosses every 30 minutes – every 15 minutes during peak tourist season (and the charge is $6 for a foot passenger and $7 with your car).  Instead, there was a proposal for the federal government to spend $398M for a bridge that would be as long as the Golden Gate Bridge, and as tall as the Brooklyn Bridge – and the reason for this is, the Tongas Narrows is the major section of the Inside Passage through SE Alaska that links all of the other cities, including super-tall cruise ships and barges like the Pacific Titan tows.  Why the reference to “nowhere”?  The entire island of Gravina has a total of 50 residents, and with Ketchikan having a population of 8,000 it would represent an incredible waste of money.  But Governor Sarah Palin, Senator Ted Stevens, and a bunch of other Alaskan politicians wanted it, and they were determined to get it.  Luckily Congress came to its senses and canceled funding for it in 2005.

Throughout our stay at Bar Harbor Marina it filled and filled with seiners – because there was an “open day” scheduled in nearby waters for seine fishing. Here’s a seiner heading out the night before the open, and is about to haul the “little boat” aboard the stern of the main boat. The little boat is nothing but an aluminum tub, with an inboard engine that’s totally unmuffled – therefore, incredibly loud – and the driver stands up in it because there’s no seat.

On our trip north in 2008 we were totally flummoxed by the differences between seiners, gillnetters, long liners . . . whatever . . . but because the seiners are by far the most common, at least we’re getting to know them by sight, and can anticipate what they’re going to do (and how to spot them) when we encounter them on our cruising.  When a seiner is ready to deploy the net, the little boat is dumped into the water, and “anchors” the end of the seine net – where the net is maybe 10’-12’ wide (i.e., it will hang as a curtain down in the water) and it’s kept on the surface with a string of white floats – which you can see all piled up in the stern of the main boat.  The main boat will then drive in a circle, letting out netting all around that circle using the overhead “power block” that you can see as a boom in the photo.  When all the netting is out, the main boat will begin drawing the net in like a purse drawstring, closing the circle ever and ever smaller.  The fish that are captured are then brought aboard.

On our last night in Ketchikan I was taking our garbage up to the bin at the head of the dock when I spotted the Pacific Titan with her container barge in tow passing by our marina on the way south. I snapped this picture with my iPhone in the evening’s last light. You can barely make out the yellow/blue hull colors of the Pacific Titan, and close behind her the 6-high stack of containers on the Alaska Marine Lines barge.

Pacific Titan – Tug and Tow, Seattle to SE Alaska. On our last afternoon in Ketchikan our old friend, Cap’n Doug Myers pulled into the Alaska Marine Lines (AML) dock next door to the north section of the Bar Harbor Marina where we were moored.  On one of my early morning walks with Jamie a few days earlier I had stopped into the AML receiving office at the wharf and asked if the Pacific Titan would be stopping in and was told he’d be here late Friday afternoon on his run south.  I subsequently texted him of our whereabouts and he suggested maybe he could pop over for a few minutes to see us on Flying Colours after he loaded containers on the barge (when they arrive at each port, the Skipper and First Mate each drive a huge fork lift in a mad scramble to load or unload containers on the wharf – we’ve never understood how strict maritime union rules allow that to happen, but it works wonderfully well given the unpredictability of their arrival times).

When Cap’n Doug arrived, though, he texted again that his schedule was very tight, as he had to be heading south as soon as possible and only had two days at home and then had to head north again on another run.  We agreed to meet for dinner and catch up on our mariner’s stories when we were both back in the Seattle area.  (See my July 25, 2014 post, titled House Bank – Depositing Boat Units for a story and photos about meeting up with Cap’n Doug in this same Ketchikan marina in 2008 when we took Cosmo Place to SE Alaska.  There’s also a good story there about Ketchikan’s Arctic Bar – and the home of the Happy Bears – where we spent a raucous evening at a benefit dessert auction, and our friend Bucky Wood on UnDoc’d bid on and won seven (!!) pies for an admirable sum of money.)

I later got another text from Cap’n Doug saying that as he passed by he’d spotted our Canadian courtesy flying high on our VHF antenna, plus our two large satellite TV domes – which aren’t very common in a commercial fishing boat harbor.

This photo was taken in 2003 from the Pacific Titan at the AML container facility on Seattle’s Duwamish River. The four Gray Line buses that went along for the ride were headed for Ketchikan, where a large increase in cruise boats was planned. Note the tall (and specialized) fork lifts, capable of sliding into the slots at the base of a container, lifting it, then lowering it to the ground for transport – each of the five cities in SE Alaska we stopped at there were at least two of these, and Cap’n Doug and his First Mate unloaded full containers, then loaded empty containers from a previous trip for shipment south to Seattle. This is an incredible way to supply a state that is virtually isolated from road and train access.

He also mentioned that he had 2.5 million pounds of salmon on board the barge that night – but due to a slow start to the fishing season, it’s barely a fourth of the total salmon tonnage heading to market in the Lower 48 for this time of year.  As a matter of interest, 2.5 million pounds, at maybe an individual salmon average weight of, let’s say, 25 pounds, that’s 100,000 salmon!  The containers on board Doug’s barge are double-sized, each holding 90,000 pounds of cargo, working out to about 28 containers filled to the brim with salmon (and that’s a quarter of his normal load).  These are cold storage containers, each running refrigeration compressors, and every day he swings the tug around (180to tie up to the barge (out in open water), and his crew scrambles all over it to check to make sure everything is still running smoothly.  The barge he tows typically carries 700+ containers, stacked 5-6 high, and oftentimes the top of the stack has vehicles that are more appropriate for a roadway surface.

After our return to Shearwater from Discovery Cove, I dropped by Couverden moored at the end of the dock to say our temporary farewells to Steve and Andrea, as Kap and I were getting ready to head off in the morning. As we sat talking in their salon I spotted an eagle flying low and close to the side of their boat. Next thing I knew it had landed on the bow cap rail and I could clearly see it from my chair in the salon. I reached for my iPhone, but to my chagrin I had left it back at Flying Colours. I said to Steve – “Quick, grab your camera and get a photo of the eagle on your bow!” He went forward with his phone and snapped a bunch of photos. This is about as close as you get to a bald eagle without scaring it away. What a majestic bird!

Bald Eagle Territory. For such a powerful and majestic bird (and our national bird no less), the Bald Eagle emits a surprisingly weak and unmajestic call—usually a series of high-pitched piping notes – notes that sound quite wimpy.  You can hear it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RArGl2vkGI.  Throughout the Inside Passage you can hear Bald Eagles along the shore, particularly starting at Port McNeill.  In Prince Rupert you can see Bald Eagles flying overhead almost all the time, and you can constantly hear their calls.  Luckily, these calls are a good reminder for us to keep ZuZu under protection, as she’s the perfect size for a midday snack for the eagles around here.

A myth about eagle calls?  What is your impression of what an eagle sounds like?  I’ll bet it isn’t what you just hears.  Nope, what most people think of as an eagle call is the result of dubbing a red-tailed hawk’s call for one into a John Wayne movie, where they didn’t think the actual call was good enough.  Here’s the NPR segment about it: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=156187375, then click on the link three paragraphs into the PBS story.

Nearby is a photo from 2008 on the dock at Shearwater, with a  bald eagle sitting on the sailboat spreader looking down at ZuZu, hoping for a quick snack.

Here's a photo from 2008, looking up an an eagle perched on the mainsail spreader of a sailboat just across the dock from us. You could see the eagle's head cocked, looking down at ZuZu sitting on the deck of Cosmo Place, hoping to swoop down for a midday snack.

A close call with an almost ZuZu disaster from a bald eagle was in 2008 when we were laying over for the night at Shearwater on the way to SE Alaska.  At the time we weren’t worrying about ZuZu making her security rounds on the teak cap rails – until Kap spotted this bald eagle sitting on the main mast spreader of a sailboat across the dock from us.  He was close enough that we could see him/her cock the head so that an eye was looking directly down at ZuZu.  In an instant the eagle could have swooped down, grabbed ZuZu by the talons and carried her away.  An 8-9 lb cat would have been a small snack to that eagle.  From that point on we’ve been very careful when and where we allow ZuZu in open areas on the deck – particularly if we hear any nearby eagle calls.  We also have a habit of scanning nearby tree tops, and if we see any eagles, we keep ZuZu off the cap rails or the open main deck area of the bow.

This photo was taken in the narrow Blow Hole Passage outside of Lagoon Cove, on shore just a couple dozen yards away. When I first spotted this bald eagle he/she had already plucked this 8” (or so) fish from the water and had deposited it in the shallows near the shore. When I looked over the eagle was hopping towards shore with the fish clutched by the talons. Just as we passed by the eagle took off with the fish held tight and flew right across our bow.

One sure way to attract eagles is to throw fish heads and entrails into the water as you’re cleaning your fish.  As my photo at right attests, spotting eagles swooping in for their live prey near the water’s surface, we also see them in carrion mode just as often.  At a sport fishing camp near Campbell River where we used to catch a ferry across from our moorage at April Point, we could watch eagles as long as we wanted at the fish cleaning station.

