Hello all,

This last blog post for 2011 is going to be a wrap-up one, covering a wide range of topics that just don’t seem to fit anywhere else, plus an exciting little anecdote from our recent cruise in Flying Colours from Lake Union in Seattle to her home berth at Anacortes Marina.  (Don’t forget – you can click on any image to enlarge it, and for this blog post, I think you’ll really want to.)

Passing through the Ship Canal we're always on the watch to see if the Pacific Titan is at the Western Towboat dock. Here she's rafted up to her sister ship, the Ocean Titan (Titan is the "class" name they give to this model of tug). I had the unique experience of cruising to SE Alaska as a guest aboard the Pacific Titan in 2003, and again in 2006 when Kap was also along. This is a story in itself, and best left to another time - but suffice it to say, it was one of the most memorable experiences in my life.

On the last day of the Fleming Fling at Seattle’s Elliot Bay Marina in early October, we moved Flying Colours through the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks and the fresh water of the Lake Washington Ship Canal.  After this short cruise, we arrived at Yacht Masters NW at the north end of Lake Union, ready for our fall maintenance work.  Over the next two months, shuttling between Yacht Masters, Pacific Yacht Management, and Level Sky Brightworks, we had the main engines and all other systems serviced, the teak cap rails varnished to look like new, plus some small fix-up work on various details.

The Lake Washington Ship Canal as it passes the funky Fremont neighborhood on the way into Lake Union. Behind us is Fisherman's Wharf and the waterfront area of Ballard called Salmon Bay. Ahead is the Fremont Bridge and the Hwy 99 Aurora Bridge.

By the first week of December, Flying Colours was ready for the journey to Anacortes where we could get her out of the weather and under the roof of our covered slip at Anacortes Marina.  The challenge now was to wait for weather that was conducive to the trip.

At this time of year, the days are short at Seattle’s latitude – with sunrise about 7:45AM and sunset at 4:15PM – gives us barely 8½ hours of good daylight.  At the speed we like to cruise at (9-10 kts), plus the transit time through the Locks, it’s problematic to make this trip in one day.  Another significant factor in the route planning is slack tide at Deception Pass – it’s around 10-11AM right now, and impossible to reach from a Seattle start.  The only option was a 2-day trip.  Our first thought was to overnight at the new Port of Everett Marina, but when Kap plotted the second day’s cruise it was still impossible to reach Deception Pass in time for slack water.

Our route on the Ship Canal takes us past the funky neighborhood of Fremont, past Fisherman's Wharf, through the Locks, and out to Shilshole Marina.

An aerial shot of the Ship Canal, taken from the Hwy 99 Aurora Bridge at the NW corner of Lake Union, with the Fremont Bridge in the foreground. This is a very picturesque section of the Ship Canal, tree-lined on both sides for about a mile, with the newly completed Ship Canal Bike Trail (the overall bike path runs from the Seattle waterfront all the way out to Redmond).

All work on Flying Colours was complete on Friday, December 2^nd, and the weather for the weekend called for cold temperatures (dipping into the 30s at night, and barely reaching the 40s in the daytime), sunny, and partly cloudy – it looked good to go.  After discussing our options one last time, Kap chose a route that took us to Port Townsend on Saturday, then on to Anacortes on Sunday.

The iconic Lake Washington floating home that was the set for Sleepless In Seattle. There are hundreds of floating homes on Lake Union, in Portage Bay between Lake Union and Lake Washington, and along the Ship Canal that leads out to the Locks. Some are pretty dumpy, but many - like this one - are works of art inside and sell for well over $1M. It sits nearby our route from Yacht Master NW as we're heading towards the Ship Canal.

As usual, there were several rowing clubs on their Saturday practice runs along the Ship Canal. We always slow for them, to ensure that our wake doesn't cause them any problems - but we've heard that many other boats just blast on by them without any concern.

Departure from the Yacht Masters NW dock in Lake Union was set for 9:30AM for the anticipated 4+ hour trip to Port Townsend.  The day before, while meeting with our architect team at our new home construction site, we invited them to join us on the trip through the Locks.  This is usually a memorable experience, and one you can’t get unless you own a boat or know someone who does, so we thought it would be fun if they came along for the ride.  We’d drop them off at the Shilshole Marina fuel dock, and the extra time for us would only be a few scant minutes.

Regan and Katie arrived right on time, and after a quick tour of Flying Colours and a safety briefing, we slipped our lines and slowly motored out of Lake Union and into the Ship Canal that leads to the Locks.

Along the way, we passed near to the Sleepless In Seattle float home on our left, then passed under the low Freemont Bridge and the tall, stately Hwy 99 Aurora Bridge.  As we slowly motored along the mile-long tree lined section of the canal, there were morning joggers and walkers along the banks, as well as groups of rowers in racing shells, urged on by their coach in a nearby motorboat that follows alongside.

We always enjoy this part of the passage along the Ship Canal, as people sitting along the banks wave to you, and it’s just a beautiful sight to behold.  It soon empties into a jumbled area of work boats – the type that I really like to look at – including fishing trawlers, large factory fish boats that station themselves in the fishing grounds to take on the catch from the smaller boats, with facilities on board to quickly cool the fish for the trip to Seattle.  It’s a fascinating heritage of Seattle that always amazes.

Once under the Ballard Bridge, you pass Fisherman’s Wharf on the left – home of the Seattle fishing fleet – and a bit further on, are the docks that cater to the larger cruising boats, such as Westport.  From there it’s just a few hundred feet and you’re in sight of the Locks.

On a busy summer weekend day, the big lock might look like this - every bit of it crammed with pleasure boats, rafted to one another, with the boats along the lock walls tied to bollards - taking in or letting out line as necessary - along the top rail as the water in the lock raises or lowers (depending on which way you're going). In this particular photo, with the boats facing towards Lake Washington and the BNSF railway bridge in the backgound), water is being let in to raise the flotilla from the level of salt water Puget Sound to the level of fresh water Lake Union and Lake Washington. The green algae along the Lock wall shows how far the water level has to be raised to lake level. At the back of the lock, you can see that the hinged lock doors haven't yet been closed. (In the foreground of the photo, it would appear that the lock door is in the process of closing, but rather, this is the safety railing on the pedestrian walkway, and the photo is being taken from the level of the lake, directly above the lock door.)

At the Locks – officially known as the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks (but known locally as the Ballard Locks) – your blood pressure is always raised a point or two in anticipation, no matter how many times you’ve transited.  Kap and I have now been through about 12-15 times over the past five years, but we’re still just a tiny bit nervous about them, as conditions are always different.  Along the Ship Canal, Katie, Regan, and I got our lines and fenders ready for the Locks, and we briefed them on what to expect.

As you approach closer to the Locks, you typically never know whether you’ll get the large or small lock – and a red/green light system at the entrance to each lock notifies you which lock you’ll be directed to.  Unless one of the locks is actually loading at the time you arrive (in which case it will show a green light), you’ll typically see red lights for both locks (and binoculars are particularly handy to know exactly what you’re looking at).  If you see red for both locks, the procedure is to stop far enough back from the lock entrance to let boats leaving the lock get by you (when it opens), or slowly mill around, or tie up to the long pier in front of the lock – whatever makes the skipper more comfortable.  This morning, there were no other boats milling around, both lights were red, so it’s a situation where you wait to see the green light.

This photo, taken from the pedestrian viewing area on the small lock shows the moving side walls. When using this lock, you tie your boat's lines at the bow and stern to the small round cleats in the moveable wall indentations. On the large lock, your lines would be tied by the lock master to very large yellow bollards (much larger than the one shown in the lower right of the photo). The Locks date to 1917, which can be seen by the architecture of the buildings.

The large lock is just that – large – 825′ long by 80′ wide – big enough to hold a half dozen very large fishing boats or ocean-going tugs, or at least 10 boats the size of Flying Colours, or maybe 50 small pleasure boats (as shown in the nearby photo).  With the large lock, you tie onto a large bollard along the top level of the lock – where 2-3 lock masters are stationed to help you.  If you’re arriving from the Puget Sound level (which is usually 14′ lower, depending on tide level), they throw down a small line at your bow and stern, which you’re then expected to attach your 50′ mooring line so they can pull your line up to attach to the bollard.   If you’re arriving from the Ship Canal level (which is at the same level as the top of the Lock), the person at the bow and stern just hands across the lines for the lock master to tie on.  Once the massive lock gates swing shut, water is flooded in if you’re rising to lake level, or drained out if you are lowering to Puget Sound level.  The line handler’s job on the boat is to either play out line if  you’re going down, or take in line if you’re going up – all the while keeping the lines tight enough so the boat remains close to the wall.  The wall is covered with slimy green algae (which you can see in the accompanying photo) – which you certainly don’t want to touch – and which you also don’t want your boat rubbing against, so it’s imperative that you have enough fenders out.

If you get the small lock, the whole process is simpler, but not as exciting.  The small lock is, well, small – 150′ long by 30′ wide.  Once in the lock, the lock master tells the person handling the bow and stern lines which small round cleat along the side wall to tie to, and as the lock is raised or lowered, the wall raises and lowers with you.  It’s easy-cheesy, and actually sort of a disappointment that there isn’t more excitement to it.  From a boat owner’s perspective, though, the small lock is preferred, as it presents less risk of damage, and since there are almost always visitors standing around watching your every move, there’s less risk that you’ll embarrass yourself.

This time, we got the small lock, and as soon as we spotted the green light for it, Kap started motoring slowly into it, careful not to get too close to the sidewall until we were ready to tie on.  Regan worked the bow line, while I took the stern line.  We were the only boat in the lock, so as soon as we were tied on, the huge lock gate behind us creaked to a close, and we started down as the water in the lock tank was released.  Within 4-5 minutes we were at Puget Sound level, and after a continuous buzzer rang to alert lock masters and visitors alike that the gates in front of us were about to open, they swung out and we were ready to go.  The lock master always has you release the bow line first – for better control of the boat as it starts to move – and then the stern line is released.

From the Locks, it’s a quick half mile cruise to Shilshole Marina, where we pulled up to the fuel dock, momentarily tied on, and Regan and Katie jumped off.  Kap backed Flying Colours into the main fairway of the marina, and soon we were on our way.

We left Shilshole just as the tide was switching from high to low – so the waters of Puget Sound would be flowing north (i.e., back to the Pacific) – which gave us a following current almost all the way to Port Townsend.  It was about a 2 knot “push”, allowing us to maintain our 9 kts speed at a much lower RPM (thereby saving diesel fuel).

Our route from Shilshole Marina (just outside the Ballard Locks) to Port Townsend.

Along the way, there wasn’t much out of the usual,  At first, we cruised along the east side of the shipping lane that runs down the center of Puget Sound, but we crossed over to the west side of it as we approached Port Madison.  The commercial shipping lane is a controlled section, with a northbound lane on the right side, and a southbound lane on the left – and with huge tankers, freighters, and container ships running at over 20 knots, pleasure cruisers treat it with respect, and when you cross it, you do so smartly and don’t doddle.

Another obstacle to watch for on this route is the cross-Sound ferry that runs from Edmonds to Kingston, as they also run at 20+ knots, and have the right-of-way over us.  We got lucky this time, with the eastbound and westbound ferries passing well in front of us, and as we crossed the ferry route they were both in port.

Our first glimpse of the Trident submarine, with its protective arsenal ships flanking it. They were probably a bit over a mile in front of us when I snapped this photo.

Just as we were passing Point-No-Point (on the west side of the Sound, just before you turn into Port Townsend), Kap hollered to me that we might be getting a chance to see our first-ever Trident submarine cruising past us in Puget Sound.  Ahead of us about two miles were two really strange-looking – boxy, actually – Navy ships, heading towards us in the center of the shipping lane.  Between them was something that looked like a sub conning tower, but it was too far away to see clearly.  As we got closer – we were on the west side of the shipping lane – flanking them were three smaller boats that looked like fast cruisers.  I snapped photo 1844, figuring that I might be able to blow it up to see better.

As we got closer we could tell for certain it was a Trident sub, and we then heard the following radio transmission on Channel 13 –  “Pacific Mariner (rf – a Western Towboat tug and tow that was behind us about a mile), this is a Navy submarine 9,000’ ahead of you.”  No response.  Within a couple of minutes, the sub then called on Channel 12 “Seattle Traffic, this is Navy submarine (rf – but didn’t identify himself more than that), we have a tug and tow in front of us in the shipping lane approaching us and it appears he’s not conforming to the northbound lane of the shipping lanes – can you confirm that he’s a bona fide vessel, and can you reach him on VHF to have him clear to the outside of the northbound lane.”  At that point we certainly knew it was a sub heading towards us.

The Trident submarine and its entourage is abreast of us, with the larger Coast Guard boat shadowing us to ensure we don't make any stupid moves.

At about that same time one of the go-fast boats – by now we could recognize all of them as Coast Guard boats – headed straight towards us at full speed, with their blue lights flashing.  When he got to us – Kap had already stopped dead in the water – they spun around to the same direction we were going, and called us on Channel 16 , “Flying Colours, this is the Coast Guard vessel on your starboard side . . . please switch to Channel 22”.  As soon as we switched, he then proceeded to tell us, “Captain, U.S. Navy and Coast Guard regulations require that you stay at least 3,000’ in every direction from a submarine of the U.S. Navy.  There is a submarine passing on your starboard side.”  As if we didn’t already know……

We both took a look at our radar screen, and it appeared to us that we were about 4,000’ away from the radar blip that was obviously the submarine, so we should already have been OK.  We didn’t argue the point, as it was also obvious from their radio transmissions that they meant business, and we could clearly see they had automatic weapons in hand.  So Kap responded that we understood, and she powered up our speed to move further away, but we were still pretty much parallel to the sub’s path.  The CG vessel then turned and went on its way.  Within moments, though, another (and larger) of the Coast Guard boats hit the throttle and headed for us.  They spun around about 100’ from us and just shadowed us until the sub was well behind us.  They then turned around to rejoin the flotilla.  While they were flanking us, I got up the nerve to snap a photograph (1845) of the second CG boat, with the Trident in the background.

This is an aerial starboard bow view of the Michigan, SSBN-727 (which I grabbed from http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/08727.htm). I was on the Michigan in 1999 during a one-day shakedown cruise from the Trident sub base at Bangor, WA. Kap was also on a shakedown cruise a couple of weeks earlier than mine, but on the Alabama (but that again is another story, to be told elsewhere). Our trips were arranged by a neighbor (Bob Tate) who is a retired Navy captain. The Navy used to allow guests on board – about 15 in a group – on the mandatory one day shakedown cruise at the start of each 6-month cruise. During the day, we were given a tour of the entire sub – except for the bottom deck where the nuclear propulsion reactor is located – including up on the outer top deck at one point when we were on the surface. We dove to 100’ in Dabob Bay, we each got a chance to look through the conning tower periscope, and we got to climb up into the conning tower. This sub is huge – over 900’ long, with a diameter of over 40’! There are four decks – which isn’t what you think of when you see a sub in the movies – and get this, the 18 multiple warhead nuclear ballistic cruise missiles carried on board are about 30' tall, and stand vertically, rising straight up through three internal deck levels. They’re fired from this standing position, and shoot up through big (5-6’ across) manhole–looking covers on the deck. The most impressive thing of all, though, was the crew – as we departed the dock at Bangor that morning, we watched as the crew said goodbye to their families, knowing they were heading out on a six month cruise where they’d be submerged the entire time, with no in-port time – and the morale was unbelievable! At the end of the cruise, the sub returned to the sub base area, but didn’t dock – we were piped aboard a Navy tug that pulled alongside, and the sub quietly slipped out towards its cruise. This is one serious piece of military machinery, and I’m sure glad it’s in our arsenal!

We went on our business and into Port Townsend.  After mooring at the guest dock, we went to the marina office to register and pay for our moorage.  As we were chit-chatting with the marina manager, I mentioned our encounter with the Trident and the Coast Guard.  He chuckled knowingly, saying that this is now common practice since 9/11 – that Tridents don’t venture out into Puget Sound anymore without escorts like this, particularly when they have nuclear missiles on board, and that they were undoubtedly heading for the ammo dump just south of there to offload them before they headed over to Bangor.  He went on to say that it’s a good thing we responded on the first transmission on Channel 16.  If you don’t, he said they fire something called a “sound blast” (I think that’s what he said) over your bow.  I’d never heard of this, and he explained that it’s a cannon-like shell that’s fired over your bow, and as it passes over the sound blast from it is enough to knock you to the ground.  I guess that’s their way of getting your attention.  He also indicated that what’s on board the two escort ships next to the sub is enough munitions to probably blast the Pacific Northwest into oblivion (I would imagine what happened to the USS Cole in Yemen is the cause of this).  Needless to say, this was all a bit unnerving.

Port Townsend was great at this time of year, with the main streets (all two of them) all decked out with Christmas ornaments.  It was surprising how many people there were on the street, and the shops were busy – and we soon found out why.  There was a Santa parade down the main street, and it brought the whole town out.  We had a wonderful dinner at an old pub/saloon on the main street, with a bottle of very good local wine.  Afterwards, we headed back to Flying Colours to get warmed up.

Early Sunday morning, we headed out of Port Townsend for Anacortes.  It was another four hour cruise, and we wanted to be at our slip in time to get the kayaks offloaded and stored for the winter, and to tidy things up for a last fall clean-up before putting Flying Colours to bed for the winter.  Before we got to our marina, we stopped off at the Cap Sante Marina fuel dock to top off our diesel tanks.  It took just 122 gallons to top them off, but the pleasant surprise was that the price for diesel is down to $3.68/gallon (which still seems like a lot, but compared to the $5.75/gallon we paid on our cruise to SE Alaska in the Nordic Tug in 2008, this is a bargain!).

I hope you enjoyed the blog this year as much as I enjoyed writing it.  It’s proven to be a really good way to get my thoughts down on paper, and a way to remember the things that we’re doing.

Happy Holidays.

Ron

The Fleming Fleet Review passing the Seattle waterfront as the 7th North American West Coast Fleming Rendezvous winds up. Flying Colours is the fifth boat from the lead boat at left. Photo by c-images.

The Fleming Fling at Seattle’s Elliot Bay Marina was the perfect end to our summer on Flying Colours.  We arrived in Seattle on Tuesday, September 27^th, exactly four months to the day from our Anacortes departure heading north.  Granted, we had a tiny amount of at-home time in between, but for the most part, this was our longest cruising summer so far.

Click on any photo to see an enlarged version.

The Fling began the following Friday night and lasted through the weekend.  On Monday morning, we then took Flying Colours over to Yacht Masters NW on Lake Union, where a bit of annual maintenance and touch-up will be done, then we’ll take her home to Anacortes for the winter.

But I’m always getting ahead of myself . . .

September 11^th, SYC Garden Bay Outstation (Pender Harbour) to Union Steamship Company Marina on Bowen Island

We’ve wanted to visit Bowen Island for some time now, but since it’s located on the east side of the Strait of Georgia and not in our usual cruising line as we head south, it just hasn’t worked out.  This time, though, we had almost a full week of cruising left in our schedule before we needed to be in Sidney, and Kap came up with a novel float plan that would take us down the east side of Georgia Strait from Pender Harbour.  Then, after visiting Bowen Island the distance across the notoriously rough Strait of Georgia, altogether bypassing Nanaimo and Dodd Narrows proved interesting.  I was all in favor of it.

Our route from the Seattle Yacht Club Garden Bay Outstation to the Union Steamship Company Marina on Bowen Island.

Merry Island Lightstation in the Strait of Georgia is three miles south of Halfmoon Bay. The lightstations (we call them lighthouses in the U.S.) on the B.C. coast are almost always scenic, and while nothing special, this one was no exception.

Our route southward from Pender Harbour followed an area that’s known as the Sunshine Coast – a rugged 53 mile section of the B.C. mainland coast that stretches from Vancouver in the south, to Lund (almost to Desolation Sound) in the north.  Much of it is rugged coastline, and while it’s quite heavily populated, a good portion of it is accessible only by B.C. Ferry or floatplane.  The Sunshine Coast Highway runs along it, linking many of the towns between the B.C. Ferry port of Langdale in the south (the B.C. Ferry route is from Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver), to Lund.

For us, the most interesting part of the route was from Secret Cove to Sechelt, passing through a narrow stretch of water between Thormanby Island and the mainland.   This is the area of the Smuggler Cove Marine Provincial Park, and it’s very scenic.  There are lots of anchorages in this area, and we cruised this part at 7 knots to reduce our wake.

Our route took us around the west side of Bowen Island to the Union Steamship Company Marina in Snug Cove on the NE side of the island.

Cruising in calm waters along the west side of Bowen Island. The towering mountains in the background are directly north of Vancouver. Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains are in this range, but 30-40 miles to the north.

Near Eliphinstone at the south end of the Sunshine Coast, Kap’s plotted route took us north along the west side of Bowen Island – the shortest route to our destination deep inside Snug Cove on the NE side of the island.  The biggest shock to us along this route was the density of small pleasure boats.  It was a Sunday afternoon, and we figured that every marina in Vancouver had emptied out and everyone was out for their weekend high-speed fix on the water.  The drivers were crazy, and it soon made us wonder if we’d made a good choice for our next port.