An even more unusual situation happened in early 2008 when we were getting some boat training prior to our departure for SE Alaska.  We were in a small bay across Puget Sound from Seattle practicing anchoring techniques when we heard a loud commotion going on nearby.  An eagle had dropped down on top of a duck – which we’d never before heard of as eagle prey – and with the duck in its talons the eagle was loudly flapping its wings, with water flying everywhere.  Apparently the duck was too heavy for the eagle to take off, so it was bouncing up and down, flopping its way towards shore.  Once on dry land – and with the duck still trying to escape – the eagle did what eagles do to kill their prey, most likely using its talons as deadly weapons.  It was pretty unnerving to watch this happening just a few yards from us.

Next up:  Slow Boat Home from Ketchikan.

Now that we’re back in better cell phone and WiFi range I’m finally able to get more up-to-date on my postings.

Ron

The northern half of the Inside Passage is defined by long, straight, narrow channels that begin at the southern end of Swindle Island (a good name that makes you wonder about its origin). Halfway up Finlayson Channel you can either continue or shunt off to the more narrow Tolmie Channel - particularly if you want to stop by at Klemto village.

Friday, July 20^th; Shearwater Marina to Butedale Cannery. In 2017 our furthest northern point on the Inside Passage was Shearwater (and the visit didn’t leave a very good taste with us).  Striking off northward from Shearwater was a clear indication that this year might be different.  We just decided we’d see how things go, and with lots of time still on our schedule, take it a day at a time.  At least, that was our overall plan – but more immediately was a concern about ZuZu, which I’ll explain in a bit.

Don’t forget – you can click on any photo in the post to enlarge it.

Tug and tows are commonplace in this part of the world – but it grabs my attention when it’s a triple tow, considering that “little” tug (probably an 80-footer) at the far right is towing three large barges that each dwarf it, weighing thousands of tons – and doing it at nearly the speed we’re going. It took us forever to catch up with this “water train”, and it helped when we cut a corner on the inside of him as we rounded a buoy. We’re in Millebanke Sound at this point, and while it's a short stretch of open Pacific waters it isn’t bad. The seas are a bit lumpy, with swells of 5’-6’ that come in every 10-15 seconds. In the background is Price Island that we’re just starting to get some protection from heavier seas. All morning long we had low clouds and a touch of fog to contend with.

During preparations for our departure we outwardly said very little about whether we’d even make it to Prince Rupert, let alone to SE Alaska.  Rather, we spoke in terms of maybe getting as far as Prince Rupert – the furthest north town/city along the B.C. coast.  And given the boat and system problems we’ve been having of late, maybe we wouldn’t even get that far.

Nevertheless, just getting out of Shearwater and finally beginning our northernmost cruise in ten years was very cathartic.  As we headed west on Seaforth Channel there were quite a few fishing boats from the Shearwater/Bella Bella area – a good sign that the salmon run was finally starting.  We slowed our route through there to keep our wake down for the small fishing boats – which is something a lot of cruising boats don’t do (even though the captains of many of those boats probably curse the wakes when they’re out there in their own small fishing boats that they tow behind them.

If you want to see where we are now, or better yet, monitor our route progress as we cruise along, you can go to www.ronf-flyingcolours.com and click on the Current Location link in the upper right corner of the home page.

Also, this post is more readable in the online version, plus you can read any of the posts back to 2010 from the archive – just click on the link above to the blog.

Now that we’re in serious Spirit Bear country, our eyes are constantly scanning the shoreline for rocky areas where a bear might come for breakfast. And Spirit Bears are everywhere! Is that white spot over on shore a spirit bear??? As soon as we put the binoculars on ones like this, they turn out to be false – and nothing but a bleached log or a white-tone rock.

As we passed Ivory Island on our starboard it marked the entrance to Milbanke Sound – and another bit of Pacific Ocean-exposed Inside Passage that can be very rough with ocean rollers and waves coming in.  Today it wasn’t too bad – maybe 5’-6’ rollers and waves around 3’.  At least we didn’t have heavy fog, and that made the going a lot more pleasant.

After all, doesn’t the possible Spirit Bear in the photo above look just as real as the one in this photo – which is a photo of a real Spirit Bear that we spotted on Bell Island north of Ketchikan in 2008. This Spirit Bear sighting was covered extensively in my blog post of July 25, 2014, House Bank – Depositing Boat Units.

It took about an hour to get to the protection of Price Island, as we turned north towards Swindle Island.  For me, the entrance to Finlayson Channel is a major turning point on the Inside Passage, where there are a series of long, straight, narrow channels.  It’s my mind’s-eye image of what the Inside Passage is really like – cruising mile after mile with steep and heavily forested mountains on both sides of the channel.

In this photo we’re cruising in Finlayson Channel, on the east side of Swindle Island, with the telltale Cone Island (also known as China Hat) that marks the entrance to Tolmie Channel, a side waterway that leads to the tiny First Nations village of Klemtu. The large boat we were about to meet was baffling us – too small to be a ferry, but seemingly too large to be a cruiser. Maybe a research vessel of some kind?

We were starting into Spirit Bear country – from here up to the northern end of Princess Royal Island – so we kept several pair of binoculars at close hand, including a special one that has a battery-powered stabilizer focus – that I bought for the 2003 tug and barge trip to SE Alaska (with which I didn’t manage to spot a single bear on the entire trip).

The mystery boat is named Scout II, and while it’s almost certainly owned by a rich American, it’s flying a flag from some tax haven island in the Caribbean – a sure sign that the owner of this megatub is skirting his/her fair share of U.S. tax laws. This is one of our pet peeves, as we all rely on government facilities when we’re on the water, such as weather service, Coast Guard, search and rescue, fisheries, and on and on. It’s deadbeats like this that make things more expensive for the rest of us – yet somehow they claim it’s because they are already taxed too much.

Our original plan had been to stop at a tiny First Nations village called Klemtu (number 8 on the Central B.C. map above).  We’d stopped there overnight on our 2008 trip on Cosmo Place, and with a special tour of their brand new longhouse, it was one of our most memorable days of the entire trip.  Our only negative of that stop was how depressed all of the First Nations people that we met on the streets seemed to be – sullenly walking along, everyone with iTouch ear buds in their ears, and not even interested in a greeting.  Now, though, we’re told that the village elders have really turned things around – and the longhouse was a big factor in it – by engaging the young people in learning to appreciate their culture and heritage.  The local school kids are taken on a weekly field trip to visit other First Nations villages up and down the coast, at cultural centers such as Alert Bay near Port McNeill.

This new ecotourism lodge at Klemtu must be a huge boon to the economt of this small First Nations village – but who knows if it’s a good or bad thing in a larger sense. The lodge sits very close to the water’s edge, and from the website gallery it appears that almost every room has a good view.

The big change at Klemtu, though, is the opening of a large, 5-star ecoadventure lodge, called Spirit Bear Lodge (at www.spiritbear.com).  There was a major article about the spirit bear in National Geographic in December 2017, titled What’s Black, and White, and One of Earth’s Rarest Bears? If you don’t subscribe to National Geographic, you can see a advertisement for the article, including a great video clip of their hunt for this rare bear:  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/12/basic-instincts-spirit-bear/.  Supposedly, there are around 400 spirit bears in and around Princess Royal Island, yet every cruiser we talk to who’s been to SE Alaska has never see one.  We are very lucky to have photos to prove of our one sighting.

When you scroll out to see the bigger picture of the route, these channels really come into perspective – long, narrow, and relatively straight (in fact, zoomed out it hardly looks like Flying Colours will fit in them, but in fact, they’re typically 1/4-1/2 mile wide. This section of the chart is just north of Kelmtu. Flying Colours is the green boat symbol at the bottom, with a long blue line showing our intended course direction. The green line is the day’s course plugged into the navigation software; the little square boxes – with a dot in the center – are waypoints, and the software gives us times and distance to each. On the chart this channel looks to be very narrow, but in fact it’s probably a quarter to half mile wide, with mountains that come right down to the water’s edge. At the top of the chart is Butedale Cannery, our intended moorage for the night.

But a stop at Klemtu this summer was not to be.  On our last full day at Shearwater a serious ZuZu injury occurred – or at least, that’s what we thought.  While I was at Bella Bella getting some last-minute provisions, Kap stayed back on Flying Colours with Jamie and ZuZu.  She suddenly heard a loud crash in the fly bridge and when she went to explore its origin she found ZuZu seriously lame and not able to put any weight on her left front leg or paw.  This is the leg that’s been troubling her for several months now, and her regular vet back home diagnosed it as arthritis in her left front shoulder.  She’s been on a medication called Meloxicam (or Mobic, depending on brand name or generic – and which is exactly what I took for several years before I had my partial knee replacements).  This time, though, ZuZu was acting so lame and her left leg projected out at a funny angle that Kap thought she’d dislocated her shoulder or broken a bone.  We seriously discussed whether to return to Port Hardy (where we know there’s a good vet) or continue north to Prince Rupert – either way, as expeditiously as possible.  Prince Rupert is quite a bit larger (population 12,000 versus 4,000), and we figured if we headed south for vet attention it would likely mean our northward momentum would be over.  We opted for Prince Rupert, and to get there as soon as we could.

They don’t get more picturesque than Boat Bluff Lighthouse, on Tolmie Channel just before Klemtu, at a sharp S-turn. With a narrowing pinch point, the area not only creates a rushing current and whirlpools, but also channels and accelerates the winds – which is why there’s a lighthouse/reporting station here. At first, we thought the tombstone-shaped “things” below the lighthouse keeper’s house were just that – maybe a cemetery of previous keepers – but as we got closer we could see it was a maze of round concrete foundations that probably stabilize the hillside to protect the house. It’s interesting to note the tide level – probably mid-tide – and high tide would be where the rocks at the right turn from dark to white-ish.

In the meantime, we had some powerful meds for ZuZu that our regular vet back home had given us for just such an emergency – mouth-injectable pre-loaded gizmos that contained a precise amount of a drug called Buprenorphine. We had about 10 of the injection/squirters with us, but we found that one-a-day would almost completely sedate her, plus keep the pain manageable.  (It was only later that we learned Buprenorphine (prescribed for humans under the brand name Buprenex) is “30 times more powerful “at relieving pain” than morphine”, according to a website called VetInfo.  The site also told us that “cats usually react negatively to opiates, but Buprenorphine is an exception”.  At this point we gave a dose to ZuZu each morning and it would knock her out for the entire cruising day, and the after effects would seem to keep her comfortable through the night as she slept on our bed with us.

As a result, we bypassed Klemtu, and after a lot of discussion we opted to push on to Butedale.  It’s a ramshackle old fish cannery that’s a further 25 miles up the channel, known to be in total disrepair, but our cruising guide indicated the dock was in slightly better shape than in previous years.  And while other cruisers often stopped there for a free night’s moorage, we thought we might be able to find space for Flying Colours, and that would get us a much-needed 25 miles closer to Prince Rupert.

Shawn Kennedy, a retired mining engineer from Calgary and the present owner of the Butedale Cannery and the surrounding land (plus all of the water rights leading out of the lake above and behind the waterfront), is either a visionary or a fool who’s parted ways with his money. This is his business card that he handed me as we discussed his hopes and dreams for the future - and he's really serious and passionate about the future of this place.

Butedale Cannery. What a pleasant surprise!  There’s no question . . . at the present moment, the Butedale Cannery is at least as derelict as anything you might find along the B.C. coast.  (The photo that Shawn used on this business card was clearly taken at a time when the cannery was still in operation.)  But before I can go any further on that, a bit of history is in order.

Here's what Butedale Cannery looks like today - the photo was taken on our approach into the bay.

On our approach to Butedale Cannery, there’s one sailboat at the dock, and at the left of it is a derelict little speed boat next to a yellow can buoy that seems to be anchoring the dock (maybe to keep it from floating away).  At far left – the large building on pilings, and has water under it at high tide – is the original fish cannery facility, and while it’s in serious disrepair, it could probably be renovated (we toured a similar one a few weeks later, and everything about it is stout enough that it’ll take another 100 years for it to totally decay, although a bunch of the pilings would have to be replaced.  Inside of the dock we tied up on is an extensive array of pilings that had a row of community buildings on it.  Nowadays, and right where the sailboat mast is, there’s a makeshift heliport deck – that Shawn seems quite proud of, and says he’s used it several times to fly in and out.  On shore, most of the original buildings have been pulled or fallen down.  The current owner lives in the small house to the left of the red/white/red building – when he’s in residence.  It’s hard to imagine this place with 300+ people living/working here.

Butedale waterfront general store and post office. There’s nothing but pilings left of the buildings in the photo center, and the large building at far left is the main fish processing plant that we moored near – just a hulk now, but one that could probably be restored. This photo is from the archives of the Royal BC Museum.

Logging and salmon fishing have been the two main industries along the B.C. coast for over 100 years.  The more we explore this coast, the more we realize that, as seemingly remote as it is now, it wasn’t always that way.  Dating back as far as the 1880s, there were 100 (!) salmon canneries scattered along this coast, and each of them employed upwards of 300-400 people.  At the same time, there were also hundreds of logging camps – with full-service “villages” built entirely on floats that enabled them to be towed from camp to camp as the logging sites changed – and each of these had populations that maybe stretched to 100-300 loggers and support staff.  Externally to support all of this there were supply boats and passenger steamers that brought provisions and mail, and carried workers back and forth.  All of that represents a huge difference in today’s total population.

Fishing boats at Butedale Cannery in the 1920s. The tiny vessels with drums are vastly different from today’s highly efficient seiners and gill netters that we’re used to seeing – and the sheer number of these boats is very different. The foreground building in this photo is the opposite end of the derelict hulk near where we’re moored in my photos. This structure was almost certainly the main salmon processing building of the whole operation. This photo is from the archives of the Royal BC Museum.

Today, not a single cannery is in operation anywhere on the B.C. coast, out of the 100 that existed 50 years ago.  Butedale has been declared a B.C. heritage site, which gives it some level of protected status even though it’s in serious decay.  At its peak, Butedale Cannery employed 400 workers.  That’s the size of a small town, and given the remoteness of it, would require a sizeable infrastructure to support it.

The numbers shown in the waters of the channel are in fathoms, where a fathom is equal to 6 feet. So out in the deeper water that shows 165-210 fathoms, the water depth is 990’ to 1,260’ deep. Along the shorelines where you see dotted lines, these are contour lines that show how quickly the water depth drops, from as shallow as 6 fathoms (36’) to 70-80 fathoms (400+ feet) in a matter of a very short distance from shore. This will become relevant when you read about Captain George Vancouver’s experiences right here.

As you can see from the accompanying map, Butedale is nestled in a U-shaped cutout near Work Island, where Graham Reach  takes a turn around the island and becomes Fraser Reach.  Shearwater is now 70 miles behind us, and Prince Rupert is at least 100 miles ahead of us.  Our cruising guide indicates a new owner recently purchased Butedale Cannery and its surrounding property.  While it’s closed for any kind of marina business, boaters won’t be turned away and mooring here is at no charge, and at your own risk.  When we were 4-5 miles out we tried VHF channel 66 (the standard marina channel in Canada) to see if anyone would respond, and to our surprise we immediately got a friendly voice back that there was room on the dock and we were certainly welcome to moor for the night.  We decided to give these decaying ruins a looksee.

Butedale’s new owner that we soon met, Shawn Kennedy, treated us like long lost friends on our arrival, and when I took Jamie to land for some much-needed shore leave, Shawn couldn’t wait to show me the photo of Flying Colours that he snapped with his iPhone on our approach. This is definitely a postcard photo, and it just might inspire me to write a family and friends “what we did in 2018” letter for this year’s holidays. Even enlarged, you can barely make out Jamie on the forward bow, directing us onto the dock.

As he showed me the photo of Flying Colours approaching the dock, Shawn excitedly told me the barest of details about his plans.  He’s an ex-mining engineer from Alberta, and somehow managed to purchase not only the decaying remnants of the cannery, but also a large portion of the shoreline that makes up the U-shaped bowl, plus the land that extends to Butedale Lake behind, plus the water-use rights for all water coming out of the lake and cascading down the waterfall next to the cannery (from which he can generate enough electricity to power whatever he wants to develop).  He said he has several “well-heeled mining friends” back in Calgary who are very interested in investing in whatever project is decided on –  but for right now, what he’s concentrating on is cleaning up the structures that are in total disrepair (i.e., falling down), getting the dock in usable shape, and ridding the place of “its liabilities” (his words, whatever that means).  What he’s most proud of – get this – is a heliport that he’s built on top of the pilings that are right next to the dock, and which he’s utilized several times.  (An hour after our arrival, another cruising boat arrived, with Australian registration – yes, that’s right, Australian – and the guy on board spent the next three hours with Shawn looking over every bit of the property, and our guess was, he’s one of the well-heeled potential investors Shawn was talking about.)

Yes, we did manage to get over our concern and tie our very special Flying Colours to this derelict dock.  (I seem to be using the word “derelict” a lot in this blog post.)  And yes, the dock is listing dramatically to the left – the flotation under it needs some serious repair, as do many of the boards on the dock surface itself.  It’s so unstable that it rocks from side to side as I’d take each step.  At the stern of the sailboat ahead of us, there was a 15’ gap in the dock, with a set of boards that shunted me (and Jamie) off to some temporary boards sitting atop the large logs.  Above the pilings is the heliport.  During our overnight stay here, Kap never did go ashore (and probably for good reason),so taking Jamie ashore three different times was a solo task.  The fjord-like mountains in the background are on the other side of Fraser Reach, with low clouds over them.

I snapped this photo from the new aluminum dock ramp where I took Jamie ashore. Behind the railings that hold the Butedale and 66A signs is the heliport that sits on what appears to be very ramshackle pilings that probably date to the early 20th century. While a bunch of them need to be replaced, the majority are probably still sound. The structure is probably one of the original buildings in the first archive photo above. At the far right of the photo, the orange “thing” is a scoop shovel/backhoe that Shawn brought in to clear rubble. The Butedale Lake is to the right and behind; to the left – and for at least a quarter mile – is the shoreline that Shawn also owns. There’s room in this bay to create an extensive array of docks, plus an anchoring area for overflow.