We had a two night moorage reservation at the Union Steamship Company Marina – the largest marina on Bowen Island.  It’s named after the company that used to operate Bowen Island as a holiday resort until the mid-20th Century, and during a later afternoon walk around the area we learned just how much of a holiday resort this place must have been a century ago.  Accessible by ferries operated by the Union Steamship Company, excursionists from Vancouver flocked here by the thousands to relax and stroll the island.  Now, the island has largely become an artist’s colony, and while there isn’t much in the way of downtown shops, there are plenty of art galleries.

Our moorage was at the end of D Dock with a side tie, looking directly towards the ferry terminal several docks away, with the mountains north of Vancouver in the distance.

As we neared the marina, we called them on VHF channel 66A and were directed to a side tie on the end of D dock. As Kap started into the narrow bay, an AIS marker on our chart plotter showed a B.C. Ferry on approach and he’d have right-of-way.  Knowing that we might have to dither while sorting out exactly where we needed to go, Kap quickly spun a 180 outside the entrance to give the ferry room to maneuver.  Of course, a bunch of the weekend boaters took that opportunity to jump the queue on us, causing the ferry captain to give out several loud blasts on his horn to get them out of the way.

Finally it was our turn, and we headed deep into the bay to Dock D.  Our maneuvering width between the end of the dock and the shore was barely 1½ boat lengths, but Kap expertly turned us on a dime with forward/reverse engines and we gently drifted onto the dock.  A friendly young guy was there to catch our lines, and give us a welcome to the marina.  After getting Flying Colours secured and shore power hooked up, I walked over to the marina office in a float building at the head of the dock.

As I was checking in, the young woman behind the desk said, “I see you’re prepared for the Seattle Yacht Club discount.”  Puzzled, I told her I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Well, with an SYC hat and an SYC polo shirt on, it’s obvious you wanted to make sure we recognized you were from the Seattle Yacht Club.  You’re aware, of course, that the marina owners, Rondy and Dorothy Dike, are Seattle Yacht Club members, and they give a 25% discount to all SYC members who moor here?”  I had to admit that I wasn’t aware of this, but since two night’s moorage for a 62′ boat is a significant chunk of change, I was certainly glad I accidentally happened to be wearing the SYC logo clothing.

With ZuZu crouched at the windlass, Kap casts off with the toy mouse fishing pole.

After settling in and giving ZuZu her “getting here” treats, we headed for shore and a walk around the small village to check out our restaurant and grocery store options for the next couple of days.  It was finally starting to feel like summer, and even in a lightweight polo shirt and shorts, it was hotter than I like it.  We soon came back to Flying Colours for an early happy hour.

For some reason, ZuZu is always fascinated by all the machinery associated with the windlass. We find her scrounging around here all the time whenever she's on the forward bow.

For dinner, we settled on an Italian restaurant just up the street from the marina, the Tuscany Wood Oven Pizza Restaurant – and it was excellent.

Snug Cove is a very narrow bay, and with the marina docks jutting out into it, there's barely room to turn around. Flying Colours is to the right of center.

Other than that, there really wasn’t much to do.  The island is 8 miles long by 4 miles wide, but being quite hilly – and being on foot – getting beyond the tiny village at Snug Cove is difficult.

Nevertheless, this gave us a really good reason to hang around Flying Colours, relaxing on the deck and taking life easy.

All too soon it was time to leave, and after checking the weather Kap decided we needed to be out on the water shortly after first light.  The winds come up by midday on the Strait of Georgia, kicking up wind waves that aren’t pleasant, so the earlier start you can get, the better.  Besides, our route was through Gabriola Passage – located at the southern end of Gabriola Island and the northern tip of Galiano Island – where the tidal currents can run at 6 knots.  We needed to hit it at slack water.

September 13^th, Union Steamship Company Marina on Bowen Island to Ganges Marina on Saltspring Island

Our route took us southwestward across a bumpy 14 mile stretch of the Strait of Georgia, timed so that we'd reach Gabriola Passage at slack.

Sure enough, we barely turned the southern tip of Bowen Island and into the Strait of Georgia when we hit the wind waves.  The wind was coming from the south, causing the waves to build at a fairly uncomfortable angle off our port bow.  We could have zigzagged across the 14 mile width of the Strait to give us a better angle with the waves, but it would have significantly increased our crossing time, and the risk was that we’d then miss slack tide at Gabriola Passage.  Our ZuZu Rough-O-Meter wasn’t going off, so we pressed on and put up with it.

Gabriola Passage current chart for September 13, 2011, from the web site, www.xtide.com.

Kap perfectly timed our arrival at Gabriola Passage!  As you can see from the current chart at left, slack at that location is calculated to be at 11:30AM Pacific Daylight Time.  We actually arrived at 11:10, and talked over whether we should hang around for 20 minutes, but Kap decided to stick a toe in to see what it was like.  Unlike Dodd Narrows on the west side of Gabriola Island, there wasn’t a pack of boats waiting to go through.  As Kap rounded the first corner at the entrance, we spied a Grand Banks coming through from the other direction – and that’s always a comforting sign – but other than that, we had the passage all to ourselves.

Flying Colours' route through Gabriola Passage.

The passage itself is an S-turn, with the Strait of Georgia on both sides as you cruise southward in a wide channel between Valdez  Island and de Courcy Island.

We continued south along the east side of Thetis Island, past a favorite anchorage at Wallace Island, then Montague Harbour at the southern end of Galiano Island.  At the SE tip of Saltspring Island we turned around the point at Long Harbour and into the very long Ganges Harbour.  We were comfortably tied up at the Ganges Marina dock by 2PM.

ZuZu often has outsized ambitions - this time she thinks two swans who came by for a handout would make a good snack. When they see her, they hiss their displeasure, and I think they'd actually try to fight her if she leaned over too close - and I don't think ZuZu would come out the winner.

Gator too had eyes bigger than he should - thinking he could take on the prehistoric-looking blue heron who seemed to like our dock.

Our favorite restaurant in Ganges.

With Kap’s concurrence, I had a bit of ulterior motive for our stop in Ganges – the Auntie Pesto’s Cafe was calling to me, and I was in the mood for a fix.  They serve an absolutely perfect Beef Carpaccio – ultra-thin sliced raw filet mignon, with shaved parmesan cheese, capers, and olive oil drizzled over it.  For a main, they make one of the best Spaghetti Carbonara dishes in North America (and yes, Paula, theirs is made with cream).

September 15^th, Ganges Marina to Sidney, B.C. on Vancouver Island

After a two day stay in Ganges, it was time to head for Sidney.  We had a bit of repair work on Flying Colours scheduled at Delta Marine the following Monday, and we wanted to get into town in plenty of time so that weather problems wouldn’t delay us.

The cruise from Ganges to Sidney is barely two hours, so we got a leisurely start, arriving around midday.  Steve and Shirley from the Couverden had been kind enough to let us use their slip at the Port Sidney Marina over the weekend, and that allowed us easy access to town to get some shopping done and a car rented.  It also made it easy to have dinner at our favorite schnitzel restaurant, the Suisse Bistro in downtown Sidney (do you get the idea that food plays a role in our cruising schedule?).

On Sunday afternoon, we took Flying Colours over to Delta Marine, deep inside Shoal Harbour to the north of Sidney.  Our Fleming guy there, Brian Coverely, had given us access to a boat house where we could have the work done on Flying Colours without weather concerns.  We’ve never put Flying Colours into a boat house before, and we didn’t know if we’d fit through the door without having to put our antenna arch down, so there was some trepidation to this move.  As it turned out, there were no problems, and an added benefit was that it gave us more security with ZuZu – she could get off the boat anytime she pleased, but with the pedestrian door closed at the dock side, there wasn’t anywhere she could go.

Monday morning, the work began on Flying Colours.  The garfed-up porthole cover that we’d damaged in Nanaimo at the beginning of the summer was the first priority, but we also needed annual service on the WhisperGen and the watermaker.  At midday, Kap drove me down to Victoria where I caught a Kenmore Air Flight to Seattle.  Gator was with me on my lap, and part of my task was to deliver him to Camp Kelly where he’d spend the next couple of weeks with Raz.  I also needed to check in on the new house construction.  It was a quick trip – I’d return on Wednesday afternoon.  Meanwhile, Kap and ZuZu would spend their time on Flying Colours, keeping an eye on the work being done.

Flying Colours "on the hard" at Delta Marine, Sidney, B.C.

The computerized stabilizer wings on the hull were in great shape. With the gyro/computer that controls these, the stability of the boat is head and shoulders above our previous Nordic Tug.

To my surprise, when I called Kap while I was home, she told me Flying Colours was being hauled out and put on the hard for the next several days.  The primary reason was, she wanted to have the propeller shaft and bearings checked to ensure there wasn’t any damage from the line wrap we’d done a month earlier.  While doing that, they might as well change the zincs, clean and apply new bottom paint, clean the props, and other general maintenance that’s needed for a boat living in salt water.  When I returned, our next few days were spent living on Flying Colours high and dry.

Here's an example of a zinc - basically a slab of zinc that's considered "sacrificial", meaning that it gets eaten up by any stray ungrounded electrical signals around the marinas we're in, from nearby boats that don't have a good ground and are leaking electricity into the water. If we didn't keep our zincs up to snuff, any metal parts on our boat would get eaten up instead.

It took three days to complete all the tasks, as typical with a boat, the initial list of tasks just grew and grew.  By Friday, everything was complete, and Flying Colours was ready to be put back in the water.

Flying Colours is lowered to the water by a moving crane called a TraveLift. It always amazes me that something weighing 70,000 lbs can be picked up like this and moved around.

The plan was to move Flying Colours back to the boat house for two nights, where she’d be cleaned inside and out the next day.

As the Delta Marine crew got the TraveLift ready to go, Kap quietly told me she’d prefer to have someone from Delta Marina move Flying Colours from the very tight haul-out dock over to the boat house.  We asked Brian Coverely to do it, and he readily agreed.

The navigation light post looks pretty sad broken off at its connection point with the satellite arch frame.

All went well, until we got to the boat house.  On the way over, I lowered the two 16′ VHF antennas that we knew wouldn’t clear the door of the boat house, but we left the main antenna arch in place – as we’d just been in this boat house three days earlier and everything fit.  Brian was driving from the covered fly bridge, and Kap and I were down on the main deck to give a hand on the tight side-by-side door clearance, and to handle the lines.  As we moved halfway into the boat house, there was a horrific crash and we felt Flying Colours shudder.  Brian hollered something profane from the fly bridge.

It took about two seconds to figure out what happened.  There had been another boat in the boat house the day before, and the Delta Marine worker who took it out had raised the folding door – but had stopped raising it about 5″ before he should have.  That was enough to hit our navigation light post jutting up from the arch – and was the highest point on the arch.  Who would have thought?  We’d just been in there three days before, and with a 20′ clearance on the door, who would notice that the door was down 5″ from where it should be.

“No problem,” said Brian.  “We’ll have this fixed in no time.”

We could tell he was muttering under his breath at this embarrassing situation, and we knew he was going to have some words with the yard guy who screwed up on the door.  As it turned out, it took a full day to complete the repair (at Delta Marine’s cost), and it wasn’t until Sunday before we were ready to depart.  In the meantime, Flying Colours got a great exterior wash, interior clean, and rugs cleaned, so she’d be spotless for the upcoming Fleming Rendezvous in Seattle.

September 24^th, Sidney, B.C. to Roche Harbor on San Juan Island, WA

Crossing from Canada into the U.S. is always the definitive sign that the cruising season is coming to an end.  This time, though, we planned a few days at Roche Harbor on San Juan Island, then down to Seattle for the upcoming Fleming Fling Rendezvous at Elliot Bay Marina.

Sunset at Roche Harbor.

As we were getting ready to depart, a text message from Jim and Paula on Apt. 5 arrived on my cell phone – “Hey, you guys, where are you?”  After texting back and forth, it was decided they would come over to Roche Harbor to meet up with us for a couple of days.  They did, and we had a great time catching up on the summer’s activities, two wonderful on-board dinners – one that Paula and Jim cooked, and one that Kap and I cooked.  Both evenings were spent playing Wise and Otherwise, a board game that we played almost every night during our bareboat cruises in New Zealand and Australia in 2003 and 2005.

September 27^th, Roche Harbor on San Juan Island to Elliot Bay Marina, Seattle

The cruise down to Seattle was uneventful.  After hours and hours of weather watching, Kap elected to set our course around the east side of San Juan Island, past Friday Harbor, and through the narrow inlet that separates San Juan Island and Lopez Island.  This empties into the Strait of Juan de Fuca at its NE corner, following along the west side of Whidbey Island.  We then turned a bit eastward at Port Townsend where it changes to Admiralty Inlet.

As we were nearing the south end of Whidbey Island, we started hearing a very interesting VHF radio exchange.  We always have our VHF radios on scan mode, scanning for any transmissions on about six frequencies.  One is the local “Traffic”  frequency – the equivalent to Air Traffic Control that communicates with airplanes flying in controlled airspace.  We do this so we’ll know about commercial traffic that we might be encountering, including freighters, container ships, oil tankers, tug and tows . . . you name it.

This time, a huge Hapag-Lloyd container ship named the Hamburg Express that had just passed us at 21 knots called Seattle Traffic, “Traffic, Hamburg Express, can you give me the frequency to contact the Coast Guard “Little boat” – they’ve indicated they plan to board us, and we need to coordinate how this will occur.”  The “little boat” he was referring to is one of the 3-man inflatables the Coast Guard uses, launching from a larger Coast Guard cutter in most cases.  We couldn’t see any Coast Guard boats anywhere around us.

On arrival in Seattle, we stopped off at Shilshole Bay Marina to fuel up. The marina breakwater has these wonderful metal sculpture figures that brings a smile to our face each time we see them.

We perked up at that, as the Hamburg Express was just 1/2 mile in front of us, and it might be interesting to see this going on.  Traffic came back with a frequency, and we could hear the freighter calling and calling – but no answer.  He called Traffic again, saying that he really needed to talk with them, as if they wanted to board him he’d need to slow down, and doing that quickly isn’t possible.  Somehow they got in touch with the “little boat”, and we could only hear their side of the conversation.  Presumably to questions from the Coast Guard, the freighter skipper responded that he didn’t have any hazardous or illegal cargo on board, and he gave them a rundown of the crew members on board.  The Coast Guard told them to slow to 6 knots (we were doing 10 knots), and after asking about the crew on board, they were told to have two crew in the pilot house, two in the engine room, one down at the boarding platform at the water – and to have the rest of the crew “standing at the main deck railing, passports in hand.”  We didn’t hear anything further for about a half hour, and we were slowly closing in on the Hamburg Express.  Then we spotted a Coast Guard cutter heading north past us at high speed, presumably with the boarding completed, and the little boat back on board.  The freighter resumed speed, and we could see it in the Seattle harbor when we arrived.

October 1-3, Fleming Fling Rendezvous

Do you call this a bevy of Flemings? Flying Colours is the last boat at left, and we had the best view of the Seattle skyline across Elliot Bay.

The weekend long Fleming Fling was a lot of fun.  By Friday night, 17 Fleming yachts had arrived at the main guest dock at the Elliot Bay Marina, and it was a hoot to see all them in a single file line.

It began with a cocktail party on Friday night, hosted by Chuck Hovey Yacht Sales, the broker for Flemings on the U.S. West Coast.  There were upwards of 80 people in attendance, and we were wined and dined like royalty, and entertained by the famed Roosevelt High School Jazz Band.

Saturday morning was a series of seminars on various aspects of operating and maintaining our Flemings.  In the afternoon there was an Open Boat, where everyone could shuttle around to visit other Flemings, to see all the new gadgets on newer boats, and to see how others had outfitted and decorated.  Saturday night was a fancy sit-down dinner at the Palisades Restaurant that overlooks Elliot Bay Marina.

Sunday morning, following a brunch and a captain’s briefing, was the pièce de résistance – a parade of all the Flemings around Elliot Bay, past the Seattle waterfront, where a helicopter with a professional photographer on board met up and took dozens of photos.

After passing the Seattle waterfront in formation, we were instructed via radio to speed up to 9 knots - presumably to create an interesting wake behind each boat. Photo c-images.

On Monday, October 4th, Kap and I took Flying Colours through the Ballard Locks and delivered her to Yacht Masters Northwest on Lake Union for about a month of work to get her ready for next summer’s cruising season.  Hopefully, we’ll be able to move her back to the permanent covered slip in Anacortes in early November, where she’ll be out of the long winter’s rain and snow.

All in all, it was a wonderful cruising summer – even if it did end.  I hope everyone has enjoyed the blog postings this summer.

Flying Colours passing the photographer's stand at the marina breakwater.

September 3, 2011

This is one plausible explanation for why it happens – she loses track of her center of gravity. Another is that she loses her footing on the slippery fiberglass. Still another is that a pesky seagull swooped at her and she zigged when she should have zagged. Who knows? All we heard was a plop when she hit the water.

Teabag (a.k.a. ZuZu) has had another cold saltwater dip.  This is her third plunge into the frigid 50° waters in these parts, and her adventure really alarmed us.

We were tied up at the Seattle Yacht Club outstation dock in Cortes Bay, near Desolation Sound, and were both getting some stuff done on our laptop computers – Kap in the pilot house and me at the salon table – when Kap suddenly cried out, “ZuZu’s in the water!”

Boy, that statement really energized me, and I raced out the salon doors to the cockpit and around to the starboard side walkway.  I looked down into the water along the side of Flying Colours, and sure enough, there was ZuZu swimming like an Olympic champion.  She was looking up at me, wide eyed, but making an incredible pace through the water, heading straight for the aft end of the boat and the swim step.  By the time I could run back to the cockpit, open the transom door and step down onto the swim step, ZuZu was there and had propelled herself out of the water and up onto the swim step.  Like a lightning bolt, she shot through the transom door and raced up the side walkway on the port side, around the Portuguese bridge, and into the open pilot house door on the starboard side that Kap had just come through.  She then bolted up the five steps to the fly bridge, and when I got there she had already briskly shaken herself and was crouched beside some pillows on the settee, looking like a drowned rat.

Kap arrived with a towel and managed to get it wrapped around her.  We took her to the cockpit – by now I’m sure she knows what the drill is – to hose her down with fresh water so she won’t get sick licking herself dry of the salt water in her fur.

Yes, she managed to get me once really good with her hind claws – a deep rake across the left wrist that was reminiscent of the San Diego Airport scene last January.  I can’t say as I blame her – the fresh water from the cockpit hose is cold too, and this definitely isn’t one of those summers where a cool rinse-off feels good.

We don’t know how she did it, but luckily Kap heard a light bang against the hull and the loud splash in the water.  ZuZu was up on the dinghy deck, which is a good 15’ above the water line, and might have just gotten too cocky about her fancy footwork.  Or maybe the waxed fiberglass might have been too slick for some little jump that she tried.  Or, there’s a possibility one of the nearby seagulls might have swooped down on her – we see them keeping an eye on her, and maybe one of them decided to take her out.

We later found two scratch marks in the main deck teak railing at the spot where she fell, and it’s obvious she managed to get a paw and a couple of claws onto it as she fell.  That must have really given her a whap on at least one leg.  Below that near the water line is a fiberglass rub rail that she then likely hit.  She was definitely nursing her bruised body and ego the rest of the day, but now seems no worse for wear.  What’s most interesting about it is, her coat is softer than velvet – makes one wonder if a salt water bath for cats could be bottled and sold.  Hmmm, maybe we could make our fortune?????

I am getting worried, though, as I’m the only one on Flying Colours – including Gator – who hasn’t had an unexpected dip in these waters.  I’m watching my back.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. . .

Click on any image to see an enlarged version of it.

Wednesday, August 17^th, Booker Lagoon Anchorage To Jennis Bay Moorage

When I last left off, we were just departing Booker Lagoon, planning to head for Jennis Bay.  Well, we did, and we had two really great nights there.

Here’s the nautical chart of Drury Inlet. Stuart Narrows is at lower right (and enlargement at top right), and you can see the narrow, rocky, shallow bit that sets up the strong current during tidal flows. It’s about 3 miles up the inlet to Jennis Bay, tucked in behind an island, and you wouldn’t even know it was there without the chart. Along the way, we searched for and found a pretty good prawning hole, right at 300’ deep.

Jennis Bay is about 3 miles up Drury Inlet, in the northwestern corner of the Broughton’s – a dogleg inlet that pierces into the mainland almost 20 miles, with old logging camps dotting the area.  You have to pass through Stuart Narrows to get there – and as the name implies, it’s narrow, and therefore, the current runs fast with the tide changes.  It’s one of the places we avoided in our early years coming here, as frankly we thought it was just too narrow to feel comfortable.  And with good reason – just inside the Narrow’s entrance is a memorial marker for two guys on a tug towing a barge – the barge was found in the middle of the Narrows, running full speed in tight circles, with no sight of the two guys, presumably drowned when the tug, for whatever reason, didn’t make it through the Narrows.

As it turns out, Kap’s comfort level with narrows and rapids these days is very good (i.e., really good common sense), and we just don’t have the frightening tales that others have about this.

As we motored further into Drury Inlet we kept a keen eye on the depth sounder and paper charts, looking for the magic “holes” around 300’ deep – places where we might get some prawning in.  Sure enough, about a mile from the entrance to Jennis Bay we spotted an oval shaped hole, and mentally mapping it as we cruised over it, we knew this was one to ask the locals about when we got into Jennis Bay.

Jennis Bay Marina as we approached it. There were just two other boats at the dock when we arrived, and another small fishing boat came in shortly after us. We were directed with Flying Colours to the other side of the dock from the Grand Banks and the sailboat. This is the site of an old logging camp from the late 40s and early 50s, and the founder, Allyson Allo, grew up here when her father was helping to build the camp.

It was Wednesday, and Tuesday is their big jambalaya night potluck, and it’s always crowded then – so we figured there was a good chance there’d be room for us.  I had sent an e-mail the day before telling them we were arriving and they said they’d have room, but oftentimes it’s still first-come, first-served.   As we rounded the island almost blocking the entrance to the bay, we could see that their dock was tiny, with two boats already on it, but looked like there was room for us.  On the VHF a woman’s voice said to come around to the left of the log breakwater and we’d have a port side tie, bow out – which is exactly what we needed if we were to get the dinghy down for prawning.

Sure enough, a woman who introduced herself as Karen met us at the dock and took our lines.  She was extremely friendly, and told us it was “her month” to fill in for her sister, Allyson, who was away settling up a divorce.  Karen’s husband, Joe, soon joined us, explaining that there was no shore power or fresh water at the dock – which we already knew, so you’re on battery power and generator to keep things running.  They also said Happy Hour was at 5PM on the covered float behind us.

The old float buildings at Jennis Bay are really quaint. As with most other marinas in the Broughton’s, few of the float buildings are native to the particular site where they’re currently moored – they get hauled around from site to site as needed. All of the buildings at Jennis Bay are at least 50 years old, and they’re floating on old growth logs that are reaching the end of their lives (i.e., starting to sink from being totally water logged). The cookhouse is the building to the left, where coffee and hot muffins are served each morning. A gift shop is in the middle building, and the bunkhouse for guests is on the right.

This photo is a good example of the float logs that are typical here – the ones beneath the bunkhouse are at least 40-44” in diameter, and being the same diameter at both ends, they must have come from very large trees. Nowadays, there’s a guy near Port McNeill who specializes in building floats and buildings to sit atop them, and he uses foam blocks and sealed fiberglass boxes for floatation, as they last almost forever and are more evenly stable.

Happy Hour was fun.  Karen whipped up a plate of baked brie, with a salmon berry sauce drizzled over it – I’ve never been wild about brie, but with the sauce it was good.  There were also two dozen just-cooked spotted prawns with cocktail sauce, and sure enough, they’d been pulled up that afternoon from the hole we had spotted.

With the divorce of the owning couple going on, we’d heard that the jambalaya night wasn’t being held this summer, but Karen and Joe assured us that wasn’t so – they’d had 40 people at the previous night’s dinner, and the marina was filled to the brim with boats – and that would have to be at least 12+ boats. We couldn’t imagine where they put that many boats, as there were only four now at the docks, and it didn’t look like more than two more would fit.  It’s amazing, though, how some of these marinas pack them in.

First thing next morning, we got the dinghy down, loaded it with the prawn trap glimp, got suited up in our flaming orange suits (more to keep warm than anything else, as early morning temperatures are still in the low 50s), and headed out to drop our traps.

There was already a prawn buoy at the eastern end of the hole, so after driving around to find the absolute deepest spot in the hole, yet away from the other buoy, we baited up and dropped our two traps in about 325’ of water.

Flying Colours moored at Jennis Bay Marina.

When I went onshore to get the photo of Flying Colours, I found a thimbleberry bush – the first I’ve heard of them. The berries are edible and taste like a raspberry (and they’re related to raspberry and blackberries), but more delicate in flavor.

Imagine!  On our return from setting our traps, and after just one night as guests at Jennis Bay, Kap and I were put in charge of the place to run it for the remainder of the day!  We must have honest faces, or maybe we act like we know what we’re doing……

Actually, we were now the only boat expected to be there that day and night, and Karen and Joe had plans to motor over to Echo Bay to inspect a float home they were thinking about buying.  On their return, they were stopping at Sullivan Bay for dinner – and their first night away from Jennis Bay in a month.  We told them we’d be happy to look after the place, but that they needed to double our $0/hourly wage they were offering to pay us.

One of the nicest things about a new boat is new systems and equipment. One of the best pieces of equipment on Flying Colours is our WhisperGen. Built by a company in Christchurch, NZ, it consists of a Stirling diesel engine that generates 800W of AC electrical power when it’s running. This electricity is then routed through a DC generator for charging/maintaining our house bank of batteries that we use for our everyday needs aboard Flying Colours. (The Stirling engine, invented in 1816, is vastly different from a combustion engine, with no “explosions” going on inside, so they operate very quietly, with no exhaust gases – if you’re interested you can read more about it at www.howstuffworks.com/stirling-engine.) Our WhisperGen is about the size of a home kitchen oven, inside a stylish case to make it look pretty, and basically sits unattended in Flying Colours’ engine room. Electronic controls inside it monitor our very large bank of “house” batteries (i.e., the batteries that we use for all DC systems aboard the boat), and start up the Stirling engine whenever the battery voltage drops below a threshold. Its sole function then is to top up the charge on the batteries, and if/when they reach full charge it shuts down again. When it’s very quiet aboard Flying Colours we can barely hear it running, and it’s so automated we could go for weeks without even thinking about it – and it burns 1/5th of a gallon of diesel per hour when it’s running. (Unfortunately, the company’s research and manufacturing operation was virtually destroyed in the huge Christchurch earthquake this spring, shutting down operations and wiping out their entire inventory. Since then, they’ve rebuilt much of their operations, but as of now they are no longer producing the “off grid” unit such as we have on Flying Colours. When we installed our WhisperGen, we purchased their complete spare parts kit, so we’re hoping this will enable us to withstand any repairs that might be necessary on our unit in the future.)

As a prelude to a later part of this post, in mid-afternoon while I was sitting in the cockpit taking life easy and reading a book, I suddenly noticed an acrid smoke smell wafting in from the port side of Flying Colours.  I then saw smoke curling over the cap rail, and I’ll tell you, I jumped to my feet in an instant.  At the same time, two other guys on the dock smelled it too and they came rushing over – fire on a boat isn’t a pretty business, and it always gets everyone’s attention.  The smoke was coming from the WhisperGen exhaust port – a fancy gizmo in the engine room whose primary function is to monitor our house bank batteries, and when they reach a certain voltage limit, it fires up and charges the batteries.  (See quite a bit of information in the photo and caption sidebar about this.)

To our suprise, late in the afternoon we spotted a cruising boat motoring into the bay.  With our binoculars we could tell it was a classic old wooden motor boat, but it was too far away to read the name plate on the side of the house.  There wasn’t a radio call from them, nor could we raise them on the radio, so we just stood on the dock and acted like we knew what we were doing.  As it neared, Kap said, “That isn’t the Puget Lady, is it?”  I told her no, it couldn’t be, as the lines just weren’t right.  As it neared the dock and turned 180° to get a starboard side tie, sure enough, it was the Puget Lady – and I could see our old friend, Tom Magwire, in the pilot house.

This photo of Tom Magwire’s classic wooden boat, Puget Lady, was taken in 2008 when we were anchored in a tiny bay at Claude Point on the top end of Revillegigedo Island (the island that Ketchikan is on). Many years ago, Tom and a friend built a kayaker’s overnight cabin on the shore in this bay, and Tom spends a few days here each time he’s in Ketchikan to fix up whatever needs to be done on it. We had just ended a circumnavigation of Revillegigedo, visiting Misty Fjord across from the east side of the island. We decided our meeting at the cabin would be the First Annual Arctic Bar Yacht Club meeting . . . but it turned out to be the last too, as we all got too busy and didn’t carry through with it.

After the late-night decision to create the Arctic Bar Yacht Club, we all posed for a founders group photo. Tom is at center rear, and his business partner and friend, Paula is at left. Next to Paula are our good friends, Bucky and Christy Wood from the American Tug, Undoc’d – Bucky is a retired surgeon from Birmingham, AL, and this was their first-ever year of cruising. To our left is Marty and Linda Ellison, who cruise on a 47’ Nordhavn, Tenacious – and the live just south of us in Bellevue. Tom’s son is in the black T-shirt, and Tom’s friend, Kevin, is at far right. Hey, all you guys in the photo – we miss you, and look forward to getting together again!

Happy Hour at Jennis Bay. Our Ketchikan friend, Tom Magwire, is at right rear. I failed to get a photo of the yellow Lab whose butt you can just see sticking out from the end of the table. This is the marina’s official dock-greeter dog, but his claim to fame is losing an eye to a cougar a few years back, defending the place. When our friends, Steve and Shirley, were here five years ago, he still had the stitches closing his eye, and the marina owner’s two young girls were passing a hat around to all of the boating guests to help pay for the huge vet bills.

I say old friend – actually, we met Tom in 2008 in Ketchikan, where he’s half-owner of the Arctic Bar, the home of the happy bears (to see what I mean by happy bears, take a peek at their web site, www.arcticbar.com).  We’d met Tom – and his longshoreman-mouth partner, Paula – at a raucous Dessert Auction to raise money for the Ketchikan Arts Council on our arrival night in Ketchikan on our 2008 cruise to SE Alaska.  Tom lives in Port Angeles (Washington), and cruises up to Ketchikan almost every summer to do fix-up work on the bar, and to help out with whatever work Paula needs done.  With our four other cruising friends that we were buddy-boating with, the dozen or so of us were the founding members of the Arctic Bar Yacht Club – but unfortunately, it never really got off the ground.  We hadn’t seen Tom since.

Over Happy Hour that night, we caught up on old times with Tom on what we’ve been doing since we last saw each other in 2008.  He still co-owns the Arctic Bar with Paula, and tries to get up to Ketchikan every summer – but not this summer.  He said he’ll hang around the Broughton’s for a month or so, and we’ll probably meet up somewhere as we head south.

Prawning at Jennis Bay wasn’t bad – 80 and 81 for the two trap pulls – and they were surprisingly large.

Friday, August 19^th, Jennis Bay Marina Moorage to Moore Bay Anchorage

We stayed two nights at Jennis Bay, and as luck would have it, there was pea soup fog when we awoke on the second morning.  Slack water at Stuart Narrows was at 10:30AM, so we really needed this to burn off if we were to go through for our next leg – the plan was to head for Moore Bay and hopefully meet up with Couverden.

The view of Jennis Bay looking from the dock towards Drury Inlet (the narrow slit between the two points of land). The fog had just lifted and we were set to go.

As we pulled our prawn traps, the fog started to lift a bit and that was encouraging.  By the time we got back to Flying Colours, stowed Hinky (that’s actually the name of the dinghy – if anyone can guess why it’s called Hinky, we’ll send you a Flying Colours T-shirt) on the dinghy deck, and settled our moorage account, the fog had lifted and we were good to go.

Kap timed slack water perfectly, and we passed through Stuart Narrows with flat calm water.  While Kap managed the helm, we cruised through Patrick Passage, then Sutlej Channel, headed for Moore Bay near the entrance to Kingcome Inlet.  I settled in at the salon table to shell, vacuum seal, and freeze the catch of prawns from the day before.

We’ve heard a lot about Moore Bay this summer, first from a couple from Vancouver that we met in Beaver Inlet at the start of our prawning season.  They told us they were hauling up 300 prawns each pull, and max’d out their limit in a couple of days.  We hadn’t seen more than about 80 in our traps so far, so we were anxious to give this a try.  We were in touch via e-mail with Steve and Shirley on the Couverden, and they expected to arrive a few hours after us.

Moore Bay may not have been the greatest for prawns during our 2-night visit, but the view was certainly spectacular. From our anchorage we had an absolutely stunning view up Kingcome Inlet, with mountains on the Canadian mainland that have permanent snow caps at the higher elevations.

Moore Bay is on the Canadian mainland, at the end of a long peninsula that juts out to the west.  The fairly large Gregory Island sits at the opening, and inside the bay there are several small islets – just big rocks covered with trees, actually.  While the bay is quite large, there aren’t many comfortable places to anchor, and luckily, there wasn’t a single boat in the bay when we arrived.  We cruised around looking for a good spot, but it was deep – up to 150’ in many places – right up to the shoreline.  We located two mooring buoys near a government Forest Service dock, but we didn’t trust them to hold a 70,000 lbs boat like Flying Colours.

Finally, we settled on a tiny bay within a bay on the west side of Moore Bay, where we found 30-40’ water near the shoreline – and maybe too close to the shoreline.  At the point where we were as close to shore as we felt comfortable, there was a steep drop-off from 40’ to almost 100’ in a matter of about 100’ distance.  With Kap at the helm and me at the windlass, we decided to drop the anchor at 40’ depth, bow out, and then back towards the shore as we let out scope.  It was totally calm when we anchored, but we were still nervous about dragging the anchor to deeper water than we had chain out for if a NW wind came up, and finding ourselves on the shore rocks if an Easterly came up.  It was a dilemma, and that’s what always makes anchoring interesting (and challenging).

The Couverden arrived shortly after we set our anchor, and they too had a challenge finding an anchorage they felt comfortable with.  They finally settled on a tiny shoreline indentation on the opposite side of the bay from us.  While they anchored, Kap and I headed out in Hinky to find a good spot to set our traps.  We searched throughout the bay, but none of the spots that were anywhere near 300’ matched the description by the Vancouver couple who told us how great the prawning was.  After driving around for 30 minutes, we settled on the edge of a large square-shaped hole that was just over 300’.  There were two other prawn traps there, and we hoped their owners knew the best spot (they must have been set by someone through a tiny passage from us that goes to Shawl Bay, where there’s a marina we visited in 2007 and hadn’t been back to since).

Steve and Shirley had other ideas – they set their traps quite a distance from us – and that didn’t bode well for us, as Steve seems “to be one” with the prawns, and instinctively knows the best places.  We decided to pull our traps in late afternoon to see how we did – a big zippo!  This was the first time in a year we’d come up completely empty-handed, and what a disappointment.  We re-baited our traps and headed for the area where Steve set theirs.

Next morning, we had 49 prawns in our trap, which is certainly better than zero, but it was one of the lowest pulls we’ve had this summer.  We moved again, and had a skimpy 38 prawns this time – and there were large numbers of Coon Stripe Shrimp, and we haven’t decided if we like them as much as Spotted Prawns.

On our second or third pull at Moore Bay, a crab showed up in our trap – Helmut crab, or a Lyre Crab.  At Booker Lagoon we had a Sunflower starfish in each of our traps – the starfish that I cleared was easily 16” across, and must have weighed 5+ lbs.

The prawns in the Broughton’s definitely come in two sizes, mixed almost equally – what I’m calling large and medium. I’m guessing the large are 2-year olds and the medium are 1-year olds and before molting into their new harder shells.

Notice To Readers:  I’ve gone totally overboard in my following discussion about Spotted Prawns and Coon Stripe Shrimp.  If you don’t care to read this, be my guest and skip to the end of the discussion – annotated by a line of ******.

Starting with Beaver Inlet back in mid-July, we found one or two striped prawns in our traps – whereas all the others were spotted (about a 25-to-1 ratio of spotted to striped).  They otherwise looked quite similar, but when I shelled them I found their shells to be very different – a much more delicate shell, and the flesh seems to be more delicate.  We soon learned these are Coon Stripe Shrimp – not prawns, but shrimp – and they were always much smaller . . . so much so that we sometimes threw them back as we emptied our traps, figuring they were increasing our caught number towards our limit and were substandard.  When we got to Moore Bay this week, we found that the striped were almost equal in number to the spotted prawns, but much larger in size.  One guy we talked to said he actually preferred striped to spotted, claiming they were “sweeter” (I’ve never figured out how anything coming from the sea can be classified as “sweet”, but then I guess that’s my land-food bias.)

Later, at Kwatsi Bay, Kap picked up a very expensive book at their tiny gift shop – called Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest – and it told all about the various prawns/shrimp that we’re encountering.  According to the book, Coon Stripe Shrimp (also called King Shrimp or Humpback Shrimp, because they have a prominent hump to the back of their body) are very similar to Spotted Prawns (which are also known as Pacific Prawn), and are said to taste very similarly.  We can’t seem to get a definitive statement on the difference between “prawns” and “shrimp” – as the Coon Stripe are called shrimp, whereas the Spotted are known as prawns.  I always thought size had something to do with it, but that definition seems to be going out the window.

Another interesting thing I’m finding has to do with the shell of the Spotted Prawn.  As you may recall, our technique (learned from Steve on the Couverden) is to rinse the prawns as soon as we get them back to Flying Colours (and their heads have been snapped off back where we brought up the traps).  I then rinse them (twice) in fresh water, and put them overnight in the fridge (25 – or so – to a plastic container).  This cooling down does something to the way their shell is attached to the fleshy part of their body, and when they’re shelled the next day, the shell can be more easily peeled off.  Well, having peeled over 1,500 shrimp this summer, I now sort ours into two sizes – medium and large.  As I peel them I separate the large from medium, and vacuum seal 20-24 (or so) large to a ZipLoc-type bag and 26-28 medium to a bag.  (The idea being, the large ones are great for a prawn cocktail or cooking on the BBQ, whereas the medium ones are perfect size for Scampi.)

What’s interesting about this is, the shell casing itself is very different between the two sizes.  Turns out, Spotted Prawns live about 2½ years, and molt somewhere in between.  My guess is, the ones I’m calling medium are still in their first shell, and the large are in their new shell after molting.  In the Spotted Prawn world, even the young ones have a firm shell, but it’s not difficult to get my thumbnail under it, peel it around, then get the next shell wrap and do the same, crashing my thumb through the little flipper legs on the underside of the belly.  With the large ones, though, the shell is significantly more firm, and I have to be much more careful and specific with actually peeling each shell wrap – and the flipper legs are much more firm and cannot be “crashed through” with my thumb.

Lastly, I’ve found that the purpose of the two white “spots” a Spotted Prawn have seems to be a cartilage-like spot weld, where the shell is attached to the body flesh of the prawn.  When I peel the Spotted Prawn, whether large or medium, I have to be very careful to force the shell to break away from the two spot welds.  There seems to be nothing about this in the books that we’ve looked at, but with my experience in numbers, I believe I’m right about this.  (The Striped Coon Shrimp doesn’t have these “spots”, and the shell seems to be wrapped around the flesh in such a way that it isn’t “welded” to the flesh.)

********************************************************************

A drawback to Moore Bay is the total lack of cell phone coverage or Internet access.  With everything going on in our lives right now, about two days is the most we can be totally out of range, so we decided to dinghy across to the next bay to visit the Shawl Bay Marina.  We’d briefly stopped in there on our 2007 cruise to the Broughton’s, but quickly decided it was a bit too disheveled, plus the owner’s large dog took a liking to Gator and sat outside our boat on the dock the entire time we were there, driving Gator crazy.

We didn’t find cell phone coverage, but sure enough, they had Wifi available to guests for $5 – but they were closing it down in 45 minutes (presumably to lower the load on their generator).  I knew I probably had 100+ e-mails, plus Kap needed to access an internet weather site as she hadn’t been able to get good weather data via our VHF radio on Flying Colours.

The lady who couldn’t find her camera – because it was in her pocket – waves goodbye to us from the Happy Wanderer as they pulled away from the dock.

As we worked away on my computer at one of the Happy Hour tables, racing to get e-mails and weather data downloaded before they shut down, a gal about 80 years old from a boat right in front of us stopped by and asked if we’d seen her camera.

“What does it look like?” we asked.

She reached in her pocket, pulled out a camera, and said, “It looks just like this!”

Realizing immediately what she’d just done, she blurted out, “Silly me!  I’m the ditzy woman on that boat over there!”

One thing we found at Shawl Bay – the best dog potty float in all the Broughton’s (the grassy area in the foreground is actually part of a float). Maybe it’s because virtually every boat in the marina had a small floor mop dog aboard – that seems to be the type of breed for the older set – and they demand a better place to walk their dog.

It didn’t take us long to figure out that Shawl Bay Marina caters to the geriatric set.  There wasn’t a single boat in the marina – and there were at least 20 boats at the dock – that wasn’t crewed by couples in their late 70s and early 80s.  That’s great to see, but it’s unusual, and seemed like they come here for the summer and just hang out – sort of like snowbirds going to Arizona for the winter.

Back at Moore Bay, by our third prawn trap pull, we’d come to the conclusion that this area had recently been fished out, and we really had no reason to stick around.

Steve and Shirley roast marshmallows over the fire pit at the Forest Service picnic area in Moore Bay.

At the edge of the picnic area there were huge old growth cedar stumps, with fallen cedar trees everywhere. We’re told that in the early logging days cedar trees were considered junk, and cleared out so they could get to the more valuable Douglas Fir trees more easily. These old cedars are now nursery stumps and logs from which new trees have grown from.