As I went about our tasks securing Flying Colours – not to mention a Happy Hour wind-down – my mind was racing with the possibilities of this place (I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll never stop being an entrepreneur).  The old cannery building is in pretty bad shape, all of the other structures on shore are in sorry shape, and the dock is in horrible shape.  But what could $5M, $10M, or whatever, do to get this place in operational shape?  From Tolmie Channel in the south, to Grenville Channel at the north end, this is a main waterway of the Inside Passage, with a large BC Ferry on the route between Prince Rupert, Bella Bella, and on south to Port Hardy.  And with hundreds of cruising boats passing in both directions, not to mention similar numbers of fishing boats heading to and from the Alaska fishing grounds – and with our dilemma in finding a place for the night along this 170 mile stretch of remote channels . . . well, a multi-purpose marina has to be viable here.  And If the cannery once supported one of the premier commercial fishing spots in the region, it could also support a high end sport fishing camp for well-heeled guests who fly in for a week or two.  Thoughts of it almost made me want to be one of his well-heeled mining friends from Alberta . . . and I couldn’t help but think about what this place might look like in another hundred years.  But enough of these fanciful dreams and speculation.

Oh, one operational detail.  This was our first night without shore power since the two new batteries were installed.  Kap and I are convinced that our overall battery power is stronger, for longer, than it was 3½ years ago when the entire house bank was replaced.  It makes us wonder if one (or both) of the two recently failing batteries had a problem from the start.  We’ll never know, but it’s an interesting idea.

This early morning photo was taken just as we departed Butedale Cannery and getting our position established with the best current on Fraser Reach. On the navigational charts a channel like this looks narrow, and with perfectly smooth shorelines. Instead, tiny shoreline indentations on the chart translate to fairly large jogs in the real shoreline, and layers of ridges give it overlapping appearance. And what looks narrow is really a substantial body of water.

It was almost certainly somewhere in this photo at the right that the following occurred around 200 years ago.

So, How Much Fun Was Captain George Vancouver Having Here in the Summer of 1793? Not much, I suspect, and in fact, rather than being aboard the Discovery and Chatham ships under his command, Vancouver (and all of his men) would probably have preferred to be in England right now.

Here’s a passage from the Evergreen Pacific Exploring Cruising Atlas – Alaska/British Columbia, by Stephen E. Hilson – an historical cruising guide that we carry on board and reference whenever we want to find out the history of what we’re cruising through.  Every indication from the following account shows that cruising these waters, not only here at Butedale, but everywhere from Puget Sound to SE Alaska, in primitive ships of the late 1700s was brutal, incredibly hard work, and fraught with life-threatening dangers.

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“Saturday, June 29, 1793

As the English ships Discovery and Chatham fight their way up the waterway from Work Island [RF:  which is just outside the bay where Butedale Cannery is] the tide begins to turn and threatens to push them back.  Vancouver writes in his journal, “. . . and the steepness of the rocky sides afforded little prospect of obtaining any anchorage on which we could depend for the night.  We had repeatedly traversed from shore to shore without finding bottom with 165 and 185 fathoms of line, though within half of the ship’s length of the rocks [RF:  a fathom is 6’, so that’s 990’ and 1,185’, respectively – which is probably quite a bit deeper than any anchor chain they had aboard the ships – the Discovery itself was 99’ in length, so being half that distance from shore meant they were finding these depths at 50’ from the shore].  The tide now making against us, we were constrained to rest our sides against the rocks, and by hawsers fastened to the trees to prevent our being driven back.  Our present resting place was perfectly safe, but this is not the case against every part of these rocky precipices, as they are frequently found to jet out a few yards, or at a little beneath low-water mark; and if a vessel should ground on any of those projecting parts about high water, she would, on the falling tide, if heeling from the shore, be in a very dangerous situation.

The weather was foggy for some hours the next morning, and was afterwards succeeded by a calm, this in addition to an unfavorable tide, detained us against the rocks until about noon, when a breeze from the westward enabled us to make sail, though with little effect.  In the afternoon the breeze again died away; but with the assistance of our boats, and with an eddy tide within about fifty yards of the rocks, we advanced by slow degrees to the westward, and found soundings from 45 to 60 fathoms [RF:  270’-360’], hard rocky bottom, and about a half a cable’s length from the shore; but at a greater distance no ground could be gained.  In this tedious navigation, sometimes brushing our sides against the rocks, at others just keeping clear of the trees that overhung them, we had advanced at midnight about four miles; and having, at that time, bottom at the depth of 45 fathoms [RF:  270’], about forty yards from the shore, we let go of the anchor; but such was the projecting declivity of the rocks on which the anchor at first rested, that almost instantly slipped off into 60 fathoms [RF:  360’].  By this time however a hawser was made fast to the trees, and being hauled tight, it prevented the anchor slipping lower down, and just answered the purpose of keeping us from the projecting rocks of the shore.”

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Having cruised this area for a dozen years, and with the relatively mild experiences we’ve experienced, I find Vancouver’s description about his challenges here to be harrowing.  As we cruised along, Kap and I certainly felt comfortable being in the middle of this channel, but the thought of putting Flying Colours up against the rocky shore and lashing the boat to trees at the water’s edge for the night would be terrifying!  (not to mention, unthinkable!)  Granted, on Discovery they had a bit over 100 sailors on board (versus just the two of us), but the dexterity and bravery required to get big hawsers around the trees and back to the boat just seems like a recipe for disaster.  And they’re dealing with huge anchors weighing several hundred pounds – and with no hydraulics or electric motors to assist them.  They faced powerful winds and currents as we too experience around here, but they had to contend with it with nothing but sails and oars.

As a final note about Butedale, there’s an Author’s Note in the book about Butedale Cannery:  “In 1973 this author found the cannery operations in the bay had been abandoned, a few logging families were living in the homes (including some blushing newlyweds to whom we contributed our ship’s wheel mirror), the store was almost empty, and the fuel pumps looked about to sink on a rickety dock.  By 1975 all services were reported closed but with moorage still available.” In the 40+ years since this was written, nothing that he describes here even exists today.

In Our Day and Age, How Remote Is This? From the moment we head north from Sidney (at the south end of Vancouver Island) there are pockets of no cell coverage (and therefore, no WiFi access), but it doesn’t take long to learn where they are and plan for them.  Over the years we’ve also outfitted Flying Colours with as much electronic equipment and long-range antennas that supposedly reach out to cell towers as far away as 40 miles (but that’s decidedly on the high side, as there are mountains in every direction, and this stuff is line of sight).

This Verizon USB-connected broadband modem is a slick little gizmo for connecting to cell towers. The data plan is pretty inexpensive, and it’s proven the best of all we’ve tried. As soon as we cross into Canadian waters I have a Telus equivalent USB broadband modem that gives us good WiFi access using a reasonably-priced data plan from this Canadian carrier.

The best piece of communications equipment we have on board is a tiny USB-connected broadband modem that plugs into a WiFi router – and as along as the broadband modem can “see” a cell tower, we have WiFi for all of our devices aboard the boat.  For the time we’re in U.S. waters we have a Verizon broadband modem, and in Canadian waters we have an equivalent Telus broadband modem.

Most marinas that we moor at have WiFi coverage, and connecting to it at the dock ranges from poor or nonexistent to fairly good.  The price for the WiFi is factored into the moorage charge, so if we can get internet access using it, we do.  The SYC outstations all have good WiFi, assuming there aren’t a bunch of boats on the dock – and as soon as there are, the WiFi drops to zero, as every boat has a half dozen internet-connected devices on board, and there’s always someone streaming a bunch of data.

As soon as we round Cape Caution, all bets are off on whether you can get any cell or WiFi coverage, and from that perspective you feel like you’ve gone back to 1985.  It’s pretty normal to go 4-5 days without access to either for the entire time.  At Hakai Bay – where the Hakai Research Institute is located – our iPads and my PC are brought to shore with us each time we take Jamie for a beach walk and they allow us free access to their satellite-connected network – but they cut us off at 100MB of data transmission (which is very little).  Same at Shearwater – they have a good strong cell tower nearby, and that’s good for iPads and iPhones that have cellular internet access, but for my PC I have to take it ashore to an espresso stand where they have a WiFi (at the boat, the cellular access isn’t strong enough for my iPhone or iPad to be used as a hotspot for my PC).

Once we departed Shearwater, we didn’t have cell or WiFi access until we reached Prince Rupert, which was just two days, but in normal cruising mode this could easily be a week-long trip.

So long for now.  I hope to have the next leg of this cruise posted in a few short days.

Ron

One big treat of our short overnight stay in Port Hardy – we met up with Bob Gladics, our old gliding friend from Sun Valley who (along with a friend) had trailered his boat up for a weeklong fishing trip.  Kap had run into Bob the previous day at Port McNeill while haunting the local boat chandlery – she heard his voice, and it’s unmistakable.  Late in the afternoon, Bob dropped by our dock with most of a salmon he’d just caught and gave us the fillets from it.  He then spent an hour (or more) giving Kap a bunch of fishing tips – his version of how to set up the tackle for best effect.  It was really good to see Bob, as we haven’t caught up with him for several years now.

Don’t forget – you can click on any photo in the post to enlarge it.

With seven reporting stations you'd think the decision on weather would be an easy one. The problems, though, are manifold. Some of these stations are automated, and "Not Available" is a common statement for a station. The information might be six hours old, and a lot can change in that time. For marine traffic that moves at 8-20 knots speed, with distances from pint G to D of at least 50 miles, the time that a boat is making a crossing is essentially a full day. The "data" in the forecast is mostly wave heights and wind speed and direction, and how that translates into what all of this feels like on your boat is vastly different from boat to boat - and boater to boater.