Steve and Shirley dinghy back to Couverden after a wonderful evening of S’mores over an open fire.

On their way to Moore Bay, Steve and Shirley stopped at Echo Bay Marina for provisions, and Steve stocked up on S’mores fixin’s for a shoreside bonfire on the last evening.  We dinghied over to the Forest Service dock and found several freshly painted picnic tables, each with a nearby fire pit in which we could build a safe and sane fire.  While getting eaten alive by the no-see-ums, we roasted marshmallows over the fire, then tucked them between layers of graham cracker and chocolate.  Washed down with a glass of red box wine, plus a nip of Drambuie to finish off the evening, it was a perfect ending to a not-so-perfect – but nevertheless very enjoyable – stay at Moore Bay.

Sunday, August 21^th, Moore Bay Anchorage to Kwatsi Bay Marina

Just before 5:00AM, Kap and I both awoke to the sound of our anchor chain rumbling over rocks – and we could also hear high winds outside creating waves that were rocking the boat.  We bounded out of bed to see if we might have pulled up our anchor.  Visually, our distance from shore was still pretty much the same, but our depth sounder indicated we were sitting in 70’ of water – and when we looked at A-oh, our anchor sentinel bobbing in the water, we could see that “he” was still in the same location.  If the wind blew us any further offshore, though, it would likely pull our anchor off the shelf and we’d be adrift.  Interestingly, the waves were pushing us toward shore and the wind was pushing us offshore, and for the moment they seemed to be counterbalancing each other.  Nevertheless, we decided it was time to get the hell out of there.

We were damn glad we’d made the effort at almost darkness the night before to raise Hinky to the dinghy deck, so there wasn’t much to do in getting ready – and we weren’t doing it in the current nasty weather conditions.  After starting the engines, and with Kap also at the bow, I first raised the anchor enough so she could grab A-oh’s line with a boat hook to keep it away from any underwater running gear, then I raised the anchor.  Back at the helm, Kap immediately steered us out to safer water.  It was the first chance to catch our breath in 30 minutes of high anxiety.  Just as we stowed the anchor paraphernalia, we saw Couverden making their way out of Moore Bay.  They were heading for Port McNeill – the opposite direction from us – and we hailed them on the radio to wish them a safe journey.

Wow! It’s a great underwater shot of a Killer Whale . . . well, OK, it’s a raindrop spotted camera lens in the fly bridge, looking aft at our wake as we traveled down Tribune Channel in the rain. The Killer Whale is the inflatable kind, a kite connected to a pole to keep eagles from scooping ZuZu up from the deck.

The cruise down Tribune Channel to Kwatsi Bay was uneventful – the rain continued, but the wind calmed considerably and the water was less than 1’ chop.   We arrived at Kwatsi Bay just after midday, and while it was good to see Anca and Max as they helped us onto the dock, it was raining too hard to be sociable and we puttered around inside.

Actually, it poured all afternoon, into the evening, and all of the next day.  It had already been raining for more than a day,

Anca said that tonight was a potluck dinner night (every other night is potluck, the other night is just Happy Hour with appetizers).  I’d been hoping for Happy Hour with appetizers, and had something all ready to bring – now I had to switch gears and figure out what to bring.  Kap’s advice was, “it’ll all be fine, just wing it from what you find in the fridge”.

The fog at Kwatsi Bay Marina is always interesting – swirling around and over the small island just off the docks at the marina. This photo was taken at 4:30PM, in heavy rain (as you can see from the splatters in the water), and that’s most unusual.

Shortly after we arrived, a trawler called the Intrepid pulled in and tied up directly behind on the dock, stern-to-stern with us.  On the way in, Anca yelled out congratulations to the woman at the side rail as she readied the bow line to toss, “Hey, you’re now a published author!”

It was then I recognized the woman from last year at Kwatsi when we were in, and also knew that she was the author of a just-out paperback book I bought at the General Store in Sullivan Bay – called Last Resort.  The author is Rolynn Anderson, a long-time cruiser here, and she’s been dropping off copies of her first-ever novel to all of the resorts (www.rolynnanderson.com).  After they tied up, I invited her over to sign my copy of the book.  Rolynn was ecstatic to do it, excitedly telling me that she’d been asked to do a book signing at the nightly theme dinner at Echo Bay Resort the night before and she’d sold 20 copies.  She was almost jumping out of her skin at excitement over this.

Rolynn has been a high school English Composition teacher for most of her career, and always knew she needed to write a novel to prove to herself that what she was teaching really worked – and now she’s done it.  She explained that it’s a romance/mystery/thriller, published by The Wild Rose Press that specializes in romance novels, but then added, “You guys will love it too . . . it even has helicopters in it!”  I’m not into romance novels at all, but from the titles in the lending libraries at each resort in the Broughton’s, I think it’s the most widely read genre by the women cruisers.

Three days of heavy rain created wonderful waterfalls – this photo is at Lacy Falls on Tribune Channel, a mile or so before you turn into Kwatsi Bay. For the past several years, this hasn’t had but a trickle of water – if any at all – but with the recent rains it’s living up to its name.

Several waterfalls sprouted behind us on the sheer cliffs at the head of Kwatsi Bay, one of them emptying out in a gushing stream on the shore just 100’ from where we were moored. It created a mass of foam on the other side of the dock from us, which then trickled under the dock and encircled us. Looking down at it from the deck of Flying Colours, I would have guessed it looked more like the ice floes around Iceland and Greenland that I’d often see from 38,000’ on Polar Route flights from London to Seattle – the geometric patterns didn’t look like they could be foam from a waterfall on shore.

All afternoon long, the rain bucketed down, intensifying as the day progressed.  In no time, the stream on shore near us was gushing and the sound of the waterfall behind it drowned out everyone’s generator.  The outflow was so intense that it created white foam everywhere on the water’s surface.  It was a good day to stay inside and read a book, write, or play on the Internet.

In the evening, Max and Anca hosted their every-other-night potluck dinner on the covered Happy Hour float just opposite where Flying Colours was moored.  Kap and I are usually not wild about potluck dinners, but this was one of the best we’ve been to in a long time.

While Anca was on the dock most of the afternoon orchestrating arriving boats, Max whipped up a noodle pasta with sausage and dried tomatoes, plus a large dish of curried baked chicken drumsticks – both delicious.  I decided to wing it with a country fry potato hash, with chunks of Black Forest ham sprinkled in, and finished off under the broiler with melted cheddar cheese on top.  For such a mundane dish, it seemed to be a hit, as it was among the first to be gone.  Rolynn brought her Broadway Pea salad – from the old Broadway Café on Broadway Avenue in Seattle – and it was so good I’ve asked her for the recipe.  There were three or four other dishes that were really good.  For some reason that isn’t true at most other resort potluck dinners, but the cruisers really go out of their way to make good dishes here at Kwatsi.  We don’t know why.

Our primary generator (known as the “genset”), a 17KW – i.e., it puts out 17,000 watts of power – sits in the engine room, and does most of the heavy “lifting” loads, running the high-load electrical systems (220V AC systems) such as the water maker, the galley cooktop stove and dishwasher, the water heater, and entertainment system when we’re not on shore power. Inside that shiny case is a fairly substantial diesel engine, but it’s efficient – barely sipping 1 gallon an hour of diesel.

The next morning dawned clear and dry, and we thought maybe we were back to another day of summer – which seems to be the pattern this year.  Our plan had been to get the dinghy down to set our prawn pots, as we’d heard earlier that the prawning was good at Kwatsi.  Anca told Kap at Happy Hour, though, that the bay had been prawned out, and the only decent place to get prawns right now was past the end of Kwatsi Bay, then across Tribune Channel to Wahkana Bay.  That’s a 4-5 mile trek in the dinghy, and if the winds are blowing down Tribune Channel it can be rough.  We decided to give it a miss, and just take life easy, and both of us spent most of the day on our computers.  I still had one last batch of prawns from Moore Bay to peel, vacuum seal, and get in the freezer, which pleased ZuZu to no end as she got her “prawn nectar” juices at the end.

In the middle of the afternoon, I noticed acrid exhaust smoke rising from the port side of Flying Colours – at the location of the WhisperGen exhaust – same as two weeks earlier at Jennis Bay.  Two other cruisers chatting away on the dock noticed it just as I did and came running over, thinking it might be a dreaded boat fire.  It certainly burned the nose, and I asked Kap to immediately kill the WhisperGen.  Sure enough, it was a failure, with a “flame fault” indication on the panel, same as before.  Then, though, it seemed to clear itself when the unit was restarted.  This time, it belched more smoke, plus it filled the engine room with the noxious fumes, and didn’t show signs of improving.  Kap decided it was best left to a professional to analyze the problem.  With the WhisperGen out of commission for unknown reasons, we’d have to run the generator more often to keep the batteries charged up.

A couple of hours later, Kap was cleaning the sea strainer for the water maker to see if a yellow warning indicator on it would go away.  To run the water maker we either need to be on shore power or have the generator running, so Kap started the generator.  It would start, then immediately self-shutdown 30 seconds later with a “lack of raw water” message on the digital screen.  I went down to help, and we cleaned the sea strainer multiple times, but to no avail.  Nothing would correct it, so finally I went next door to talk to Steve Anderson on the Intrepid to see if he had any ideas.  He opined that if the input raw water seemed OK, then it was likely the output raw water after it left the engine cooling system.  We watched the thru-hull on the aft starboard side to see any evidence of water or bubbles – none.  While I was calling Mike Radding – our Chuck Hovey Yacht Sales tech manager in Newport Beach – both Mike and Steve simultaneously came up with the conclusion that it had to be a raw water impeller failure.  An impeller is a hard rubber shaft with fan-like blades that force water through a tubing, without letting any other solid objects through.  When an impeller fails from age, or possibly debris in the line, the rubber blades break off, which then break all the other blades in a real hurry.

Over our satellite phone, Mike gave instructions to Kap on how to replace the impeller – provided we had a spare.  We both searched and searched through the spare parts bins under the guest stateroom bed, and finally came up with a set of Onan generator spare parts boxes.  One was marked “Impeller”.

This is what a failed impeller looks like – the bits and pieces were once curved vanes that push raw water from the thru-hull intake into the generator. Once it fails, the generator doesn’t have cooling water, and the temperature sensor shuts it down. We really should be replacing these during our annual winter maintenance, but we didn’t know to tell our service yard to do it.

Kap began the impeller replacement job, but the first challenge was to find it.  It’s in a different location on each generator model, and Mike didn’t know exactly where ours was.  Using the Onan User’s Guide, she found a drawing of what it looked like, and finally spotted it on the outside face of the generator.  She carefully removed the three screws holding it in place, and as Mike directed, pried the cover off.  The impeller inside was totally destroyed – at least the blades were all destroyed.  We saw immediately, though, that the spare impeller we had was not the same size – turns out it came from our old Nordic Tug, and thinking the impeller on the next size up generator would be the same, we’d kept it as a spare.  Bad idea.

By now, Happy Hour was in full swing across the dock from us, and I went across to see if anyone happened to have an impeller like the one in my hand.  No one had one exactly like it.

Go figure!  Two generator failures in the same afternoon, and we’re at Kwatsi Bay Marina where they don’t have shore power.  We were running on the house bank batteries throughout the day, and that’s the reason the WhisperGen had come on in the first place – to get them charged back up.  Now we didn’t have either generator to get our batteries charged, and we had a long night to go before we could leave to get service help.

We started our main engines up to give us electricity to run some galley appliances, and I managed to get a light dinner fixed up.  Then, after shutting down absolutely everything we could think of to lower our batter drain – including the fridge/freezer – we went to bed about 8PM.  Our new plan was to depart Kwatsi Bay shortly after daybreak and head for Port McNeill – the closest place for any chance of repair help.

This is the reason the two main engine start battery banks are separated from the house bank – we’d still be able to start our engines in the morning even if we completely drained our house bank.  We were even more glad now that we hadn’t taken Hinky down to set prawn traps, as we’d then have to contend with the power requirements of getting the dinghy back up on the upper deck.  Oh, the things you learn when you’re cruising – they’re enough to fill a book.

Tuesday, August 23^th, Kwatsi Bay Marina to Port McNeill Fuel Dock Marina

Bright and early – actually, just after daybreak – we started the main engines, and trying to be as quiet on the dock as we could so as not to wake up anyone around us, we slipped the lines, motored out of Kwatsi Bay and headed back up Tribune Channel.

At 8AM I called Brian Coverely at Delta Marine in Sidney to give him the news of our latest dilemma and to find out if he could arrange an air shipment of a replacement impeller – and if possible, personally courier it up to us, as he’s the primary service guy for WhisperGen in Canada.  Based on the symptoms of heavy smoke, Brian figured the problem was due to a clogged filter screen.  With the new impeller and filter screen, we could get both generators fixed.

Brian said no problem – if we’d foot the bill of a round trip flight, he’d have a guy on a plane first thing next morning to meet us at Port McNeill.

Our friend, the fish-gut mooching eagle was still around. He was hoping this guy on the end of the dock had some fish to throw in the water for him, but he was disappointed and flew on.

At Port McNeill we linked up with the Couverden again, but only with Steve on board as Shirley had gone back to Port Angeles to care for her mother.  We hoped to be in port for the next day, and leave the day after that.

Our mechanic, Kevin, from Delta Marine arrived just before lunch the day after our arrival in this chartered floatplane. We didn’t ask the price for the charter (we didn’t want to know).

ZuZu’s a happy cat when she has a fresh container of kitty litter – well, actually, she hates using a litter box, and she’s happy when she can sit on whatever is around that’s the tallest off the floor . . .

. . . or when she can wrestle with a stuffed mouse dangling from the ceiling handhold.

A Celebrity Cruise ship (you can tell by the large X on the funnels) passes by Port McNeill harbor on its way home to Seattle from SE Alaska.

Sunsets at Port McNeill just got better and better – this one looked like the clouds were on fire (and I didn’t Photoshop this in any way!). We’re looking to the northwest, and the equipment in the foreground is heavy machinery on the breakwater that’s used to build up log booms on the other side from us.

Next morning, our mechanic from Delta Marine arrived by private floatplane charter from Sidney – a young guy named Kevin.  He had the right impeller, and after getting it installed and the generator back up and running, gave Kap a good lesson in impeller replacement (for future reference).  He also had with him a filter screen for the WhisperGen, and had it replaced in about a half hour – again, if we’d known, it would have been an item replaced last winter during our normal annual maintenance.

Unfortunately, the weather forecast on Johnstone Strait for the next day was high NW winds, and we’d not only be bucking a current, but would also have wind against waves which kicks up sharp waves that really beat you to pieces.  We decided to wait out another day.  We had plenty of time to spare in our schedule, and this made life quite easy.

Friday, August 26^th, Port McNeill Fuel Dock to Blind Channel Marina

It’s a long slog down Johnstone Strait to Blind Channel Marina, so we decided to get an early start – 7AM.  Kap’s float plan gave us an estimated arrival time of 1PM – a cruise time of six hours at 9 knots – but you never know if you’ll get some favorable current that you aren’t expecting.

It was a commercial fishing open day, and the fishing fleet was out in droves – some trolling (the boat on the left), and others seining (the boat on the right). The boat on the left has an empty seining spool on his aft deck, and you can see trolling lines stretching back from the outriggers on each side. The boat on the right has his seining net still on the spool on the aft deck, and his “little boat” is just heading out to spool out his net.

Along the way, we passed dozens of commercial fishing boats – more than we’ve ever seen on Johnstone Strait, so it must have been one of the rare open fishing days for the commercial guys.  You always have to keep a sharp eye out with the fishing boats, as some have fairly long trolling lines in the water and you need to make certain you don’t run over one of them.  The seiners are more problematic, as they put out large nets – several hundred feet long, with an orange buoy at the end farthest from the big boat, and the net is kept at the surface with a string of small white buoys  – and while it sounds like it’d be easy to see, they aren’t.  We got lots of practice with this going to SE Alaska in 2008, so we know what to watch for.

The larger logging camps have surprising camp housing – this one on Johnstone Strait near Salmon Bay is an old B.C. Ferry that’s tied up to shore. Given that this was built to be a passenger/car ferry, it would be interesting to see what the inside is like. It’s been there in the same spot for at least two years, so they must also be logging in the hills behind, then hauling the logs over to Johnstone Strait to float them out.

Just past Salmon Bay sits Helmken Island, smack in the center of Johnstone Strait, with Current Passage on the north side for boats going that direction, and Race Passage on the south for boats heading south. Those two names are very apt – as the current runs strong whether it’s flood or ebb. Notice the little oblong marks at the left and right side of the chart image – that indicates whirlpools and rips . . . and they mean that too!

As our Maretron readout shows, we were definitely scooting along in Race Passage, helped by the current going with us. The upper right window indicates were going 9.7 kts through the water, but the GPS in the upper left indicates were going 14.8 kts over ground. Just before I got the camera up for this photo, it was showing 15.5 kts – indicating almost 6 kts of current! Our cruise to Blind Channel just got shorter.

For the most part, Johnstone Strait was behaving itself – light winds, less than 1’ wave chop, and the current running with us most of the way.  We pulled into Blind Channel at least an hour ahead of our estimate.

Once in Blind Channel and the engines are shut down, ZuZu is again a happy camper. You can buy some cats all kinds of toys and beds, and they still prefer an old grocery sack or a cardboard box top. If she’s not in her bed, you can usually find her sitting or lying in this box top.

An outdoor BBQ lunch was still being served on the patio when we arrived, so as soon as we got Flying Colours tied up we went ashore and had a light lunch and a much-needed beer.  We didn’t need much in the way of provisioning, but in this part of the world, when you get to a General Store, the temptation is great to buy more than you need – and I’m sure I did.

Since we were staying two nights, we made dinner reservations for the Blind Channel restaurant for the first night, and at Cordero Lodge the second night (gotta’ get one last fix of a really good Cordon Bleu schnitzel).  Outside of that, most of the time during the two days was spent just lounging around and resting up.

When she’s not falling overboard, ZuZu is allowed off the boat and on the dock a bit more now – provided we don’t see any evidence of eagles around (i.e., none sitting in treetops, and none of the telltale pipsqueak sounds they make.

OK, OK, I take too many photos of ZuZu . . . but she’s just so photogenic almost every time I see her. Besides, she doesn’t object to having her picture taken like some other people I know. Here we’re at the SYC Cortes Island Outstation, and ZuZu is just itching to jump off on the dock and go exploring.

Sunday, August 28^th, Blind Channel Marina to SYC Cortes Bay Outstation

Departure and cruising times were completely centered on slack water at the three rapids we’d have to get through, one after another – first Dent Rapids, then the rapids around Gillard Island, and finally the Yuculta Rapids.  Slack was scheduled for 10:30AM, so Kap set our departure time at 9AM.  As usual, Kap plugged in our cruising speed at 9 kts, but with a push from the current we got there almost a half hour early.  There were four or five boats already setting up a single file stream to go through, and we got in line.

Devil’s Hole was a non-event – barely a ripple on the surface, which is the way it should be if you plan it correctly.  Going through the rapids at Gillard Island, we had some difficulty with an inexperienced (or dumb) cruiser who couldn’t seem to get the hang of keeping up speed and staying on course, which always riles Kap – she doesn’t accept fools lightly in situations like this.

The cruise southward on Calm Channel was quiet, peaceful, and gorgeous weather – maybe even a bit too warm.    We arrived early afternoon at Cortes Bay, hoping it wouldn’t be full of boats – it wasn’t . . . maybe four total.  By the end of the day, though, the place had filled up, and if any more than two additional boats had arrived we’d have to raft together to get them in.

The next day was spent mostly with prawning – pulling the traps first thing in the morning, then again at midday, and the third time in the late afternoon.  We’d set them at our usual spot, about a mile outside of the bay and just offshore of Twin Islands.  It wasn’t the most productive that we’ve had, but we managed to get 120 prawns – still not up to our limit, but getting closer.

Shelling the prawns had to wait a day, as I had a flight home on Kenmore Air booked for the 30^th.  It was a very quick trip, down on the 30^th, then spent all day the 31^st on mail and paying bills, plus picking up Gator from Camp Kelly and getting him to a vet appointment for a lame front shoulder that had been plaguing him.  He then returned with me to Cortes Bay on the 1^st.

South of Nanaimo, and just before Dodd Narrows, is a log boom assembly area. Every time we pass we see tiny tugs zipping around as they move large numbers of logs into position and forming up the log booms. This time, I got a bird’s eye view of it from the Kenmore Air flight as we passed southward.

On my flight home, I managed to get a quick photo of Winchelsea Island on our approach to Nanaimo. This is a Canadian Naval communications station that controls Whiskey Golf, the torpedo test range in the Strait of Georgia.

An interesting anecdote on my flight south.  While researching the Canadian Forces Whiskey Golf torpedo test range in the Strait of Georgia for one of my earlier blog posts, I ran across a blog (http://threesheetsnw.com/blog/archives/15980) that mentioned a discussion the guy had with a Canadian Forces officer stationed on Winchelsea Island, where the range is managed and where we monitor radio communication as we’re passing outside the perimeter on “active” days, or crossing through on “not active” days.  One quote was really good:  “He said the military has equipment that can clearly see you “picking your nose” from more than 20 nautical miles away, and that every square inch of the range is monitored electronically.”

What’s interesting about that was, in 2008 Kap and I were heading south from Sitka, AK. In our Nordic Tug, Cosmo Place.   A 110’ U.S. Coast Guard cutter, the Anacapa, was approaching us from the rear – and this was after we’d been on the VHF channel 16 several times, giving our boat name – Cosmo Place – each time – which is in 18” tall letters on our transom.

We heard the Anacapa call several boats behind us giving them warning that she was traveling at high speed (35 knots) and to beware of her large wake.  As she came nearer to us, I mentioned to Kap, “I wonder just how good their binoculars are on the bridge of a vessel like the Anacapa – I’ll bet they can see the rivets (if we had any) on the hull of Cosmo Place.”  No sooner had I gotten that out of my mouth than we heard a radio transmission, “Castro Place, this is the Coast Guard cutter, Anacapa, approaching from behind, traveling at high speed and you should keep a watch out for our wake.”  I responded to their transmission, saying our name as Cosmo Place, and they closed the communication by again calling us Castro Place.  So much for the long eye prowess of the U.S. Coast Guard – maybe the Canadian Forces use a better version of binoculars.

ZuZu has developed a strong interest in my prawn shell peeling each day after we pull our traps. As I finish shelling a plate of prawns, I pour the “prawn nectar” into her food bowl in the cockpit and she gets to slurp it up. It’s her contribution to the effort, and she knows what’s coming as soon as I start peeling –positioning herself nearby to make certain I don’t forget.

In the afternoon we took Gator for a walk on the remote road leading out of the outstation, picking a good bunch of ripe blackberries by the road – enough for three night’s dessert.

Gator’s a cute, innocent-looking boy, but when he’s bored he can be a handful.

Saturday, September 3^rd, SYC Cortes Bay Outstation to Prideaux Haven in Desolation Sound

The solitude of being at anchor in a beautiful bay was calling to us, and we departed Cortes Bay and headed for Prideaux Haven in Desolation Sound.  Along the way, we stopped at Refuge Cove to take on a small amount of provisions (primarily milk for lattes) for a hoped-for long stay in Prideaux Haven.

After tying up at the fuel dock in Refuge Cove, we left Gator as usual in the salon while we made a quick trip to the General Store.  On our return, I immediately spotted a large pile of bread crumbs on a sweat shirt laying on the salon settee – and quickly realized it was from a half loaf of artisan Parmesan Cheese bread that I’d left out on the galley counter.  He’d snagged the plastic wrapper and hauled it down to the settee, where he gobbled up all but a few crumbs.  He’s regressing to puppy habits, and we’re flummoxed about how to handle it.

At the windlass, ZuZu helps us find the best anchorage in Prideaux Haven. This has to be one of the most spectacular places in the world to be on the anchor.

Within minutes of getting our anchor down, we lowered Hinky, readied the prawn traps, and headed out to drop them along the Mary Island group just outside Prideaux Haven.  We knew from experience last year that finding the exact right spot was critical to our success, so we cruised around and marked each of the several 300’ deep holes with our GPS.  We dropped our traps, figuring we’d return in the late afternoon to see if this spot was working.  It was, but only a little – we had a total of 35 prawns when we pulled.  We decided to drop for the night in another nearby hole.

Kap took Gator for a cruise around Prideaux Haven in the kayak, meeting up with Steve and Shirley from Couverden.

One afternoon I popped my head outside to see where ZuZu was and spotted a doe with her fawn swimming by about 25' from Flying Colours, heading from one small island to another that surrounds Prideaux Haven. The shoreline all around is lined with steep rock banks, and I wondered what they would do. Without missing a beat, the doe found the only spot in about 300’ to get ashore. They scrambled up the rocks with ease, and in an instant were out of sight in the dense trees.

Next morning, we had the best pull of our stay – 85 prawns – but Kap wanted to find still a better spot, so we put them back down in another hole.  Unfortunately, we didn’t mark with our GPS the spot we’d just left, and for the remainder of our stay, we couldn’t locate it again.  For the 10 total pulls we had here, the average number of prawns in each was 50 – which isn’t shabby, but not as good as we expected.  It also brought us to a total of 791 total prawns on board – and with a possession limit of 800 for our two licenses, that’s about as close as you can get and still be legal.  We decided it was time to call it quits for the year – particularly since our bait ran out just as we hit our limit, and on the day we decided was our last for the season.

We didn’t have Prideaux Haven to ourselves – not by a long shot. Nevertheless, it was beautiful.

A day after our arrival, Couverden pulled in and anchored near us.  Each day, about a dozen boats at anchor would depart, and by day’s end another dozen would come in.  Most nights, we had around 15 boats anchored in Prideaux Haven, and to us, that seemed a lot for this late in the cruising season.  In late July, early August, though, there are several times that many, and it’s said you can almost walk from one boat to another.  We expected it to be a lot less this year, but with the late summer that we’ve had, cruisers must be heading out late, or staying out late – we couldn’t tell which.  We’ve decided next year we’ll try to arrive here in April, get our prawning done when the season is young and no other boats are around.

Thursday, September 8^th, Prideaux Haven in Desolation Sound to SYC Garden Bay Outstation in Pender Harbour

It had been a wonderful five days in Prideaux Haven, but something told us it was time to begin our cruise south.  We need to be in Sidney, B.C. by the 18^th for some work to be done the following week on Flying Colours, so why not spend it cruising slowly, and maybe hit a few places we’ve never been before.

We were up at daybreak, getting Gator ashore one last time and raising Hinky on board before heading off at 7:40AM for a 5-hour cruise down Malaspina Strait.  Our destination was the SYC outstation at Garden Bay in Pender Harbour.  The Couverden had departed a couple of days earlier, and were waiting there for us – this would be our last link-up with them for the summer.

The current was against us on Malaspina Strait, but fairly benign, and we had a smooth and pleasant cruise south.  We arrived in Pender Harbour on schedule at 1:30PM.  After a quick visit to the grocery store to replenish milk for lattes, we had a last Happy Hour with Steve and Shirley, proving once again that no summer is endless.

It’s a good time in life when the most important question of the day is, “Is it time to pull the prawn traps?”

As I start to write this, we’re back in Booker Lagoon on the south side of Broughton Island, this time anchored with Couverden in the SE cove of this large lagoon .  When we were in Port McNeill earlier this month, everyone was talking about Booker Lagoon and how great the prawning was – one cruiser talked about getting 300 prawns on a single pull (the most we had on our previous visit was 87), so that grabbed our attention.  Our overall plan was to search out several new prawning spots we haven’t been to, but since it’s on the way we decided to stop at Booker Lagoon for a few days.

This time we approached the entrance to Booker Lagoon exactly at high water slack tide – we couldn’t see a ripple of current in either direction. Kap later said her knees were still a little shaky at coming through such a narrow and shallow entrance, but she did a masterful job of threading us through.

On our return, though, prawning has been just about the same as last time for us – 87 prawns on our first pull (but Steve on the Couverden got 140 on his first pull), and we stayed in the 80’s almost every pull after that.  There are at least 8 other boats in the lagoon (or in the outer bay, going back and forth to their traps by dinghy through the lagoon entrance), so we suspect it’s getting a bit fished-out here.  We had a meeting (over a glass of wine, of course) and decided we’ll move on after one more day here and try other spots.

(Some of the photos really need to be viewed in the larger format – don’t forget you can click on any photo to enlarge.  Also, the photo captions will line up with the photos instead of being scattered throughout the text if you read this in the e-mail version)

But first, I should back up and catch up on where we’ve been since the last post.

Way back on July 30^th, we departed Farewell Harbour and returned to Port McNeill for our flight home.  We met up there with Steve and Shirley Clark, mooring Flying Colours and Couverden nose-to-nose.  Shirley went home in Port Angeles to look after her aged mother at the same time Kap and I went home.  Steve stayed behind to look after both boats – and otherwise spent his days fishing nearby from their dinghy for salmon.

On our flight home, the view of channels we’ve cruised on is very different from 1,000’ than it is at sea level. This is looking east up Havannah Channel, the waterway off Johnstone Strait that we use to get to Lagoon Cove. The square frames in the lower corner are fish farm pens – remember, “friends don’t let friends eat farmed salmon”, so if you’re on the West Coast and see Atlantic salmon at the store, boycott it because it’s certain to be farmed from here, and it’s wreaking havoc on the Pacific salmon ecosystem.

When I snapped this photo with my iPhone camera, we were climbing over the mountains along the east side of Vancouver Island. Johnstone Strait runs horizontally across the center of the photo, and the many channels that lead off it to the east towards Desolation Sound. The mountains in the background are on mainland Canada.

This view is along Johnstone Strait, with the fishing village Kelsey Bay inside Salmon Bay in the foreground. In the center of Johnstone Strait lies Helmcken Island, with several anchorages you can duck into if the weather turns sour. Johnstone Strait divides into Current Passage and Race Passage around the island, creating strong whirlpools when the current is running in either direction, constantly swinging the bow 20° in either direction from your course line. Chancellor Channel leads upward from it, and is one way to get to Blind Channel Resort.

We passed by Maple Bay (center of photo, with the marina), a marina we stayed at two years ago and really enjoyed it. In the upper half of the photo is Saltspring Island, with Burgoyne Bay almost splitting it into two islands. At the lower half is the town of Maple Bay – note the terraced mining area just across the ridge from the marina, with houses built right to the edge of it.

On the way south, we passed overhead of Sidney, B.C., where our summer cruise normally begins and ends. Sidney is at the northern tip of the Saanich Peninsula, and home to Victoria International Airport at the lower left. Victoria is 14 miles to the south. Downtown Sidney is near the marina to the right of center, and it’s where we moor during our initial trip provisioning. The cluster of marinas on the left are Van Isle, where Delta Marine is tucked deep into the bay – it’s where we get some of our work on Flying Colours done. The U.S./Canada international border runs along the right side of the photo, and San Juan Island is just off the upper right corner.

Our flight destination – Kenmore Air Harbour at the north end of Lake Washington. The airline’s docks are at the left side of the indentation at center left of the photo. Our approach was over Bothell, then a steep descent on final for a landing to the south.

Our Kenmore Air flight to Seattle was very interesting.  As we loaded aboard the 8-passenger turbo Otter, our pilot said the winds were very favorable, so he planned to fly “high and fast”, expecting our arrival to be about an hour earlier than scheduled.

The pilot admitted to being allergic to cats, plus another passenger directly behind the cockpit had a dog on her lap, so the pilot asked that we ride in the rear two seats.  There was room between the two seats for a third seat, but instead it was an aisle giving access through a web barricade to the luggage area behind us.  This allowed us to have ZuZu between us in her Sherpa bag on the floor.  We could hear her meow over the loud engine noise of the Otter, and it was obvious she wasn’t happy.  It’s loud enough in a deHavilland Beaver or Otter – even in the turbofan models – that you need ear plugs, but obviously a cat won’t stand for that (Gator does when he flies with us), so I imagine the noise assault on her ears after a 2½ hour flight is pretty severe.

The flight was unusual in that we didn’t fly low (500-1,000’ above water) – and high and fast to a Kenmore Air pilot is at 2,500’ – he set a course down the center of Vancouver Island rather than over the water.  I was on the left side of the aircraft, so I got to see Johnstone Strait from a vantage point very different from what I’m used to, as well as the coastal towns along the way.  Kap was on the right, and could see all the way to the west coast of Vancouver Island, with its impressive bays that cut deep fjords into the island.

One reason for the timing of this trip home was to retrieve Gator from boarding at Camp Kelly, as Lisa Hart (his co-owner) wanted to show him one last time in the 10+ year old veteran class at the Evergreen Basenji Club Hound Specialty show at Argus Ranch. He won his class, which put him back in the ring for Best of Breed (in which he made the first “cut”, but didn’t take Best of Breed, which I sort of assumed he would).

The stay at home was mostly a blur – architect meetings, visits to Kap’s father, sorting through mounds of mail and paying a month’s worth of bills, and checking on the house construction progress.  Eight days later we headed north to Kenmore Air Harbor for our return flight.

Here’s an inside shot of our deHavilland Turbo Otter that Kenmore Air flies to the Broughton’s. There are four rows of two seats each, and Kap and I were in the rear seats, with ZuZu on the floor in her Sherpa bag between us.

It was again on a deHavilland Turbo Otter, full of passengers now that vacation time to the summer cruising grounds is full on.  First stop is Nanaimo, where Canada Customs is waiting on the dock to clear us.  Kap and I are out first, so we clear first – the usual questions about carrying guns, tobacco, alcohol, etc, which we reply no to.  We were loaded to the gills with supplies we can’t get in Canada, including 2 gallons of our favorite Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Chocolate Chip Cream that’s really hard to find.  We kept our mouths shut, looked honest, and our bags never came out of the plane’s hold for inspection.

Then it’s a short walk to the little airline terminal house at the head of the dock for a pee and a candy bar while they add a couple hundred gallons of avgas for our flight north.  When we returned we expected to depart, but we stood around on one foot, then the other, wondering why we weren’t loading up.  The pilot stopped by to say that Customs hadn’t cleared our flight to depart, and someone noted that the Customs agents were at the head of the dock talking to one of our passengers.  There was obviously a problem, and they weren’t clearing us until they sorted him out – and if they decided not to let him in, we’d be on our way back to the U.S. to return him.

Finally, he came down the dock, apologizing for being the cause of the delay . . . shaking his head and muttering “DUI’s” under his breath.  As we loaded on board, he mentioned that he’d had a DUI in the U.S. back in 1992 – and didn’t even drink anymore – and that he’d failed to bring “his paperwork” with him on this trip.  As we taxied out, the guy across from him related how he too had a DUI at some point in his past, and Canada Customs knows about it for anyone/everyone on board flights coming into the country, so you’d better carry your court documents about it with you on every entry to the country.  In Canada, a DUI is considered a felony, and they’re very serious about it.  Apparently, the guy who was questioned on our flight even had the DUI somehow removed from his record (maybe by doing some community service work), but he still has to carry the court papers with him – and this trip he’d forgotten to pack them.  Whew!  It certainly makes one think twice about driving with too much alcohol in the blood!

Blind Channel Resort as we circled over Mayne Passage on downwind for the landing. The white-roofed building on shore at the head of the dock is the restaurant and General Store. They have one main dock, with seven finger piers that allow one boat per side. On a busy day they probably have 25 boats at their docks, and in the evenings they’ll have 5-6 tables with guests in the dining room. The other buildings on shore are private residences for the four generations of the Richter family who own the resort, plus two cabins that are rented out to guests.

The start of a high approach to Pierre’s Echo Bay Resort. Beyond the splotchy-shaped island, the channel leads out to Queen Charlotte Sound. At the bottom center of the photo is the first island in the Burdwood Island Group – where we later spent a night at a stern-tie anchorage in a beautiful cove.

Pierre’s Echo Bay Resort is in the top half of the photo, and Windsong Resort (which Pierre also owns and operates now) across the way. The I-90 Floating Bridge section is the rectangular part at the right of Pierre’s, with the General Store occupying half of it, and a covered tent area where he holds his Saturday Night Pig Roast is on the other half. When the weekends roll around in mid-summer, the docks are packed full of boats, and he gets 100-150 people at the evening dinners.

Flying Colours (left), nose-to-nose with Couverden at the Port McNeill Fuel Dock after our return from home. All looks well . . . for the moment.

Back in the air and heading north, our six other passengers had three different destinations before our final arrival at Port McNeill – a couple got off at Blind Channel, then another person at Pierre’s Echo Bay Resort, and a final stop at Sullivan Bay Resort.  Finally, it was our turn, and we touched down at the Port McNeill Fuel Dock at 12:30PM.  ZuZu was extremely relieved to be back on earth, even if she had to regain her sea legs aboard Flying Colours.

After we got settled aboard Flying Colours, Kap was walking back from the bow when she noticed about a dozen oblong splotches on the teak deck, just aft of the pilot house doors.  She thought it was water, but when it didn’t seem any dryer after a while, she called me over to take a look.  I stuck my nose to it, and there was no question about it – a strong, pungent diesel fuel smell.  I popped my head over the deck rail and noticed there was also a large dark stain nearby on the dock, right at the end of a 3” stainless steel pipe that runs down the side of the dock.  Obviously, something had happened in our absence, and it had to do with a diesel spill.

Since Steve had been watching our boat in our absence, I immediately jumped off Flying Colours and headed for Couverden, thinking that he might have some idea of what happened.  I checked the stain on the dock, and it definitely was diesel, and fairly fresh.  When I boarded Couverden and queried Steve about a diesel spill on our dock, and particularly the diesel stains on our side deck, his face took on an immediate look of shock and he put his hand to his open mouth.

“Oh, my god, I do know what happened,  but I had no idea it might have gotten any on Flying Colours!  Yesterday, the Thea Foss was moved over to our dock and moored across from us.  She’s too big to fit on the fuel dock, and the pipe running down our dock is for fueling the very large yachts.  When I returned late in the afternoon from picking Shirley up in Port Hardy from her flight back from Port Angeles, I saw Steve [the owner of the Fuel Dock] standing at the end of the fuel pipe and he was covered from head to toe in diesel – he was an absolute mess!  Diesel was all over the side of Flying Colours’ hull, but Steve immediately washed down the whole starboard side of your boat before he even got himself cleaned up.  He figured he had it all taken care of.”

Well, obviously not, and I immediately headed down the dock to find Steve (the Fuel Dock Steve).

Before I go any further, I should mention that the family that owns the Port McNeill Fuel Dock is absolutely wonderful.  Steve is a young guy (30-ish) who took over management of the operation from his father, and he’s been a real force in rapidly building up this marina.  Three years ago, all it consisted of was a long pier sticking straight out into the harbor, with nothing on it but the fuel dock operation (in fact, if you look at our SPOT map whenever we’re at Port McNeill, at the time of the satellite photo that Google uses, all you’ll see is that main pier).  For years, virtually every cruiser who came to Port McNeill had to moor at the municipal marina next door, and they were so full – and worse, didn’t take moorage reservations – that oftentimes cruisers had to anchor out in the harbor for 2-3 days waiting for a spot to open up in the marina.  The marina really focused on the commercial fishing fleet, and the cruisers took a back seat.  Two years ago, Steve and his father expanded the fuel dock into a real marina, putting in floating dock space for at least 30 boats, good shore power on the docks, good potable water for cruisers who needed to fill their holding tanks – and most of all, they created a really good, friendly atmosphere.  It’s really increased the ability for cruisers to “pop over” to Port McNeill for provisions, get some repairs done, and get fuel.

Anyway, I found Steve on a nearby dock helping another boat depart, and when he was free I mentioned the diesel splotches on our teak deck to him.  He was horrified and as we walked back to Flying Colours he told me the story.  Steve and the engineer from the Thea Foss were bleeding pressure from the fuel line before uncapping it to hook up the flexible hose and nozzle, and unknown to them the line still had a small bit of diesel in it.  The pipe is pressurized, so they bled it first, and they capped the diesel off to a valve further down the dock from Flying Colours.  For some unknown reason, when they uncapped the valve right next to Flying Colours, it must have still been pressurized, and also had a small amount of diesel remaining in it.  As Steve cracked the valve, the release of the high pressure atomized the diesel, spraying it all over the place, and some of it had gone up and over the Portuguese rail on Flying Colours, landing on the teak deck.

We then discovered that a fine diesel film was all over the side of the pilot house, covering the windows on the starboard side.  Steve wouldn’t let us help – he said it was his problem, and he’d get it cleaned up.  With buckets of soapy water, he and one or two of his crew washed down the pilot house and got it all cleaned up.  He was very apologetic, and we appreciated his attention to the problem, and we too thought he’d gotten it resolved.

On one of my many trips to the store, I spotted our familiar bald eagle friend waiting for fish cleaning scraps. He’s on a glide getting ready to land on the power pole at the head of the fuel dock.

Landing gear is fully extended, tail feathers are spread wide, and man, look at the extension of his wings as he slows for a perfect touchdown on the top spreader board! These guys are incredible to watch!

The next morning while I was at the grocery store re-provisioning, Kap was fiddling around on the fly bridge getting Flying Colours ready to take out.  That’s when she found a fine diesel film all over the fly bridge too, including the polycarbonate (i.e., plastic) fly bridge enclosure windows, as well as on the enclosure canvas fabric.  When I returned from the store, we looked it over, and immediately called John Barrett, the owner of Barrett Enclosures in Seattle who built the fly bridge enclosure in 2009, to find out how to properly clean the polycarbonate windows of the diesel.  John was immediately concerned, and said that diesel pits the polycarbonate if it isn’t cleaned within a couple of minutes of the diesel getting on it.  He suggested we use really soapy water, and only use our hands to scrub it.

We immediately went looking for Steve, and after apologizing for about the 20^th time for the problem, he came right down to start cleaning the fly bridge.  It didn’t take long, though, to realize that the fears were true – after washing and drying the fly bridge windows, all four panels on the starboard side had thousands of splotchy crazes.  The canvas cleaned up OK, but there was no question about it – the diesel had ruined the windows.