Next morning we set off from our Port Hardy moorage at 8:30AM (July 4^th).  There was a bit of fog in the harbor, but we hoped it would blow away once we got into open water, or would burn off when the sun was high enough.  Neither happened, and we spent the entire four hour open water part of the crossing in dense fog that never even got to one-quarter mile visibility.  Except for the shore outline on our navigation charts and radar screen, we didn’t see anything of Cape Caution, not to mention any other shoreline along the way.  And though we met multiple boats, two as close as a quarter mile, we didn’t see a single boat the entire time of the crossing.  More disconcerting, we thought our AIS transmitter was working (that would show us up as an AIS “target” on other boat’s navigation systems that were receiving AIS signals), only to find out late in the afternoon that our AIS box wasn’t transmitting.  It was unsettling, as two of the boats we met were within a quarter mile – and apparently weren’t watching their radar – as they only knew about us approaching and passing by them because we saw then and called them on the VHF radio.  We’re pretty sure there are a lot of boat drivers who figure the areas we’re cruising in are so vast that there’s just no way they can run into anything and just nod off to sleep at the wheel.

Cruising in fog bears a bit of description.  The typical fog this time of year is pretty dense, and it’s often only 1/8th mile visibility – which is only 660′ if you want to split hairs.  Now, two football fields seems like a pretty good distance to see other boats, land, or rocks, but when the fog is surrounding you 360° and a boat may be heading straight for you from any direction, it’s unnerving as hell.  We tend to stick to our normal cruising speed in fog, which is 8-9 knots, and if some other boat is coming head on at the same speed,  you have a closing speed of about 20 knots.  That doesn’t seem like much, but objects in fog aren’t well defined when you first see them, plus reaction time isn’t instantaneous, and that means a collision could be imminent.   We’ve had idiot drivers of small fishing boats running at 25-30 knots, and there’s no way they can be looking at radar, and if you’re on a collision course there’s no way you’ll not collide.  For us, the only recourse is to stay glued to the radar screen.  Our rule is, Kap does the driving in fog (because she has really good reaction timing and instincts), and I’m pretty good at watching the radar screen.

As soon as either of us spots a “target” anywhere on the screen, we first determine how far away from us it is, how fast it seems to be traveling, and which way its going.  If it’s heading anywhere towards us, we put something called an EBL on it (stands for Electronic Bearing Line) – this is a screen gizmo that our radar software has.  It’s really quite simple – it’s a line on the screen that extends from our boat marker out to the target.  As we move – and the target moves – we watch how the target relates to the EBL.  If it’s “coming right down” the EBL, it’s on a collision course with us; if it falls behind the EBL line, it will pass behind us; if it moves ahead of the EBL line, it will pass ahead of us.  Essentially, an EBL is nothing more than an electronic screen facility that functions the same as watching a moving object out of your car window – to see how it’s moving in relation to you.  It’s just that the radar EBL is more precise.

All in all, cruising in fog is demanding and tiring.  There’s nothing fun about it, and it doesn’t take long before you wish you’d stayed back at the dock or anchorage for the day.  The trouble is, weather systems that have fog components can last for days on end, and in August – which everyone calls Fogust around here – you could stay put for the entire month if you stick to a rule that you never cruise in fog.  The trick to it is to be extremely careful, very vigilant, and don’t take any extra chances.

Once beyond Cape Caution you’re in the B.C. Central Coast region, and everything is much more remote.  There are no towns anywhere nearby, and within fifty miles there are only two tiny links to civilization – Dawson’s Landing near the top of Darby Inlet where it meets Rivers Inlet, and the Hakai Research Institute halfway up Calvert Island.  Neither has a population over about 25, and in an emergency the only fast way out is by float plane.  In fact, as we passed the entrance to Darby Inlet we heard a radio transmission from a cruiser headed towards Dawson’s Landing telling them to expect the cruiser in soon, and that it was meeting a float plane to transport out a passenger who needed medical attention.  There are at least a dozen fishing camps dotting the myriad bays and coves, and some of them (like Duncanby Lodge at the entrance to Rivers Inlet), are very high end, catering to “guests” who fly in for weeklong fishing retreats during the salmon runs.

If you want to see where we are now, or better yet, monitor our route progress as we cruise along, you can go to www.ronf-flyingcolours.com and click on the Current Location link in the upper right corner of the home page.

Also, this post is more readable in the online version, plus you can read any of the posts back to 2010 from the archive – just click on the link above to the blog.

Port Hardy – to the south where we came from – and Bella Bella/Shearwater to the north are the only towns within 100 miles, and their populations are in the low three digits.  But then, that’s the reason we’re here – to escape the crowds of urbanites – and the increasingly high numbers of cruising boats – that now come as far north as The Broughton’s.

This photo was taken in 2017 when we anchored in Fury Cove for several nights. The biggest of the six (or so) midden beaches inside the cove can be seen at about mid-tide. At high tide the beach is almost completely submerged. The midden extends further to the left about 100 yards. Outside the cove is Fitz Hugh Sound, a huge channel at the north end of Queen Charlotte Sound, forming a 20 mile section of the Inside Passage. It’s protected from the Pacific Ocean by Calvert Island that you can see in the distance. The small white spec is a BC Ferry, the Northern Expedition – a huge car and passenger ferry – that makes a frequent run from Port Hardy to Prince Rupert.

Early afternoon we arrived at our destination for the next couple of night – Fury Cove.  As we motored through the tight neck of the cove we could see there were only three other boats at anchor – and with the half-dozen sandy-looking beaches scattered around its perimeter, you’d almost call it a tropical island paradise.  What looks like beautiful coral sand, though, is actually broken-up seashells that have accumulated, sometimes over thousands of years, at locations where First Nations people gathered or lived along the shores.  These beaches are called middens, and in British Columbia they are protected . . . in the sense that a permit is required to alter the site in any way if there is evidence of human use prior to 1846.  The main beach where we take Jamie three times a day has an astonishing number of shells – and it’s hard to imagine how many crab, shrimp, mussels, and oysters were eaten to create that beach.

When we arrived there were only four boats at anchor, and we thought we might have the cove almost to ourselves – and lots of good options on where to drop the anchor. Throughout the afternoon, boat after boat arrived, and by nightfall there were 24 boats around us. Flying Colours is the second boat from left. There was still room for at least a dozen more boats to anchor in the cove, and if it got to the point of stern tying on the shorline, the limit would easily be 10 times that number.

It didn’t take long to suss out the best anchorage – where we could most easily get Jamie to shore for her 2-3 times a day visit.  By now the fog had lifted, there was a clear blue sky, warm, and a wonderful day to be at anchor.  Throughout the day more and more boats came into the anchorage, and by nightfall there were 24 boats at anchor (and there was room for at least a dozen more without crowding it.

We have a 30" canvas extension for our dinghy deck, giving us a bit more protection from sun and rain in the cockpit. Because it's soft to lay on, Jamie loves to lay here for long periods, particularly when we're away from the boat - watching for us to return.

It was now three weeks since leaving Anacortes, and this was our first night at anchor – not a good idea in territory this remote, and relying on an anchor windlass that had failed us last season.  When we dropped the anchor the windlass worked flawlessly.  Our real concern arose as we got ready for bed that night – the Maretron monitoring system had a bunch of very screwy readings for our DC house bank batteries, showing that our batteries were dropping voltage much more quickly than normal.  We visually monitored the readings for an hour or so, and quickly realized that our batteries would last half the night at most, and we’d then have to start the generator to re-charge the batteries to get us through the night.  Something was amiss!

Damn!  It’s been less than three years since these batteries were replaced (at an exorbitant cost of about $12,000), and they shouldn’t be failing this early.  We had one very major power outage while Flying Colours was on the hard for repairs over the winter, and maybe that total drain of the batteries shortened their life – or maybe it wasn’t the only power outage that we had (but didn’t know about).   Whatever it was, we knew we had serious battery problems – and no easy way to fix it.

Friday, July 6^th, Fury Cove to Shearwater Marina. We spent two nights at Fury Cove, nursing our battery situation and making a hard decision about what to do next.  One option was to go south – but that likely meant going all the way south to Sidney, and doing that would likely mean going home for the summer.  The second option – the one we finally chose – was to continue heading north, bypassing our planned stops at the Hakai Research Institute (where we had some great walks last year with Jamie on the sandy Pacific Ocean beach) and skipping a prawn stop at Codville Lagoon that we were really looking forward to.  Instead, we’d continue further north to Shearwater Marina, where they have a major shipyard and repair station that was left over from a WWII flying boat base.

The route from Fury Cove to Shearwater is up Fitz Hugh Sound, which turns into Fisher Chanel as it narrows at the top. Then a left turn into Lama Passage for a 10-mile cruise west then north, passing New Bella Bella at the end, and then a right turn into Shearwater. In 2017, after spending several nights at anchor off Shearwater, we headed up Gunboat Passage (great name for a passage – makes you wonder what the history is – and after a few miles further up Fisher Channel there’s a long channel that leads to Ocean Falls. This year, we spent several days at anchor in Discovery Cove waiting for our batteries to arrive. After they were installed we then went west out Seaforth Channel, where it dumps into the open Pacific for a few miles, and then you duck back into the Inside Passage on the long run to SE Alaska.)