Anyway, to make a long story short, Steve told us he’d cover whatever cost there was to replace the polycarbonate windows when we returned to Seattle (most likely will cost a couple thousand dollars), and when we departed two days later he “comped” our entire moorage stay (which was a bit over two weeks, given that we’d gone home for a week, and that added up to around $900).  Overall, a diesel spill isn’t fun, but when it happens and it’s someone else’s fault, how Steve handled this is exactly the way it should be.  We’ll certainly be coming back, as well as telling everyone we know about their customer service.

Our Nobeltec chart plotter screen image of Flying Colours (the green boat symbol at bottom center) on course across Queen Charlotte Sound for the entrance to Booker Lagoon on the south side of Broughton Island.

Finally, on Thursday, August 12^th, we were ready to depart.  Several other cruisers on the Fuel Dock talked about how good the prawning was in Booker Lagoon, so after several Happy Hour glasses of wine with the Couverden crew, we decided to head there to start our re-prawning efforts.  One guy – who we thought was telling tall tales – said he got 300 prawns from one pull – and if so, that was fantastic.

The look on ZuZu’s face might not seem happy, but when she’s tucked in for a good snooze behind the pilot house dashboard and all spread out, we know she’s a happy cruiser.

Flying Colours at anchor in the SE cove at Booker Lagoon.

Nope! This isn’t Photoshop’d in any way. It’s an early morning shot of Couverden at anchor in Booker Lagoon, with low-level clouds (fog) halfway down the hillside behind Couverden, reflecting in the absolutely still water. That’s “A-oh”, our anchor sentinel buoy halfway out on the right.

I never tire of the early morning photos when we’re at anchor – with glasslike water creating perfect reflections, making it hard to tell where the real world ends and the reflection begins. This shot looks west towards the center of Booker Lagoon. Our prawn trap buoy is one of the small white dots on the water’s surface at the left edge of the photo.

Unfortunately, we still think the 300 prawn story is a tall tale.  We consistently got 80-86 prawns for the 5 pulls, and on our third morning as we were getting ready to depart, we only pulled 62.  Interestingly, the guy from the Port McNeill dock who claimed 300 prawns per pull had returned, and he stopped by one afternoon in his dinghy after pulling his traps . . . and he said he had well over 250 prawns in a 5-gallon bucket  at his feet.  We think he never actually counted his catch, and was estimating well on the high side – besides, if he was getting as many as he claimed he’d be way over his limit.

One morning at Booker Lagoon while shelling prawns at the salon table, my eye caught a glimpse of what I thought was a very large black blow fly at the cockpit door window. I looked up, and was amazed to see a hummingbird hovering outside. He flitted from window to window, always facing in towards me, and seemed to want in – or maybe he was seeing his reflection in the glass. My camera happened to be sitting right in front of me, and I managed to snap about a dozen photos of him. The orange blob is our prawning suits, hanging up in the cockpit. The white ball in the bottom of the window isn’t the setting sun – it’s my camera flash reflecting in the glass.

Turns out, we met this guy and his wife a couple of years ago at Blind Channel – they’re names are Stephen and Linda Nybank, and they’re really nice.  They have a 38’ Bayliner named It’s A Good Thing, and found that he’s a retired U.S. Airways 737 captain, lives in Sandpoint, ID, and has been cruising here for at least a dozen years.  He said he and his wife were heading for the Burdwood Island Group the next morning, and coincidentally, this was where we’d talked with the Couverden crew about going next.  We decided we’d all head over there the next day, departing Booker Lagoon on the early morning low water slack.

We were up before dawn on departure morning, and I couldn’t resist this shot of Couverden with the anchor light on as the morning sky just started to turn blue from black.

The morning we were ready to depart Booker Lagoon, we couldn’t find ZuZu anywhere. Since we were at anchor, we knew she had to be on the boat, but she just wasn’t anywhere to be found. She usually senses when we’re ready to leave, and hating the sound (or maybe it’s the vibrations) of the engines, she finds a good place to hide. Finally, Kap called out to me to bring my camera to the fly bridge. It had rained heavily the day before and with a pesky leak in the fly bridge canvas that we can’t seem to stop, we’d piled up the settee cushions in a corner. ZuZu was scrunched down next to a pile of cushions, hoping no one would find her.

It’s a scant 50’ wide between the two rock sides in this photo. Flying Colours has a 16’ beam, so that only gives 17’ on either side – which isn’t much if the current pushes the boat one way or another as you power through. It’s definitely a white-knuckle ride!

Morning slack water at Booker Lagoon was scheduled for 9:30AM, so we were up before dawn to pull our prawn traps for the last time.  By 7AM – it was still quite cold outside – we were suited up in our orange foulies (which are also very good for keeping out a cold wind), and headed in the dinghy to the center of the lagoon.  Then it was back to Flying Colours to get all the prawn trap glimp stowed, and the dinghy brought back up to the dinghy deck and securely fastened down.  After a second latte and a few minutes to relax, we started to bring up our anchor at 9:15.  We were at the lagoon entrance exactly at 9:30, and were glad to see It’s A Good Thing heading through first – it’s always comforting to have someone else test the waters, particularly since this was a low water slack transit, and we were just one day after spring tide – when the tide lows are lowest and highest for the month (by as much as 3-4’ lower and higher than normal).  They made their Securité call, and we followed them a couple of minutes later.  As we entered the very narrow passage, we could see a bit of current coming at us, but Kap put some extra power on and we made it through with no problem.  Minimum depth that we saw was 17’ (and we draw just a bit over 5’), so that doesn’t give you much room below the keel – and with the low water, the passage was a good 20’ narrower than it is at high water slack.

The cruise eastward on Fife Sound to the Burdwood Island Group from Booker Lagoon is a short 11 nautical miles.

The cruise to the Burdwood Island Group is just over 11 miles, and we puttered along at 8 knots to give us as much time as possible to run our water maker.  We were below a half tank on our fresh water holding tank, and if we were to stay at anchorage for several days in the Burdwood’s we’d need full tanks.  Couverden was even slower – dropping to trolling speed so that Steve could dip his fishing pole for a while – we’d heard that Coho salmon were running right now, and Steve has been really anxious to do some fishing.

One of our cruising guides indicates that anchoring in the Burdwood’s is good for a lunchtime stay only.  Stephen and Linda, though, on It’s A Good Thing said otherwise – this is one of their favorite spots in the Broughton’s, and promised they’d show us the ropes.  A stern anchor is almost a necessity, and since we’ve only done that once before in our five years of cruising (and then it was with the Nordic Tug), we really welcomed the offer.  Stephen said there were 8-10 steel eyes secured into the rock faces just above the water line to facilitate stern ties, and he said he’d give us a hand with it as soon as he had his boat securely anchored and stern tied.

As we rounded the eastern side of the Burdwoods, we could see It’s A Good Thing getting into position to anchor, with the stern pointing towards the shoreline rocks. A sailboat is anchored nearby – and to our good fortune, departed just as we pulled in.

We lagged behind enough to give It’s A Good Thing time to anchor.  You need your dinghy to take the stern tie line to the shore, so it made life significantly easier for us having Stephen there to help us with that.

As we turned into the narrow, shallow passage between the cluster of small islands – not to mention a lot of rocky bits sticking up everywhere above the surface of the water – a sailboat that was anchored about 100’ from It’s A Good Thing was just pulling up their anchor and they exited as we came in.  We pulled near to It’s A Good Thing, and Stephen hollered over to us that the absolute best anchorage here was where the sailboat had just departed, and suggested to Kap that we position Flying Colours exactly where it had been.  He suggested we drop our anchor and set it in about 60’ of water, with our stern between 20’ and 50’ from the shore.  With Kap at the helm, I dropped our anchor as instructed, and by the time we had that done, Stephen was over in his dinghy to take our stern tie line.

It’s A Good Thing is at anchor, and Stephen in his dinghy has run the stern tie line to shore, through a steel ring set into the rock, and he’s now bringing it back to his boat to tie off.

We have a specially-built stern tie reel mounted on a rail on the dinghy deck of Flying Colours, with 500’ of floating polypropylene line wound on it.  To stern tie, we bring the end of the line down to a hawse hole in the stern, then take the line to shore.  Usually, you tie to a tree or rock on shore, but Steve had imbedded the steel rings in the rocks several years ago (and few knew about them).  Once you pass the end of the line through the steel ring, you return to the boat with it and tie it off on a cleat.  You’ve now secured your boat at anchor, plus to a fixed spot on shore, and don’t have to worry about swinging with wind and current.  In tight places, many more boats can anchor without getting in each other’s way – well, except that you’re now cheek-to-cheek like RVs in a motor home park if it gets crowded.

As soon as we were secure, Stephen went over in his dinghy to help Couverden anchor and stern tie.

The butt-ugly Jody And The Kid are bow and stern tied, without an anchor down at all. Note that the bow line is tied to the anchor, which has been dropped below the bow pulpit a few feet, and then the line has been run to a tree on shore.

About an hour later, one of the ugliest tubs in the world pulled in – and we knew the Clampetts had arrived.  We’d seen it at Port McNeill on a nearby dock – a horrible looking RV-style thing (it doesn’t look enough like a boat to call it one).  It’s named – get this, Jody And The Kid – after a cowboy song title by Kris Kristofferson.  It’s a charter boat, and aboard it was a hired captain and two couples who didn’t know the first thing about boating (and we questioned whether the captain does either).

The view from where we were anchored, looking out to Tribune Channel, is awesome! Couverden didn’t feel comfortable with their stern tie, so later in the afternoon they untied and anchored a few feet further out from shore, allowing them to swing overnight on the wind and current.

To our absolute amazement, they pulled in between Flying Colours and It’s A Good Thing, and without first setting an anchor, they ran a stern line to shore with their dinghy and tied it off on a ring.  Then they let that line out about 300’ (!), and again with the dinghy, ran a bow line to the other shore, tying it off to a tree.  They didn’t drop an anchor at all, but instead, had the anchor swinging from the bow, with the bow line tied from it.  This is a 70’ boat, probably weighing at least 80,000 lbs, and they’ve got it tied with two polypropylene lines that are about the weight of ski ropes.  Geez!  This is a disaster waiting to happen – and if they break loose they’ll almost certainly wipe out either Flying Colours or It’s A Good Thing.  There ought to be a law about allowing the Clampetts into town!

After watching the bow/stern tie fiasco, we gathered up our prawn pots, got them baited,  and headed out in the dinghy to set them.  Stephen said the prawning here was either very good, or not good at all, and we wouldn’t know until we brought the traps up the next morning.  He and his wife spent the remainder of the afternoon scouting for driftwood and announced there’d be a bonfire on shore in the evening.

This is Stephen Nybank, who dropped by in his dinghy to chat with us the next morning. He has an interesting background – 10 years as a motorcycle cop in Walnut Creek (east of San Francisco), then he became a private Lear jet pilot for a charter outfit in the Bay Area (flying the likes of Francis Ford Coppolo back and forth to LA for movie filming), then a long career flying 737s for U.S. Airways (and they’re now retired to Sandpoint, ID).

In the photo of Jody And The Kid, there’s just a glimpse of a white beach at the right side of the photo.  You never see beaches like this in the Broughton’s, and it’s not sand, but rather, made entirely of seashells.  The First Nations natives created these over very long periods of time, most likely in areas where they frequently camped and made villages, probably to give them a nice shoreline to gather on, and also a good place to beach their canoes.  The shells are broken into small fragments (1/2”-1” in size), and deep enough that you can scoop handfuls and not reach bottom.

After dinner, the six of us from It’s A Good Thing, Couverden, and Flying Colours dinghied to the shore on the back side of the island from the seashell beach.  As I said earlier, this is a favorite place for Stephen and Linda, and they’ve spent lots of time here – enough, in fact, a few years ago Stephen brought a chainsaw from home and hacked through the downfall cedar trees and created a wonderful trail to the other side of the small island.  There, he built a cedar bench on a nice rock outcropping that faces the evening sunset, and they’d go there for an evening glass of wine.  We hiked the 15 minute trail to it, and it definitely is a wonderful place (unfortunately, I forgot my camera!).  When we returned, Steve (from the Couverden) had a large bonfire going on the beach, and we roasted marshmallows and sipped a glass of wine.  After the sun set, we returned by dinghy to our boats, as the temperature was dropping quickly.

Sunset from the end of our dock at Sullivan Bay.

Next morning, we checked our prawn traps – Steve came up totally empty handed, we had a meager five, and Stephen (this is 300-prawn Stephen) had six.  With no sign that Jody And The Kid were leaving, and somewhat terrified they’d break loose any minute in the tidal current, Kap and I decided to leave Burdwood after our one night stay.  Couverden too decided to leave, heading across Tribune Channel to an inlet, Viner Inlet, that seemed to captivate Steve.  Kap and I made the decision to head for Sullivan Bay Resort for a night, then maybe go to Jennis Bay – a spot we’d wanted to go to for several years now – and maybe meet up with the Couverden in a few days at Moore Bay (on Kingcome Inlet) for more prawning.

The cruise was only 13 miles, so we were in Sullivan Bay shortly after noon yesterday.  We’ve checked by e-mail with the marina owners at Jennis Bay for moorage space, and after they indicated there is plenty available, we’re heading there later today.

The “official” entrance to Sullivan Bay Resort – actually, it’s the covered fish cleaning station halfway out the dock from the cluster of buildings that make up the resort. This is the infamous (at least to us) fish cleaning station where Kap took her nocturnal dip in the frigid waters one night while we helped the Couverden gang clean their crabs. Kap accidentally stepped into a gap between the fish cleaning station float and the main dock float – and down she went! Next morning when word got around what happened, the resort owners immediately tightened up the chains holding the floats together, and now they’ve completely rebuilt the floats in the past couple of years to make one seamless float.

As I start writing this, it’s July 19^th and we’re at Sullivan Bay Resort, near the top end of the Broughton Archipelago, on the north side of Broughton Island.

When it rains, it pours.  First it was the generator shutdown with the clogged sea strainer – which miraculously cleared itself.  Then on the way into Sullivan Bay the watermaker conked out, with an error message to check the pre-filters.  One pre-filter was pretty dirty, and the other was so-so, but we replaced both anyway.  Fresh drinking water isn’t something we want to take chances with.

The water maker was supposed to have been serviced over the winter, but when I checked the maintenance invoice for the finished work, it didn’t show up.  With all that we had going on, I didn’t cross-check our wish list against the actual work, and now I think we’re paying for it.

After swapping out both pre-filters, the watermaker still quit after running just a few minutes – but now it indicated a pressure problem within the unit.  After fiddling for quite some time Kap gave up, and we knew we needed professional assistance.  I did a Google query on Sea Recovery watermakers, then searched their site for tech support in B.C. – and was astonished that it listed Brian Coverely at Delta Marine in Sidney.  We know Brian pretty well, as he works half-time for Fleming Yachts as their North American warranty rep.  We’ve had him do work for us on Flying Colours several times in Sidney.

It was now early evening, but using our satellite phone, I called Brian on his cell number and he answered immediately (there’s no cell phone coverage at Sullivan Bay, and that makes the satellite phone one of the best electronic gizmos on the boat).  He’s an Aussie from Perth, but has worked in Sidney for quite a few years – and he’s a good guy!  After explaining the problem, what we’d done so far to clear it, and giving him the error messages, Brian surmised we probably had a pump failure – and if so, he’d have to order one from the company’s Southern California warehouse the next day.  He gave us a few other things to try, and we agreed to get in touch the next morning.

That night, we decided to eat off the boat – as the Sullivan Bay Resort restaurant was featuring a “custom cut” rib eye steak night.  It was a welcome treat, but frankly, the prime NY strips and tenderloin steaks from our Bellevue QFC that I have in our freezer on board Flying Colours are much better on our BBQ.  The next night was Greek night, and I have to admit it was better than any Greek dish I know how to make.  For our third night, I fixed pork schnitzel on the boat – and Kap says it’s the best.

ZuZu says she’s partial to the B.C. Sawmill Creek Sauvignon Blanc that we found at the Sullivan Bay General Store. The box wine here in B.C. isn’t bad, and while we favor the high-end B.C. reds for dinner wine, these whites are very good for warm summer Happy Hour afternoons.

Sullivan Bay Resort is one of the many stops for Kenmore Air in the Broughton’s – that is, if they have a passenger for it. This float is officially called the Sullivan Bay International Airport – after all, Kenmore Air is a U.S. airline). The blue-roofed home is a private residence. At the very left of the photo is the 18th hole of the Sullivan Bay Golf course.

Next day, after our further attempts to get the watermaker running had failed, we spoke with Brian again on the satellite phone, and it was agreed that we should meet at the end of the week in Port McNeill.  In the meantime, Brian would order up a pump (gulp . . . at $1,500).

The resort info sheet mentions that if you walk from the tip of the fuel dock, past the resort buildings, and then out and back on all four guest boat finger docks, it’s 1 1/3rd mile – so those who want exercise can be seen walking this multiple times a day. We were amused to see this old guy on his Segue, presumably getting his “exercise” by riding it multiple times along the exercise run. Go figure! Note halfway up the milepost sign that it's 265 miles to Anacortes.

Can’t argue with this . . .

A golfer (at the far right) tees off on the 18th hole (or is it the 1st?) of the Sullivan Bay Resort golf course. The "hole" is in the satellite TV antenna floating on the water at the photo’s left edge. If you hit the hole, your moorage for the night is free.

Sullivan Bay as we pulled away, bound for Port McNeill and the watermaker repair. This resort is all on floats, with no shore access, and it has more float buildings than anywhere around modern Broughton Archipelago – a hundred years ago, this would have been a small encampment.

Shortly after we exited Wells Passage and entered the east side of Queen Charlotte Strait we spied a cruise ship way off in the distance, undoubtedly from Seattle and headed for SE Alaska. Ten or fifteen minutes later the swells from the ship’s wake reached us – they’re good sized.

We lounged around Sullivan Bay for two more days, conserving water as much as we could, determined not to fill our tanks from the dock fresh water hoses.  The fresh water here is tapped from a stream on shore that probably empties from a lake in the hills above the bay.  It’s brown in color, like weak tea, and is called “cedar water” from the coloring that it picks up from the cedar forests it flows through.  The water is somewhat safe to drink – but only after boiling it for two minutes.  Last year while at Sullivan Bay, Raz came down with giardia just a little while after Kap washed down the boat decks with dock water – and we figure she got it from licking her feet afterwards.

After cruising down the 10 (or so) miles of Wells Passage, we entered Queen Charlotte Strait – another 10 miles of water that we have to cross to reach Port McNeill on Vancouver Island.  It was flat calm . . . what a day this would have been to head north across Queen Charlotte Sound – which is open water to the Pacific Ocean – to spend a few days in Shearwater.  We wish we could, but the watermaker has to get fixed.

This Google Map image is taken from the Fleming Owner’s web site (www.flemingowners.org), where the current position of all participating Fleming yachts around the world can be posted via Lat/Lon coordinates. Flying Colours is in the upper left, at Port McNeill Fuel Dock Marina. The location is near the top end of Vancouver Island – about 200 miles (as the crow flies) from Seattle. There are two other Fleming yachts on the map, one located in Secret Cove, B.C. (on the Sunshine Coast above Vancouver), and the other on Thetis Island (in the Canadian Gulf Islands, and shown just beneath the name Richmond on the map).

Compared to the singularly gauche appearance of the cruise ships, the elegant Thea Foss fantail yacht across the dock from us at the Port McNeill Fuel Dock Marina was a welcome sight. This is one magnificent yacht, and we could look at her all day long – but sure wouldn’t want the maintenance that’s necessary to keep her going. She’s named after the founder of Foss Tugs, Thea Foss, who was also the inspiration character for the movie Tugboat Annie. She's the private cruising yacht for the extended Foss family out of Seattle. She was built in 1930 for John Barrymore Sr, and after serving as a subscripted naval vessel for patrol duty during WWII, the Foss family bought her in 1950 and turned her back into a classic cruising yacht. She's 120' long, with a 21' beam.

Brian dumped the sand from the “media” filter onto a towel on the dock, then repacked it. That solved our watermaker problem.

The next morning, Brian Coverely, our tech guy for Fleming Yachts from Delta Marine down in Sidney, as well as the tech specialist for Sea Recovery watermakers, arrived right on time at 10AM.  He’d driven up from Sidney – about five hours by car – arriving with his longtime SO, Val.  He jumped right into the lazarette to look over the watermaker situation, and within a half hour had narrowed the problem down to the “media” filter, and not the pump (yeah!  A pump on the fritz would have cost us $1,500).  This filter is sand-filled, and as soon as Brian bypassed it the watermaker worked.  He removed the media filter, took it out to the dock and emptied it onto a towel.  He then repacked about half the sand back in, closed it up, re-installed it, and declared the watermaker fixed.

The forecast for the next two days called for gale force winds in Johnstone Strait, so we decided to wait it out in Port McNeill.  We had a ring-side moorage spot at the marina, where we could watch all the boats arriving and departing, and just taking it easy wasn’t an unpleasant assignment.

My favorite Lagoon Cove sweatshirt.

Boy, talk about effective product placement!  My standard summer cruising “uniform” is shorts (I don’t wear long pants – ever! – if I can help it while on Flying Colours), Teva sandals (but I go barefoot 95% of the time, and only put them on when I don’t want to get my toes banged up or filled with dock slivers), a ratty old Mainstar polo shirt . . . and since the weather is often cool on the water, a well-worn logo sweatshirt from Lagoon Cove.  Invariably, when I’m off the boat in my uniform, someone will comment on Lagoon Cove – that they visited there in 20-aught-x, or mention how much they enjoyed the prawn Happy Hour and Bill’s bear stories, or whatever.  Almost every resort or marina we stop at has logo clothing for their place, and I’m usually sucker enough to buy it, but none of it compares to the comments and conversations I get from the Lagoon Cove sweatshirt.  And interestingly, it’s so subdued that I’m surprised anyone can even read it from 5’ away, but they always seem to.  It says a lot for good product placement.

I mention all this because one day I was leaving the IGA grocery in Port McNeil, and as I walked past the front of a Jeep Cherokee a guy hollered out, “Hey, where’d you get that sweatshirt?”  I walked over, told him Lagoon Cove Resort, and his response was, “Yeah, my wife and I used to work there . . . ya-da-ya-da-ya-da.”  Amazing how often that happens!

The Port McNeill dock eagle, just waiting for another fisherman to fillet his catch at the fish cleaning station on the dock – and he’ll then swoop down to snatch any entrails thrown into the water.

Kap made her usual twice-per-day visit to a hardware or marine store yesterday afternoon in Port McNeill (she grew up visiting Army/Navy Surplus stores, and this has replaced her focus).  On the return to the marina, she spotted a huge bald eagle on the dock, patiently sitting there while a fisherman gutted a fresh-caught salmon at the dock’s fish cleaning station – hoping for a morsel that might be thrown in the water.  He’s apparently a local who isn’t afraid of people, as she got within 3’ of him, and figures she could have quietly walked right by him without disturbing him, but she met another person there and it was one too many people for the eagle’s sense of safety.

Later in the afternoon, Kap made her second visit to the marine store, and when she got to the head of the dock she called me on her cell phone to say that the eagle was still there, but perched on a power pole, waiting for the next caught fish to be brought in.  I headed up with my camera, and sure enough, this guy wasn’t going to be bothered by anyone, and with lots of noise around he/she just sat there looking around.  His feathers were a bit scruffy, so maybe he’s too big, or too old, to catch dinner on its own, or maybe he’s just learned that scavenging from the fishermen on the dock is an easier way to catch salmon.

One of our more more serious cruising duties is checking out the best in Happy Hour libations. In B.C. they sell a pre-mixed margarita called Skinny Girl, a lower calorie version that’s made with Agave Nectar for sweetener and Blue Agave Tequila for potency. I still prefer the old (and easy) standby, Jose Cuervo Golden Margarita, but Kap now prefers a 50-50 mixture. I also make my own margaritas from scratch - and they're pretty good - but they're also a lot of work, and sometimes I just feel like quick and easy.

Sunday morning – a good day and time to have a cooked breakfast in town.  We left Flying Colours before anyone else on the dock was up and around, and the fuel dock hadn’t yet opened.  We were headed for a good café in town – Bo Banee’s – that serves quite good food, including awesome Mexican food for lunch.

When we got to the head of the dock, there was a terrible garbage mess in front of the two dumpsters kept there for boaters who are unloading trash from their boats.  At night, the dumpster lids are chained shut – but not very tightly – and a bag of garbage from one dumpster had been pulled out.  It could only have been by a bear in the night, as the crows and ravens who hang around most likely couldn’t have pulled that feat off.  Besides, the garbage was trounced on, and that was almost certainly from the bear.  It’s a really good reason why it isn’t wise to go for late evening walks off the docks.

Columbia III – “The Columbia III was designed in 1955 by renowned naval architect Robert Allan of Vancouver B.C. She was built the following year at Star Shipyards in New Westminster B.C. and still has her original Gardner diesel engine. She serviced the coast as a hospital ship, answering emergency calls until 1968, when it became evident that float planes met the needs of the logging camps and coastal villages much faster than a ship traveling at 8 knots. Also, the coastal population was dwindling as people left the hardships of isolated living and moved to urban areas. The Columbia III was restored to its present immaculate condition in 1990 by Bill McKechnie of Victoria B.C. and since then she's been used as a charter boat, especially as a kayaking "mothership". Today still, wherever we go, she is welcomed and recognized, and many stop to reminisce, relive and share their personal experiences aboard the Columbia III.” (Text taken from the Mothership Adventures website.)

We frequently share the dock at the Fuel Dock Marina with a great-looking old boat called the Columbia III.  She usually arrives while we’re there, disgorges a half-dozen people, and the crew then spends the next couple of days doing a yeoman’s job of swabbing her decks, offloading stateroom bedding for washing, and re-provisioning.  She’s a charter vessel, owned by a local family in Port McNeill, and they run a very highly respected company called Mothership Adventures (www.mothershipadventures.com).  They carry 8 kayaks on the upper deck, and during 4-7 day charter cruises their guests (who pay upwards of $1,500-$2,500 for the all-inclusive passage) explore the many bays throughout the Broughton’s.  It must be popular, as they always seem to have a full complement of guests when they depart.  Their website has complete information on schedule and price.

As we departed the Fuel Dock Marina, I was busy on Flying Colours’ deck getting the fenders and lines ship-shape. I looked over at a piling next to the new breakwater being built and who should I see but our friend, the fish mooching Eagle, sitting atop the piling.

Finally it was time to leave Port McNeill, to see if we could find a quiet anchorage to spend the week or so before returning to catch our flight home.  We didn’t want to go far into the Broughton’s, as that’s just a waste of diesel and cruising time going back and forth.  We settled on Farewell Harbour, where we had anchored two years ago while waiting for a mail shipment from Alison to come into Port McNeill.  We really liked it, and while it isn’t the most protected harbor, particularly from northwesterlies (which Johnstone Strait is noted for), we figured we could find a good spot there.  We set our sights for departure on Monday, July 25^th.  Our return date to Port McNeill for our flight is the 30^th, so this gives us plenty of time to just hang out.

A few minutes after leaving Port McNeill we spotted a boat in the distance behind us – and with binoculars it was unmistakably a Fleming. It was the Tiger Lily, owned by Larry and Joan Achtemichuk of West Vancouver. Larry is an artist from West Van, painting watercolor on canvas outdoor scenes. They’re already on their way home from SE Alaska. As they passed us on Johnstone Strait I snapped this photo.

With current in Johnstone Strait, Kap figured a 9AM departure gave us our best cruise time.  The night before, the wind was howling at the dock, but in the morning it was calm, cool, and the sky was solid overcast.  We slipped the dock lines a few minutes early and headed out.  The seas were calm, and our short cruise time was just a bit over two hours.

Farewell Harbour was named by the crew of the Beaver, a steamer belonging to the Hudson’s Bay Company that was used as a survey ship. This was the last area they surveyed so they named the harbor Farewell as they were through with their mission. Our cruising guide lists it as an excellent anchorage, with room for at least three dozen boats at anchor, in 30-50’ of water, and a mud bottom. We anchored at the “w” in Farewell on the inset blow-up of the harbor. Our entry from Johnstone Strait was through the West Passage, weaving through the rocks and around the north side of the Star Islets. This is at the very north end of Johnstone Strait, and turns into Queen Charlotte Strait a bit north of here. North of that is the open water of the Pacific Ocean at Queen Charlotte Sound and above the north end of Vancouver Island.

At first glance, it almost looks like a junk heap floating on the water, but it’s actually three pretty decent-looking cruisers rafted together and at anchor. They were just inside the entrance to Farewell Harbour.

Just as we arrived at our anchorage in Farewell Harbour, the Fleming Devonsea pulled up anchor and departed. Was it something we said? Actually, we knew they’ve been over here for upwards of a week now, and that’s about as long as anyone stays in one spot.

Some of life’s more embarrassing moments can also be an “I learned from that” type of experience.  Our first anchoring in Farewell Harbour was deemed too close to shore, as high north-westerly winds were predicted, and if we drug our anchor we could end up on the shore.  As Kap slowly motored us forward on the anchor chain, I was at the bow bringing the anchor up using the handheld remote control for the windlass.  As the anchor reached the surface, the line for the anchor sentinel buoy (which is tied to the attachment ring on the anchor) is now on the water’s surface and the buoy drifted back along the side of the boat.  I was watching it, but didn’t figure it was a problem since I thought the line was only 40’ long – and therefore, wouldn’t extend as far aft as our now-turning props.

All of a sudden, as I looked over the bow at the anchor, I saw the anchor being jerked rearward towards the pointiest part of the bow and above the waterline.  In a split-second we felt a shudder throughout the boat, the sentinel buoy line snapped loose, and the anchor started swaying wildly at the waterline.  A moment later, Kap popped her head out of the pilot house door and hollered at me, “we’ve got a problem with the port engine – it’s just died!”

It was obvious – somehow the sentinel buoy line did reach far enough aft and had reached either the spinning prop shaft or the prop itself (turns out, unknown – or forgotten – by me Kap had lengthened the line to 50’, and that was long enough to reach the prop shaft where it exits through the hull).

With just the starboard ­engine running, we maneuvered to the new spot we wanted to anchor at and got it securely anchored.  After setting the snubber on it, we then made an attempt to survey whatever had happened.  Looking under the swim step at the stern, we could see A-oh’s little white head floating beneath the surface behind the port-side prop.  That confirmed it.

But, now what to do?  When a polypropylene line gets wrapped around a shaft, it happens so quickly and with such force that it typically melts the synthetic line onto whatever it’s wrapped around – and pulling on it will rarely free it.  It has to be cut away, and that means someone has to get in the water, under the boat, with a knife . . . ah, yes, I’m sure you get the picture.  The water temperature here is a frigid 50°F (or so), and unless you have scuba gear the task isn’t very easy.

Nevertheless, Kap said she was game to give it a try.  She typically carries some diving gear on the boat – mask, snorkel, fins, and her wet suit – but not a BC (buoyancy control vest), regulator, or scuba tanks.  This trip, too, she’d left her full wet suit behind and just brought her warm water “shortie” suit that’s short-sleeved, ends at the knees, and only 2mm thick.  Whether she could even stay in the water enough to get wet was problematic, let alone working under the boat on gulped lung-fuls of air, popping up and back down every half-minute or so.

She got suited up, and we set up every safety idea we could think of, and she then slipped into the water off the swim step ladder.  It was obvious that her fins were going to be too unworkable, and in just getting them off her feet in the water, her body temperature had cooled down to the point that she knew she couldn’t do the job.  She climbed out – and I was glad, because I wasn’t in favor of it in the first place – we got a warm towel around her, and she took a very warm water shower to stop shivering.

In the meantime, I called the Fuel Dock Marina at Port McNeill – which we had just left three hours earlier – and asked them if they could locate a diver in the area and have him call us (luckily, we had both cell phone coverage and Verizon broadband Internet coverage here in the harbor).  Within an hour my cell phone rang and it was Steve Lacasse from Sun Fun Divers in Port McNeill.  He instantly understood, and while he couldn’t come out that afternoon due to a dive class he was scheduled to teach that afternoon, he could be there in his fast boat at 9AM the following morning.  I didn’t even ask the price, as it wasn’t something we could not do, and whatever he charged was what we’d have to pay.

Next morning, we turned our VHF radio on just before 9AM, and a bit later we heard a transmission on Channel 16, “Flying Colours, this is Sun Fun Divers”.  We connected up on Channel 69, and directed him to us (by now there were a couple other boats at anchor in the harbor).  He pulled alongside, and immediately after we got him secured to our side deck, Steve quickly suited up in a dry suit (smart guy, given the water temperature), and knife in hand he jumped in.  Within minutes he came up with two pieces of polypropylene rope in his hand, with A-oh on the end of one–and our poor little anthropomorphized buoy-guy looking a bit worse for wear, with some permanent bumps on top from his high-speed rotations around the prop shaft.  Parts of the line connected to A-oh were blackened from being melted at the high friction heat.

Steve from Fun Sun Divers with a latte that I made for him after his dive to cut out the buoy sentinel line wrapped around our prop. Steve runs a dive shop in Port McNeill, and we now have another friend whenever we drop in there.

While Steve was under the boat, I whipped up a latte for him once he got back aboard his boat, and we then chewed the fat for an hour before he headed back to Port McNeill.  With a nice tip for his trouble, the $500 cost was a good lesson.  It would also have paid half of the cost of a portable emergency scuba system that we almost bought at the Seattle Boat Show this past winter, and Kap has also vowed to get fitted for a dry suit as soon as we get home.

Oh, oh! Time to keep a close eye on ZuZu when she’s outside on deck. This bald eagle circled over us for three complete rotations, either eyeing something on deck or in the water near us. They can spot a fish near the surface at 200’, so they can certainly see ZuZu when she’s on deck. We keep a plastic owl on the foredeck, a flying plastic blow-up orca on the dinghy deck, and red-green-silver metallic colored streamers flying in the cockpit – in the hopes it will keep predators away. While cruising in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia in 2005, we had a cockatoo swoop right past my head – so close his wing brushed my ear – while having lunch ashore one day, and he got a hamburger right off our table! I think an eagle could easily pick ZuZu off the side deck rails where she likes to look at the water. Unfortunately, she thinks she’s at the top of the food chain, and hasn’t a clue there are things out to get her.

On the other hand, we can step into the pilot house and find ZuZu in a pose like this – don’t know if she’s scared of something, or if this is her way of keeping a quiet eye on things. Kap had taken an upper cushion from the settee corner, and ZuZu’s down behind the cushion.

Oh, life on a boat is just so hard! . . .

. . . and I can find just about anything to sleep on after a hard day’s work.

. . . and I really like having a good cardboard box to play in when I get tired of snoozing. It just doesn’t get any better for a cat.

The Kenmore Air Turbo-Otter – painted in King-5 TV Evening Magazine livery – landed right in front of our bow one morning, then taxied over to the Farewell Harbour Resort dock to drop off a passenger. It wasn’t there more than one minute, then taxied by us and powered up about 50’ off our port side.

Kenmore Air float planes flew in twice while we were here – the first time a Beaver that landed out in the middle of the harbor and dropped off a passenger directly into a dinghy that came alongside from another cruiser anchored here in the harbor.  This is the wonderful thing about Kenmore Air – they will fly in anywhere to drop off or pick up passengers – private docks, any resort in Desolation Sound or the Broughton’s, or even right next to your boat.

We’re anchored about 500’ off shore from a fancy-schmancy fishing lodge called the Farewell Harbour Resort.  It caters to fishing groups, with about 8 luxury cabins, a lodge building with a nice restaurant, and probably crew quarters.  We’ve anchored in here twice now in the past several years, but have never seen anyone at the resort, and with binoculars we could see that the bed mattress in each guest cabin was leaned against the wall, and no sign of life whatsoever around the lodge restaurant.  We figure the GFC has pretty much wiped out several summers for this type of operation in many places.

Kap loves to explore every bay and lagoon with her Hobie pedal kayak, and often takes Gator with her – but this time he isn’t on board, so she went alone. I like it too, but prefer the temperature to be a bit warmer.

While Kap was away in the kayak, I looked out the galley window to see if I could see her - and spotted ZuZu sitting contentedly on a 4” wide section of railing. She’s fascinated with the water and loves to sit and look at it. She also loves to sit on anything high up, and preferably narrow - just because she can.

After a couple of days at Farewell Harbour, it became obvious that it wasn’t going to be quiet and secluded as we thought it would be.  By this morning there were 12 other boats at anchor here with us and we felt like we were in an RV park.  Some of was comical – watching other people’s techniques at raising and lowering their anchors is a real spectator sport – so much so that Kap proposed we bring along a video camera and film some of them, then edit them, and sit around sometime with friends to watch them and vote on which is the more entertaining.  (And yes, I’m well aware that our prop bashing of A-oh and wrapping our prop shaft with A-oh’s line would fall in that same category!)

One sailboat came in at an incredible fast speed, didn’t cruise around at all to find the best available spot, and instead dropped anchor while still underway.  When the anchor dragged on the bottom, the chain almost took out the bow of his boat.  He then backed down on it, dragging the anchor without putting out more chain, and the sailboat quickly lurched to a stop when the anchor set.  Going forward again at high speed, he then raised his anchor and almost struck his bow with the anchor when it rose through the surface.  He was so close to us we were worried he had dropped his chain over ours, and then he would have brought up our anchor – and that wouldn’t have been good for us.  Luckily, he didn’t, and to our relief he then moved off to another spot far away from us.

I count 10 single and 2-place kayaks in this cluster crossing through Farewell Harbour.

Another guy in a 60’ Tollycraft, homeported in Bel Air, CA (next to Beverly Hills and Hollywood) is anchored behind us about 500’.  Several times a day he roars in and out in his towed 20’ aluminum fishing boat, setting up a wake that rocks us from side to side.  This morning he raced by a group of kayakers paddling through the harbor, and we could hear them yelling at him to slow down and not swamp them with his wake.  When he returned, we’d had enough of it and we too hollered over to him to slow down.  Without doing so, he yelled over that he had some free crab – we told him what he could do with his free crab.

Oh well, that’s the price to be paid for cruising in one of the most scenic places in the world – everyone else wants to as well.  It’s gotten so bad in just the short five years that we’ve been cruising here we’ve talked about skipping the Broughton’s in future years and continue further north.  There will always be jerks wherever one goes, but with fewer total cruisers, the odds are there will be correspondingly fewer jerks.

One boat we always like to see arrive when we're at anchor or moored is the MARY E, a 61' Tollycraft (American-built). She's owned by Tom and Mary Gallagher, who live in Tacoma and belong to the Seattle Yacht Club. They've been very helplful to us in learning to prawn, and they're just plain nice people. We think the Tollycarft (and the Fleming, of course) are what a cruising boat should look like.

On a bit of drying reef along the shore and not far from where we’re anchored is a very unusual rock – almost looks manmade from concrete until you put the binoculars on it. We figure it must have been rolled and rolled with glacier action, and deposited here many thousands of years ago.

Flying Colours is certainly a dock-stopper, and everywhere we are, other cruisers carefully look her over and drop by to talk with us about her. Here she’s moored at dock 7 at Blind Channel Resort.

For the past two weeks, prawning has pretty much dominated our activity.  It’s been very good to us, and if we can get them home safely (i.e., without a freezer malfunction), we should have enough to last us through the winter.  But let’s back up and take this in chronological order, starting about 8 July.

For our last night at Blind Channel, we decided we should dinghy over to Cordero Lodge.  With the place for sale, and with Reinhardt Kuppel’s health so poor that he’s now living out his last days in Campbell River, we figured it might be our last chance for schnitzel.  We knew Doris Kuppel was back for a few days, and she’s always been the chef, while Reinhardt spent most of his time with the guests in the small restaurant, frequently ending the evening sharing a round of schnapps while someone banged out German polkas on a piano in the corner.

Tonight, Doris greeted us at the door and showed us to one of two booths by the window.  Another couple was already seated at the booth next door, so we greeted them as we slid into ours.  They told us they also had arrived by dinghy, from their anchorage a couple of miles west in a quiet spot behind the Cordero Islands at Greene Point Rapids.  They introduced themselves as Buddy and Norma Smith, and we took an instant liking to them.  They seemed to be in their mid-70s, and we could tell from the discussion that they’ve been cruising around here for many years.  They have a 51’ Tollycraft and keep it at Coal Harbour Marina near the Bayshore Hotel in Vancouver.

Within minutes another couple arrived, Americans aboard a tiny C-Dory cruiser that was moored at the lodge’s dock.  We learned they are from Whidbey Island, and recently from some kind of government stint in Washington, D.C. (Kap figured he was a lobbyist, but I have no idea why).  Within minutes, the six of us were chatting as if old friends – which is the charm and appeal of Cordero Lodge, where we’ve met and spent the evening talking with other boaters over really good food every time we’ve been here.

I had my standby schnitzel – Cordon Bleu – and Kap ordered Weiner schnitzel.  When we ordered a prawn cocktail appetizer – which the menu listed as prawns from Loughborough Inlet – this started a discussion with Buddy and Norma about visiting Loughborough Inlet.  They’ve apparently been there many times, love the place, and convinced us we wouldn’t be disappointed.  I’m not sure they’ve ever prawned there, as they didn’t have any specific advice for us on where to set our traps.  They did, however, know a couple, Dane and Helen Campbell, who live in the next bay over, Sidney Bay, from where we planned to anchor in Beaver Inlet.  They insisted we must drop in on Dane and Helen -  but first contact them on VHF channel 16 to let them know we’d like to stop by – as they are extremely interesting.  Helen makes local jam that we must buy.

Over dinner we talked about how the fate of Cordero Lodge isn’t unique – that a whole generation of people who created these “resorts” for cruisers who wanted to enjoy this incredible part of the world were now being forced out by advancing age – and sadly, at a time when the world’s economy couldn’t give them the prices they deserved for these wonderful places.  Lagoon Cove is for sale, Greenway Sound is closed down after six years of trying to sell.  At the same time, though, new (and younger) blood has recently created resorts where there were none before at places like Kwatsi Bay and Jennis Bay.  Pierre and Tove Landry are going gangbusters at Pierre’s Echo Cove, and the third generation of Richter’s at Blind Channel is ensuring it will remain open for the foreseeable future.  Overall, it bodes well for the future of these wonderful cruising grounds.