Using our satellite phone I made several calls to Shearwater to organize moorage space for us, either on the marina dock or the shipyard dock and confirmed that an electrical person could look at our problem as soon as we got there.  At 7:30AM we pulled up our anchor, threaded our way out to the east side of Fitz Hugh Sound and began our all-day trek north.  The day was pretty clear, but with some ground haze – and it was only with radar and some serious sighting with our strongest that Kap spied a tug and tow six miles ahead of us going our direction.  With a speed difference of just a knot, it took us the next 40 miles to the turn-off to Bella Bella and Shearwater before we’d overtake it.

Moorage at Shearwater is on a simple T-dock. Flying Colours is on the inside of the top bar of the T – in the upper center in this photo. The photo was taken just after we arrived, and before the Bolero rafted up to us. The two aluminum boats in the foreground – at the bottom of the shore ramp – are Seabus’ that run hourly from Shearwater to Bella Bella – a 20 minute trip each way. The dock on the right is for commercial fishing boats, and just before an “open” day for fishing, the dock has boats rafted seven deep. Given how difficult it is to get moorage, this marina could stand some major dock expansion.

On arrival at Shearwater we were given immediate clearance for a great moorage spot on the marina dock – unlike last year when we waited three days at anchor and never did get on the dock.  Once secured, Kap did her engine checks and got the engine room ready for an electrician/mechanic to come aboard.  I headed to the marina general office to let them know we’d arrived.  They wrote out an open-ended Work Order that listed “house bank battery check” as the top priority, with “other items as needed” listed just in case.  My sense told me this wasn’t going to be an inexpensive repair stop.

Within an hour, a youngish guy named Nate came aboard – and we were happy to see that he really seemed to know his stuff.  But then after a bit we weren’t so sure . . . when most of what he said contradicted what Mike Radding had told us in an earlier satellite call.  Very emphatically, Nate diagnosed our problem as not being with the batteries at all, but rather, with our Maretron monitoring equipment that he said wasn’t reading the battery voltage correctly.  After fiddling with our on-screen Maretron settings for a bit he suggested we run some power draining exercises while he went off to work on a half dozen other boats that were also in line for his services.

On his return a couple of hours later, and after hearing the results of our battery drain exercise, Nate did a more thorough test of the batteries.  This time he diagnosed our 8-battery house bank as having two batteries with shorted out internal cells.  After a lot of discussion we made a preliminary decision to replace just the two failed batteries.

It was now late on Friday afternoon and the parts and service desk at the yard was closed for the weekend.  There was nothing to do but wait out the weekend.  First thing Monday morning we’d have a chat with the parts guy, Zach, to get two replacement batteries ordered up from Vancouver.  Little did we know just how long this equipment delay would be – or what the effect of the current (and stupid) tariff war between the U.S. and Canada.

The big question was, were we doing the right thing?  Everyone advises to never (ever!) replace just one or two batteries in the bank, as it will cause all of the other batteries to fail.  But in this case, what choice did we have?  These batteries, American made but sourced in Canada and as remote as we were, were going to cost us almost $1,000 each – whereas they cost around $400 each in the U.S., so replacing the whole battery bank made no economic sense at all.  A call to Mike Radding (our trusted Fleming service guy in Newport Beach (CA) confirmed that our logic was sound, and that convinced us.

While all this was going on, Christophe (the marina Harbourmaster) stopped by to tell us we’d have to let another boat “raft up” to our starboard side.  We’re never fond of rafting, because it means another boat is tied up to our side, risking some cosmetic damage, plus you lose all of your privacy inside your own boat (and they lose theirs too), and the only way for the people on the other boat to get to the dock is through our cockpit or swim step.  This time it worked out quite well, as the couple on board Boléro, a 48’ Kady Krogen were from Seattle, very nice, and having them scamper across our boat wasn’t a problem at all.  They too had boat problems – an alternator that needed replacing, and it arrived on the supply flight that came in soon after they tied up to us.  Everything on a boat is always difficult to replace/fix, so they were next to us for the weekend.

At left is the Sinbad, the 135’ hulking yacht owned by Joe Diamond of Seattle – and you can see how this behemoth towers over us. They have a full-time crew of at least three on the boat, with one friend aboard. It definitely gives one an idea of conspicuous consumption. Rafted up to us on the outside are our newfound friends from Seattle on Boléro. At our stern – sailboat Dawn Flight – has been on a multi-year around the world cruise with the couple who live aboard – and they are working the summer at Shearwater, the fella assisting Christophe on the dock, and his wife clerking in the grocery store. It’s not a bad way to work your way around the world. They plan to winter in Mexico, then through the Panama Canal, and up the East Coast to their home in Toronto.

Making matters worse, the sun, stars, and moon were blotted out the next day by the arrival of Sinbad, a behemoth yacht owned by Joe Diamond and his wife.  Every paid parking lot in Seattle is a Diamond lot, so every dollar you plug into his collection boxes goes into his pocket, and that’s how one pays for a 135’ example of conspicuous consumption.  To our chagrin, the Sinbad was moored directly across the 8’ wide dock from us, towering over us, and as a result we couldn’t see the sun each day until after noon.  If there’s one thing we don’t like when we’re cruising, it’s these damn big ostentatious yachts, which is interesting, as every non-boater who spots something like the Sinbad has to stroll by to catch a closer glimpse and ooh and aah over it.  (We overheard one couple passing by, “Oh, it’s just like a cruise ship!  Isn’t it fantastic!”)

First thing Monday morning we headed for Zach’s parts counter, and after futzing with him for an hour over which batteries to order, he (hopefully) got the right ones ordered – but the earliest he could have them in was next Monday, seven days from now.  While waiting for him to get the order placed, I searched the internet to see if Prince Rupert might be a better bet after all, and found that while it’s a much bigger town, it has even fewer marine services than Shearwater.

Nate and Christophe had the pleasurable task of lugging the two failed house bank batteries off the boat. These hummers weigh in at 107 lbs, so they’re nothing to sniff at, particularly if you’re a 97 lb weakling. Our battery bank was up-sized when we ordered Flying Colours, with the taller (by 3”) AGMs that boost the amp hour charge. Our moorage on the dock was about 400’ from shore, so Christophe had brought out a rickety wheelbarrow-style dock cart to take them ashore, and it was all he could do to push it down the dock.

Batteries such as the big golf cart high energy AGMs that we use can’t be air freighted from Vancouver – they’re deemed hazardous cargo – so they’d be shipped up on the weekly supply barge.  That meant they wouldn’t arrive at Shearwater until late next Sunday night – a week from now!  The barge would be unloaded on Monday, and the work to replace our batteries couldn’t start until Tuesday.  We were now resigned for it to be at least a further week and a half delay before we could be on our way.

With time on our hands over the weekend, Kap finished up the electronics control board replacement for our WhisperGen – which has now been out of commission for two cruising summers.  The replacement board had arrived last September from New Zealand, but with Flying Colours in the repair yard all winter nothing could be done.  Getting this back in running condition was now a top priority for keeping our house bank batteries topped up – and give us more hours of battery power at anchor.  After the installation was complete, we ran test after test but now the unit had a new error code and no matter what we tried it wouldn’t run.  We even added on to our Shearwater Marine Work Order and had a mechanic down for a couple of hours to see if he could figure out the problem.  No go.  We’ve now written to the New Zealand guy who is the only person left from the factory disaster after the 2010 earthquake in Christchurch, telling him that we’re either going to swap the WhisperGen out this fall for another type of unit (which we aren’t wild about), or maybe we need to have a discussion about paying him to come over this fall to get it working for us.

Christophe was now checking with us every day on our work order progress, because he had far more requests for dock space than he had dock availability.  As long as we had our Work Order open, we were OK to stay and we took good advantage of it.  To help our cause, we fed Christophe stories about battery tests that Nate wanted us to run (only partially false – they all had elements of truth to them).  Everyone we worked with was too busy to talk with others around the marina/shipyard, so our stories weren’t questioned.  Nevertheless, we had the inevitable chat with Christophe about “going someplace else” to wait out the arrival of the batteries.  Someone else obviously needed the dock space more than us, and just waiting around wasn’t a valid task on the Work Order.

Besides our upcoming batter shipment, the weekly supply barge carries a couple of refrigerated semi-trailers, stopping first at Bella Bella and then Shearwater, with huge pallets of groceries for the stores at each place.  While restocking on Monday mornings, the small grocery at Shearwater doesn’t open until 1PM, so we caught the Seabus across to Bella Bella to do our grocery shopping,  If we had to wait out a week, we weren’t going to do it at the dock here in Shearwater, and we’d need supplies to be out somewhere secluded.  The Seabus trip across is 20 minutes – free for First Nations people and guests of the Shearwater fishing lodge; C$5 one way for cruisers like us parked at the dock or anchored in the harbor.

When we stopped at Shearwater last year I needed to have a nasty deer fly bite near my eye looked at by a doctor – there was a fear that it would spread an infection to my eye – and there’s a very nice (but small) medical clinic in “new” Bella Bella. When I got off the Seabus that brought me from Shearwater, I walked a block up from the ferry dock – and ahead of me was a burned-out hulk of a building that once held the Waglisla Band Store, but had burned down just a few weeks earlier. A temporary grocery was open across the street – but now the replacement was finished and it’s probably the nicest little grocery in a small village up and down the coast.

Bella Bella is an interesting First Nations village, part of the Waglisla Band (a band is equivalent to a tribe).  At first glance you might think it’s a dreary village, but it has a lot more going for it than you get from that first impression.  It has a long history on this coast – dating to long before its original location moved from Denny Island (where Shearwater Marina is located) to Campbell Island.)

The new long house under construction in the tiny downtown of Bella Bella. When complete, this will likely be a huge cultural benefit, not to mention an incredible sense of pride for all band members in the village.

In preparation for departure we made additional forays to Bella Bella for provisions that we’d need. The grocery at Bella Bella is about four times the size of the little store at Shearwater Marina, so it’s worth the trip.

On one trip we walked up a block from the grocery store for a close look at the new First Nations long house under construction.  In the accompanying photo, note how large the vertical framing columns are that Kap is standing next to – each is 1-piece from a huge cedar tree.  And note that the roof is a lattice of full-length cedar logs.  The hole in the center of the roof is where a large chimney will let smoke escape from a huge fire pit that will probably be in the center of a large ceremonial hall where traditional dances and other ceremonies will be held.  The band most likely has control over a nearby forest area (and not giving up their logging rights), and it probably still has a bunch of old growth cedar in it.

I don’t know the details of it, but this appears to be the current tribal ceremonial house. While it’s very nicely done, note how small it is compared to the new one being built.

With a bit of conniving we managed to delay Christophe’s eviction notice until Wednesday, by adding to our Work Order and then telling him about additional tests that Nate wanted us to do.

As usual, we’ve been met or passed by the Alaska Marine Highway System Ferry, the Kennecott, several times while cruising here. It’s home base is Bellingham (WA), and provides a car/passenger ferry service to SE Alaska via the Inside Passage. It’s a fast ferry, cruising at around 20 MPH, and carrying up to 750 passengers and 80 vehicles. It's a popular run, and is often sold out.

(We don’t think Christophe had an aversion to this conniving, as he was subtly milking the whole process for large tips when it came time for moorage payment.  One of his tactics seems to be currying favor with owners in situations such as ours, and it probably leads to larger tips than he’d otherwise get.  We’d already been warned about this from a couple of other cruisers, but didn’t know how he was pulling it off.  When it came time to check out and pay for our moorage I saw firsthand a bit about what was going on.  Throughout our entire cruising region there isn’t a single marina that has a line for “Tips” on the credit card receipt that you sign (like a restaurant charge does)  – except for Shearwater Marina.  As I was signing our credit charge I specifically asked Christophe if the tips went specifically to him, and he emphatically replied, “You bet they do!”  Having announced that, he then said he was giving us a 50% moorage discount for all five nights for having someone rafted to us, even though Bolero was alongside for just three of those nights – essentially bilking his employer with that discount so that I’d have an incentive to give him a bigger tip.  As far as I’m concerned, the guy’s a real snake.)

Close to the shore, tall mountains provide protection on two sides from the wind at Discovery Cove. This incredibly calm scene was taken early in the morning, before the water was disturbed, and it's a picture postcard of our new-found friends, Rick and Lynn Parnell of La Conner on their trawler, Spring Tide.

Another picture postcard. While we were at Discovery Cove, another Fleming – this one a 65’ model called Balladeer from Vancouver – came in and anchored in another small bay inside the cove.

Wednesday, July 11^th, Shearwater Marina to Discovery Cove. To wait out our forced time, we decided to head for Discovery Cove for a few days, a secluded little bay just 8 miles NW of Shearwater – close enough that we could quickly get back for installation of our batteries when they arrived.  We’d also heard it is one of the most picturesque anchorages in the area.  It didn’t disappoint us – but the ravaging deer flies did (they basically kept us from spending any time in the cockpit enjoying the scenery or having a Happy Hour on the deck).

At the head of the small bay where we anchored, the tidal flat was very gently sloping, so that at low tide the drying area was extensive. Years ago – no telling when – the First Nations who lived – or visited – this cove dug out four weirs that trapped fish in the manmade ponds as the tide was going out. In this photo at high tide, the water is deep enough that you could easily take a dinghy all the way to the head of the bay - and in this photo Kap is taking Jamie ashore with the kayak..

This second photo, of the exact same scene a few hours later at low tide, shows three of the step-down weirs – the fourth is out of sight, further up a channel that runs down from a lake that’s just around the corner. The unsuspecting fish didn’t have a clue what their fate would be on the falling tide.

We made some new cruising friends at Discovery Cove – Rick and Lynn Perry aboard their 48’ trawler named Spring Tide, who hail from La Conner, just a few miles south of Anacortes.  We anchored near to them in one of the three small bays of the cove.  The weather forecast was for a bit of a blow from the NW (an understatement), and this spot gave us excellent protection from the winds.  Our neighbors ventured out each day to the main channel to do some fishing and prawning (they were completely skunked the whole time), and they reported back that the winds were whipping up at 30 knots, and buffeting them with 3’ seas, yet it was totally calm and smooth water at our anchorage.  Except for the dear flies that were devouring us, we couldn’t have asked for a better place to hide from the weather.

Kap is doing her duty at Discovery Cove. We learned this rule from Paula and Jim on Apt. 5 – the ship’s captain is also the BBQ chef. Kap takes it seriously, and about half of the meals we have on Flying Colours are from Kap’s BBQ. Our BBQ is a very good Australian model that we bought for Cosmo Place in our first year of cruising. It’s rail-mounted on the dinghy deck, with two propane tanks that were specially mounted under the seats in the fly bridge driving station, and hoses are brought out to connect up the gas each time.

Sunday, July 15^th, Discovery Cove to Shearwater Marina. On our last day at Discovery Cove we had a leisurely morning, as it was just an hour’s cruise back to Shearwater.  After our first morning latte, we put the PFD on Jamie, loaded her up in the dinghy, and set off to visit our usual spot ashore for her morning bidness.  The tide was going out and the deer flies were trying to eat me alive, so after Kap got out, and before carrying Jamie to dry ground, she gave me a push off to back out and idle around in deeper water.  At the current tide level, the approach to shore was very shallow, and the keel was already a bit stuck, so I lowered the outboard prop just a bit into the water – enough to hopefully give me some backward propulsion but not touch the gravel and muck on the bottom.  As I gave it some gas I looked back and could see it was churning up dirt and tiny stones – and I still wasn’t going anywhere.  I gave it a bit more gas and it finally backed off, but instantly an alarm started going off somewhere in the steering column.  In all the hours we’ve used this dinghy I’ve never heard this alarm before, but it didn’t sound good.  A moment later plumes of water vapor poured out the back of the motor.  I lowered the motor all the way into the water, then circled around to see if I could figure out what was going on.  I was loathe to shut the motor down for fear of if it not starting again.  The moment I saw Kap and Jamie returning to the beach I maneuvered in and picked them up.  The alarm continued and so did the water vapor (Kap was adamant it was smoke, and I couldn’t convince her that smoke doesn’t dissipate that quickly).

I pointed the nose towards Flying Colours, and as fast as I dared run the motor we returned the three-quarter miles to safety.  I immediately shut the engine down and the alarm stopped.  Kap raised the cover on the motor, checked the oil – it was OK .  After a discussion about what the problem could be – and finally noticing that the normal jet of coolant water wasn’t squirting out the back of the motor – we deduced that the motor may have sucked up dirt or a bit of gravel into the intake for the raw coolant water line for the motor.  Kap hooked up our fresh water garden hose to the flush coupling – thinking that maybe this would unstick whatever was in the intake.  It definitely squirted the water back out, but didn’t solve the problem.  Running out of ideas, we decided the best thing was to add it to our Work Order when we returned to Shearwater.  We had to be there that morning for the battery installation, so maybe we could find a mechanic who knows something about outboard motors and have him fix whatever the problem was.

At Shearwater we got an even better spot on the dock, just 25 yards from the ramp up to shore (for an easy walk with Jamie).  I immediately headed for Zach’s parts counter and he confirmed that the batteries had arrived on the barge.  But with everything else from the barge having to be unloaded and checked in it would be late afternoon before he could release the batteries to Nate, and ready for installation on Tuesday.  I raced upstairs to have Erica (by now I was on first-name basis with many of the service staff) add the dinghy to the Work Order.  She told me our mechanic for it would be Jay, and suggested I track him down outside of the big WWII hangar where he does his mechanic work.  I did as Erica directed and tracked Jay down.  He told me he was finishing up another job at the moment, but if I brought the dinghy over to the haul-out dock he could look into the problem.  After putting it in the water I nursed it over to the haul-out dock.

Kap also wanted to have the guest head looked at (which serves as our day head), as it had developed an intermittent problem that was quite troubling.  It would flush just fine several times, then unexpectedly you’d press the button to flush and nothing would happen.  And it didn’t make sense to do a test flush ahead of time, as it might work then, but not work right after that.  Besides, that wastes all the water of a flush, and that’s not a good thing.  Knowing that we needed “ammunition” on the Work Order to stay on the dock for a few days, I also added the guest head problem to the list.

A couple hours later Jay showed up with the dinghy, saying it was all fixed.  The problem was the cooling system’s thermostat – all gunked up and stuck shut – which was a common problem with cars from the 50s that I grew up with, but I hadn’t thought about something like that for years.

First thing Tuesday morning Nate showed up with the batteries, and almost before we knew it he popped his head up and said they were installed.  He readjusted the Maretron settings to reflect our full complement of house bank batteries, and declared us good to go.  Having him captive, Kap took the opportunity to ask if he could take a look at the guest head problem.

Prior to this I had called Headhunter, the toilet manufacturer in Ft. Lauderdale (FL) and got a service technician who initially seemed very helpful.  Trouble was, after sending us a detailed diagram of the solenoid that activates the “jet” flush for our model, we couldn’t locate any such thing (I should say, Kap, as like all other mechanical/electronic stuff on the boat, she was honchoing the fix on this).  By way of explanation, I should also add that cruising boats like Flying Colours have the capability to flush overboard or into a “black water” holding tank, the behind-the-scenes plumbing and valves are rather complicated, with some of it “hidden” behind such things as a shower enclosure, or under a sink enclosure, or under the floor boards.

Rather than a water pressure problem that the Headhunter guy thought, Nate felt strongly from previous experience that our problem was a faulty electrical connection in the actuator circuit.  He readily located three connections that might be suspect and re-soldered them.  The head now worked, and Nate went about his long list of other boat repairs on the dock.  Sure enough, within hours the head again malfunctioned, and after calling Nate back he discovered the actual faulty connection, resoldered it, and after three weeks as I write this, we have not had the problem reoccur.

My apologies for all this detail, but it just doesn’t seem sufficient to say that, gee, we got our battery, dinghy outboard motor, and guest head fixed, as that doesn’t explain why we were here at the Shearwater dock for another week.

In the meantime, Steve and Andrea on Couverden had arrived, giving us excuses for nightly Happy Hour get-together’s on Couverden to discuss next places to go.  Since we’d last seen them, Andrea had discovered an old cruising map book in their chart table storage that dated from the days when Couverden (the Couverden I from 1985, and Couverden II from 1999) was repeatedly cruised to SE Alaska by her parents (when they were in their late 80s).  In leafing through the atlas – with detailed navigation charts from Seattle to SE Alaska, Andrea saw there were dozens of handwritten notes by her father, Fred, describing good and bad anchorages, good and bad fishing spots, and other information gems.  With our own chart books in hand, Kap and Andrea went over nearby places around Shearwater and Kap made similar notations in our books that could be of value to us.

Steve and Andrea were quite intent on staying somewhere close by to fish, prawn, crab, and dig oysters to fill their freezer chest for the winter, and they decided they probably wouldn’t get any further north than Shearwater.  That left Kap and I to make the decision to go north on our own – which was OK.

Friday, July 20^th, Shearwater Marina to somewhere north. On Friday, July 20^th, we bid our farewells to Steve and Andrea and headed north – still not sure exactly how far north we’d get.  Kap and I didn’t realize until we discussed it later that we both had some very real trepidation about crossing Dixon Entrance – the 50-mile open water section of the Inside Passage that separates Canada from SE  Alaska.  This was a big stumbling block for getting back to SE Alaska for the first time since 2008 when we cruised there in our Nordic Tub 42, Cosmo Place.  The next couple of weeks will tell the story.

This is easily the most extensive resort/marina that we visit on the coast of British Columbia. The yellow building in the right background is the WWII flying boat hangar, and is now the shipyard. In front of it are the general offices, a marine chandlery, and a small grocery store. In front of that - and fronting onto the shoreline - is the pub, a full service restaurant/bar that serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The three buildings to the right are the fishing lodge. The grassy area is a ceremonial ground that commemorates the site for its WWII background, including the flying boat windsock. The long dock in the foreground is the visiting cruiser's dock (the blue boat on this side of the dock is an RCMP patrol boat that we see all the time up and down the B.C. coast - named the Inkster. Behind that dock is the commercial fishing boat dock - first come, first serve. At far left is a fuel dock - that has a line of boats all day long waiting to fuel. The treetops in the foreground are on Sheawater Island, a tiny island that all of this is named for.

So what’s the story with this place called Shearwater? We have to go back to the very early 1940s to find out the origins of Caucasian Canadians around here (before that, it was mainly First Nations people living in “old” Bella Bella on Denny Island).

As we all know, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Oahu (HI) on December 7, 1941.  What hasn’t been as well publicized is that just a bit over a week later (December 18-24), nine submarines of the Imperial Japanese Navy were prowling at strategic points along the Pacific Coast of both the U.S. and Canada.  These submarine captains had orders to sink any U.S. Pacific Fleet ships if they managed to escape the Pearl Harbor attack and head for the mainland.  They were also searching for U.S. merchant marine ships, sinking two and damaging two out of the eight that were attacked off the Coast – with a loss of six American lives.  At least one of these nine submarines was spotted off the Central Canadian Coast, in Queen Charlotte Strait (near Cape Caution).  (If you want to read more about this, a good account is at http://www.historynet.com/japanese-submarines-prowl-the-us-pacific-coastline-in-1941.htm).

But to get back to our story at hand.  As early as 1922 there was aviation activity around Bella Bella, when U.S. Air Service pilot Lieutenant Harry Brown landed at Bella Bella to refuel on his flight from Seattle to Alaska – the first successful flight on the northern coast.  Then in July, 1923, Canadian Air Force Squadron Leader Earl Godfrey landed a Curtiss HS-2L flying boat here to refuel on his historic flight from Vancouver to Prince Rupert.

This huge hangar was built for the WWII flying boats that were stationed here during the war. They now serve as the shipyard for Shearwater Marine. The erector set structure beside the dock ramp is a haul-out facility – the largest anywhere on the Central Coast.

The Canadians had long considered the Bella Bella area of strategic importance for West Coast flights.  With the war clouds of WWII building, a military detachment was established here in 1938, on Denny Island, and protected behind Shearwater Island.  In June 1940, construction began on a full-scale RCAF Station, with two flying boat hangars with ramps for beaching the aircraft, and accommodation for 1,000 men, and the accompanying support facilities (only one hangar survives today, and is the yellow Shearwater Marine Center building in the photo).  By November, 1941 there were 21 buildings in the complex.

A day after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, two Supermarine Stranraer flying boats arrived, and operational patrols began immediately when a Japanese submarine was sighted in Queen Charlotte Strait (Cape Caution is in the center of the Queen Charlotte Strait).  Later, a squadron of Consolidated PBY flying boats were brought in, allowing patrols of up to 28 hours.

For some reason the overall area and the marina is called Shearwater, when in fact almost all of it is on Denny Island - and Shearwater Island is just a tiny island. Only the control tower for the flying boat operations was here on Shearwater Island. It’s a small island, barely a quarter mile in any direction, and totally uninhabited.

Let me digress for a good story that I ran across while researching for this.  According to a history site about the RCAF Station Bella Bella (which was its official name), a dubiously bright station Commanding Officer, a Squadron Leader Galloway, decided that a control tower was needed on Shearwater Island and ordered its construction, but once completed the tower operators found that the tops of the island’s trees obscured their view. Galloway responded by ordering his Armaments Officer to top the trees with machine gun fire which worked fine but an army detachment across the bay had to take cover as their position was “peppered by the gunfire.”  One would hope that Galloway wasn’t awarded any merits for his ingenuity.

This Shearwater welcome sign greets visitors at the top of the ramp to the floating docks. It’s on the edge of a park-like area that commemorates the men who protected the Canadian West Coast from Japanese assault during WWII. The carved grizzly bear is the finest example you’re likely to see, with detail that is just amazing. On a 25’ high steel pole sits a wonderful 17’ wingspan replica of a Supermarine Stranraer, in the markings of one of the two that were based here at RCAF Station Bella Bella – and it swivels as a windsock. Behind the grassy area is a 32-room lodge for the other major function of the resort – a guided sport fishing operation that takes guests out to the best fishing grounds for miles around.

But RCAF Station Bella Bella was short-lived.  By mid-1944, risks from the nearly-defeated Japanese were low, and for economic reasons the station was closed.  In 1947 the station property and facilities were sold to a former RCAF officer, Andrew Widsten, who had spent some time here, and whose Norwegian immigrant parents had settled in Bella Coola (not to be confused with Bella Bella, but rather at the First Nations village far up Rivers Inlet).  Widsten’s vision for the former RCAF station was to create a marine services business to support boat repairs, sawmill services, and marine towing.

Today, through ownership by three generations of Widsten’s family, Shearwater Marine has 100 employees and is the largest employer on the Central Coast, with no government safety nets (i.e., no financial assistance), and no outside mentors.  It’s now in the hands of Widsten’s grandkids, with the fourth generation being groomed to take over when the time comes.  With all of the nearby cruising, anchoring, and fishing opportunities, this is not only a really neat place to visit, and for so many of us, a much-needed stopover on the way to/from other destinations on the Inside Passage – but it’s also a valuable asset to the region. It would be interesting to know what the place will be like 100 years from now – maybe a prosperous coastal town that grows into a city.