After our meal, Doris came out from the kitchen to chat with us.  In answer to a question, Doris told us that she and Reinhardt were originally from Essen (in western Germany), and that’s where she learned to cook.  Their daughter had mentioned on an earlier visit that her parents were “tough old Jews”, and being in their mid-80’s, I surmised they might have been WWII survivors, but nothing was mentioned about how or what.

A few minutes later, Doris ducked out and returned shortly.  In her right hand she carried what looked like a large wooden plane – about the length of a man’s arm, painted green, with a vertical hand grip and a flat board about 14” long connected to it.  There were 8 pewter shot glasses sitting in indentations, each full of icy cold schnapps.  Doris’ daughter followed behind with slips of paper that she handed to each of us, containing the words to the obligatory Cordero Lodge toast song – the old German Proseet toast that’s sung at all beerfests (or whenever a bunch of Germans are drinking).  With a shot glass in everyone’s raised hand, we all sang the short refrains, then downed the shot glass in one gulp.  I’m sure everyone was toasting to Reinhardt, who with Doris had built this remote lodge by hand 35 years earlier.  An era was coming to an end, and Kap and I were glad we’d at least been there for the final 3-4 years of it.

On our second day at Blind Channel, a Dashew FPB 64 all-aluminum powerboat cruiser arrived.  It was flying a Seattle Yacht Club burgee, so besides wanting to see one of these up close, Kap and I always make an extra effort to give a hand with lines when people arrive at the dock – particularly at Blind Channel, where there’s always a cross current at the dock that’s either pushing you onto or off of the dock.

The FPB 64 is one of a series of long-distance cruising boats designed by an American from San Diego, Steve Dashew, and built in Auckland, New Zealand.  Dashew, who is a long-time ocean sailor and racer – and who is now getting old enough that the rigors of sailing aren’t matched by his physical capabilities – designs on the premise that if you do it right, a powerboat can provide blue water cruising for ocean-going couples.

It would be hard to argue that the FPB 64 is a good looking boat – its lines are simply functional and Spartan – but it makes up for it in lots of other ways.  Every aspect of the design is economical (although its price tag reportedly is not), and at the same time, this boat could easily be lived aboard for multi-year cruises around the world.  In fact, this boat – named Sarah Sarah, and owned by a couple who live in the Anacortes area – was completed last August and they took delivery of her in Auckland.  For their first real shakedown cruise, they brought it across the Pacific to the U.S. West Coast.

By comparison, Flying Colours, with its fuel capacity of 1,000 gallons and a range of 2,000 miles at an 8 knot cruising speed, wouldn’t make it to Hawaii from the U.S. West Coast, let alone to New Zealand, without adding special fuel tanks.  Indeed, the Fleming is designed for coastal cruising, whereas the FPB-series boats are specifically designed for offshore cruising.

Kap and I would love to do some offshore cruising, but at our age, a sailboat is becoming more and more out of the picture (but we still talk about various motor-sailor craft that are available).  If we ever felt that we’d done all we wanted to do in exploring the Inside Passage – which is undoubtedly one of the best cruising grounds in the world – the Dashew FPB 64 would certainly be on my list to look at.

Finally on Friday morning the weather in Johnstone Strait had settled down, and we felt comfortable leaving Blind Channel for the short cruise to Loughborough Inlet.  Kap’s check of the current for Greene Point Rapids – just around the corner from Blind Channel – indicated it would be at slack at 11:45AM, so we settled on a departure time of 11:30.  Since we’d be “off the grid” for several days, we loaded up at the General Store on milk for morning cuppas, paid our moorage bill, and got Flying Colours ready to go.

Loughborough Inlet as we turned north from Chancellor Channel. It’s a wide channel, at least twice as wide as Chancellor Channel where they join, and if you didn’t know better you’d think the inlet was the main channel. It’s a dead-end, though, five miles ahead. On our port side and along the shoreline, four tugs were busy setting up a log boom as we entered, but otherwise, there wasn’t any other sign of life ahead.

This little complex of houses belong to a couple we know from the Sun Valley area – Dick and Melinda Spring. We didn’t see any sign of life during the three days we were in Beaver Inlet. They keep a fast boat at Campbell River, and use it to get here when they’re here for a vacation.

Here’s the reputed curmudgeon’s floathome opposite the Spring’s place in Beaver Inlet. It’s quite a bit nicer than we expected to see, given the description of the guy that we’d been given several years ago. On our third day here we heard from our friend, Bob Gladics, who told us the place is now owned by a retired U.S. couple named Jim and Abby.

We’ve been wanting to spend some time in Loughborough Inlet for several years now, as coincidentally, our friends Bob Gladics and Glenna Doke have some good friends near Sun Valley who own a summer house on Beaver Inlet.  In the past, though, we’ve just been in too much of a hurry on our way to/from the Broughton’s to stop here.  This year, though, our Internet research indicates there’s good prawning here (plus the prawn cocktail at the Cordero Lodge is Loughborough spotted prawns, and they are very good) – and we’ve declared 2011 to be our year for prawning – and even more so, to be able to spend long carefree periods at anchor, tucked into quiet bays.  We hoped Beaver Inlet would be just such a place.

Bob and Glenna’s friends, Dick and Melinda Spring, bear a little discussion, as their background and the background of their property on Beaver Inlet is interesting.  We met Dick and Melinda in early 2008 when Bob and Glenna invited us to dinner at a restaurant in Hailey, ID, just south of Sun Valley.  Dick is a successful rancher in the Hailey area, and apparently has quite a bit of money.  Our recollection is that he’s widowed, and a few years ago while searching for a new bride there was something unique enough about how he was searching that he wound up on Oprah’s TV show.  As you can expect, that got lots of results and he was inundated with offers from women all over the country.  Based on whatever criteria he was using, he selected his new bride-to-be, but first invited her out to his ranch to gauge if she’d work out – well, she didn’t, and he dumped her.  The second one was Melinda, and they’ve been happily married ever since.  They were a really nice couple, and we thoroughly enjoyed the evening with them.  They told us all about their summer place on Beaver Inlet, and invited us to use their dock if we dropped by and they weren’t there.  Bob and Glenna had been there as part of a fixer-upper project on their summer home, and raved about the area.

According to Dick, the summer house was built by a young Microsoft retired millionaire who was a bit tiched in the head – and was totally convinced that Armageddon was coming at the moment Y2K rolled around.  He bought the place to be totally off the grid when that occurred.  When the world didn’t end, he gave up on the place, Dick somehow found out about it, and bought it for a song.  The place had sunk into serious disrepair, and that’s where Bob and Glenna came into the picture – making several trips there in previous summers to help fix up the place.  They raved about five different types of oysters that could be found on the small stretch of beach on their property.

Bob and Glenna regaled us with stories of an old hermit curmudgeon who lives in a floathome directly across Beaver Inlet, and who does some caretaking for them when Dick and Melinda aren’t there.  He reportedly also shoots across Beaver Inlet with his shotgun or rifle at anyone who stops by that he thinks might be poaching oysters from their beach.

After we met Dick and Melinda, the upcoming summer was only our second year of boating, and we were hell-bent for SE Alaska.  We stopped at Blind Channel on the way north, but were in too much of a hurry to make the detour on Loughborough Inlet to have a look at Beaver Inlet.  Ditto on the way south.  That’s the way it was for the next three years, even though Bob and Glenna urged us to take a look at it.  This year, and now that we’re into prawning, is the time to check it out.

This shot is looking west towards the head of Beaver Inlet, with the Franklyn Mountain range on the left, and if you went overland straight ahead you’d run into Johnstone Strait. This is on a peninsula of the Canada mainland jutting towards the south. In the distance you can see one boat at anchor, at the exact spot Kap had marked for our anchorage. The house-looking object on the left shoreline isn’t a house, but rather, as stone face along the shore.

This shot is looking down Beaver Inlet the other way, towards Loughborough Inlet. The snow-capped peak in the background could very well be a glacier, or at least snow that won’t melt until the very end of summer.

As we cruised deeper into Beaver Inlet, we could see one boat already at anchor at the head of the inlet – and it looked to be right at the “sweet spot” anchoring position shown in the Douglas cruising book.  Never mind, it’s 500 wide here and a flat mud bottom at around 40-50’ deep, so there’s plenty of room.  After cruising around for a bit we selected the spot we both thought looked best, leaving lots of swing room from the other boat as well as the shore.  With Kap at the helm and me at the windlass, we dropped the anchor in 42’ of water.

We have an “anchor sentinel” – a small white buoy on a 50’ line and tied to our anchor.  Kap made it up for our anchorage in Desolation Sound last summer – where we were worried that it might be overcrowded and a high risk of someone laying their anchor down over ours – and it’s proven great for knowing exactly where our anchor is.  When the only visual reference points are trees and rocks and “stuff” on the shore, there’s no way for it to be very accurate, and besides, your visual reference points are quickly forgotten.  Marking the GPS position is pretty sure-fire too, but it means you must have your navigation system or a laptop up and running to “see” it on an electronic chart.  A white buoy in the water, though, is something you can see any time you look outside – and it’s also something that other boaters can see when they’re deciding to put down their anchor near to you.

Being our first anchoring of the year, we’re always rusty, and somewhat nervous that we’re going to forget some small detail.  What we’ve been taught to do is drop the anchor to the bottom, then drop at least an amount equal to two times the depth as we back down (laying anchor chain on the bottom in the direction we’re backing), and then stop.  We then pop the engines in and out of reverse to get a bit of reverse motion, to “set” the anchor.  If you feel a sharp pull when the chain becomes tight, you know the anchor is set.  Once you’re satisfied it’s set, you then back down again, laying more chain to get the ratio of scope (i.e., chain to depth ratio) that you figure will hold you in the forecast wind and current conditions.

In our case, we figured 3:1 scope would be just fine – which means letting out 3 times as much chain as our depth – particularly since the bottom here is reported to be mud.  The water depth was 42’, so 3:1 scope would require approximately 150’ of chain.  Using hand signals from the windlass at the bow, I let down the appropriate amount of chain as Kap slowly backed the boat downwind from where the anchor lay.  When we were at 2:1 scope, we stopped and made certain the anchor was set, then backed another 50’ and let out that amount of chain.  We typically then do some tidying up around the deck as we watch to see if it looks like we’re staying put without dragging the anchor.

An hour later, we felt comfortable with our anchoring and decided it was time to put the snubber on.  This is nothing more than a rope tied to a deck cleat on either side of the bow, and hooked into the anchor chain.  The anchor chain is then lowered so that it falls within the V formed by the two ends of the snubber, to the point where the rope snubber is carrying the weight of the chain, and not the bowsprit of the boat/windlass.  The purpose of this is, chain going down from the boat’s bowsprit has no “give” to it, so as the boat rocks a bit it will put constant strain on the bowsprit, as well as the windlass.  It also means that the chain will make noise throughout the night as we swing on it in the wind, and it’s very close to where your head is in the V-berth bed.  Since the snubber is line (rope), it has a bit of stretch to it, providing the all-important “give” that makes being at anchor much more comfortable.

Kap readies our prawn traps for the first soak at the mouth of Beaver Inlet. We still don’t quite have a routine down yet, but it’s getting closer.

By the time we got the dinghy down and in the water, the prawn bait all set up, and our traps ready to go, it was 3PM.  With our orange foully gear on, we motored out to the Beaver Inlet opening to locate where we’d set our first prawn pots.

This would be our first time ever to locate totally on our own where to drop our traps, as this was a new spot to us, and we hadn’t gotten any local advice from anyone who has ever been here.  In general, our advice has been to locate a “hole” on the bottom at 300’, with upward sloping sides around it – apparently the little prawn guys live in areas like this, or the hole helps keep the scent in the area . . . or whatever.

Well, cruising around in our dinghy we couldn’t find any holes on our charts – just narrowly-spaced contour lines that more or less followed the shore contour, from 100’ down to about 500’ – and these lines indicated a steep bank.  The contour lines were so close together that Kap worried our traps would tumble, and not find a flat surface to land on.  We searched for upwards of half an hour to locate what we thought was a shelf at the appropriate depth.  We finally settled on a spot that was around 290’ and as I kept the dinghy in position, Kap loaded the bait cans, bungeed the nets shut, added weights to each trap to help keep them in position, and then dropped our two pots over the side.

We had hoped to pull up our traps after a couple of hours, so we could drop them again for an overnight soak – but since everything this first time took longer than we’d planned, we had no choice but to let them soak overnight.  We headed back to Flying Colours and a well-deserved Happy Hour.  I whipped up a Kentucky Crusta for Kap, and a Sidecar for myself, and we sat in the cockpit looking at what has to be one of the most beautiful and peaceful places in the world.

A loon swam past us just as the sun was setting. Something about the way she cocked her head made us think she was looking us over – sure enough, when she got past us she turned around and came back for a second look. Then she did another 180° turn and headed for the end of the inlet. An image of the loon is on the Canadian dollar coin, and Canucks everywhere call it a "loonie".

This was our first night at anchor this year, and in such a wonderful place –we decided to fix Flying Colours Scampi for dinner, with a salad and a bottle of Okanagan Valley Rigamarole label Sauvignon Blanc.

Sunrise is our favorite time of the day when we’re on the water, whether it’s cruising up a channel or sitting at anchor. The light is so spectacular, particularly when the water is glassy smooth and creates a perfect mirror image. This shot is looking east down Beaver Inlet towards Loughborough Inlet and the mountains on the mainland peninsula.

Skunked!  The next morning we motored out with our dinghy to pull our traps.  When the first trap reached the surface, we had a sense of Yogi Berra déjà vu all over again – it was empty.  So was the second trap.  Either this spot had been prawned out entirely by the commercial prawners (the commercial season had just ended last week, and we’d heard reports that they were prawning heavily in Loughborough Inlet), or we hadn’t set at the right spot.  Regardless of which it was, we decided not to reset at the same location, and motored off to the other side of the inlet mouth.

Next door to Beaver Inlet is Sidney Bay, with just a small tip of land between them.  At the opening to Sidney Bay, we found two areas that had flat shelves on the bottom at 300-400’.  We again drove around and drove around looking for just the right spot in that area, and finally decided to drop the traps where there were narrowly-spaced contour lines indicating we were over an upwards sloping wall.  Kap re-baited our traps and after marking the location with our GPS, we dropped them.  It was mid-morning, so we figured a 4-hour soak should do it.  If we were successful, we could then set again for an overnight soak.

As we cruised back to Flying Colours, we met the couple from the Bayliner named Gecko anchored near us and we stopped to say hello.  They told us they are on their way south in a few days, having spent the last eight weeks in the Broughton’s.  We mentioned that we’d just been skunked on our first trap pull, and they told us their experience is you have to get down to almost 400’ in Beaver Inlet for the prawns.  They don’t have a pot puller on their dinghy, and pulling traps by hand from 400’ would be murderous, so we figured that’s why they are crabbing and fishing here.  And it may also explain why we came up empty handed this morning, and since we’d set our traps at about 340’ the second time, it might not be a good sign for getting any prawns this time either.

We lounged around on Flying Colours for several hours, catching up on some reading, fixing lunch, and taking naps – then headed back in the dinghy at 2PM to pull our traps.

Flying Colours at anchor in Beaver Inlet, with the Franklyn Range in the background.

This time we were pleased.  There were good-sized prawns in each trap, for a total of 38 on the pull.  We decided this spot was looking good, so Kap re-baited and we dropped the traps near the same spot – but in 25-30’ deeper water.  As we slowly cruised back at idle speed, Kap rinsed the prawns several times in salt water to get them to purge as much waste as possible – i.e., poop – and then one-by-one snapped their little heads off, rinsed them off alongside the dinghy, and deposited them in a clean bucket.

We probably should have returned to pull the traps after dinner, but we’ve found that with a good bottle of wine with dinner, plus a good movie on our entertainment system, we’d rather stay put in the comfort of Flying Colours’ salon.  We decided to let the traps soak overnight and get back to them early in the morning.

Next morning (Monday), as soon as we’d had our first latte we suited up in our now-standard orange “prawning suits” – I’m sure you can see us coming a mile away! – and made the 2½ mile trip in the dinghy.  The catch wasn’t quite as good – 28 total prawns this time – but that’s 28 better than zero!  We pulled and reset twice more throughout the day, for a total of 84 prawns for the day.

In mid-afternoon, Kap heard our neighbor’s dinghy going by, so she popped her head out of the pilot house window to give them a friendly wave – and spotted another cruising boat in the distance, slowly moving into Beaver Inlet.  She put the binoculars to it, and then called me, “Hey Ron, if I’m not mistaken it’s another Fleming coming in.”  Sure enough, it was, and we could soon tell it was the Couverden, with Steve and Shirley Clark aboard.  The last we’d heard from them, they were down in Desolation Sound, heading to a place called Waddington Bay for oysters – and we didn’t even know if they knew where we were.  Before leaving Blind Channel (where we had Internet access), I’d sent an e-mail message that we were heading into a known area of no communication – no cell phone coverage, no WiFi anywhere around, and no Internet access from our Verizon broadband data cards.

The Couverden anchored near us, and after our last prawn trap check we stopped by for Happy Hour.  Steve had other ideas – he whipped up a big batch of deluxe nachos, and over two bottles of wine during the evening we caught up on their news.  (Steve’s biggest news was a dinghy accident two weeks earlier in Garden Bay, an hour after seeing Shirley off on a Kenmore Air flight home to watch over her aging mother for a week.  He was slowly idling back to the Couverden at the Seattle Yacht Club dock when a crazed heroin addict in an inflatable dinghy rammed him head-on at top speed, almost killing the guy.  Steve wasn’t injured, and only minor damage to their dinghy, but the guy was hauled away unconscious with head injuries to the hospital.  There were plenty of witnesses who agreed that it was definitely the other guy’s reckless handling of his boat.)

Tuesday morning, July 12^th.  Turns out, we do have very weak cell phone coverage here.  I managed to check messages on my cell phone, and this morning I was able to connect to the Internet with my Verizon broadband card – but with a very weak signal I was only able to pull down 82 of 97 e-mail messages before it dropped.  I won’t try again, as it will have to resend the 82 messages I’ve already received, and it’ll probably just drop again at some point.  Oddly, one cell phone message was from the Sitka harbor master (and the area code of 907 is correct for Sitka, AK), with the message that he has a box addressed to Cosmo Place – our old Nordic Tug that we sold two years ago, and we haven’t been back to Sitka since our visit there in Cosmo Place in 2008.  It makes us think that the new owners of Cosmo Place might have ventured to SE Alaska this year, and somehow the harbor master has our old telephone number in his guest boat sign-in records.  That’ll give me something interesting to check out today – in between shelling, vacuum sealing, and freezing the 84 prawns from yesterday.

Kap thinks this is a grebe, but since we don’t have Internet access it’s difficult to check it out. Whatever she is, she spent long periods paddling back and forth about 100’ off our stern, making plaintive calls that sound almost identical to ZuZu’s meows. We think the grebe might have thought ZuZu was a mate, or a potential mate, nearby. I shot this photo with a 300mm zoom lens, the longest one I have for my camera, perched on the transom of Flying Colours to steady it.

The next day, Monday July 11^th, was our best day yet at prawning.  In three sets we hauled in 84 shrimp.  Tuesday was even better – 106 shrimp.  We’ve now caught 355 shrimp since we began down in Cortes Bay, with 303 of them shelled, deveined and sitting in our freezer.  In the afternoon, Steve and Shirley headed out to Loughborough Inlet in their dinghy with their fishing gear, and in 20 minutes they were back with a 9 lb Ling Cod.  Fish isn’t my overall favorite food, but when it’s this fresh Kap and I couldn’t resist the dinner invitation.  Steve baked it in a foil wrap, with butter, capers, and lemon – it was delicious.

Over dinner, and after Kap and Shirley had been checking the weather all afternoon, we decided it would be best to head out in the morning and make our break for the Broughton’s while we had a favorable gap in the weather.

On the way north, our tentative plan was to stay one night in Lagoon Cove, then one night at Pierre’s Echo Bay Resort to provision (fresh milk for lattes and maybe some fresh vegetables), and then go to Booker Lagoon on Broughton Island for several days at anchor.  Prawning was reported to be excellent in the lagoon, and our three cruising guides all gave glowing descriptions of how scenic it was.

From Beaver Inlet, Whirlpool Rapids was between us and Johnstone Strait, so we’d have to time our departure to be at the rapids at slack.  Kap and Shirley figured our departure time needed to be 7AM, and it was agreed that we’d raise our anchors at 6:30AM.    Dinghies still had to be secured, so we declared an early evening.

Before going over to the Couverden that evening, we started our generator to run a dishwashing load.  When we returned to Flying Colours, we found the generator had shut down and an error message – “lack of raw water” – was flashing on the digital readout on our pilot house console.  The likely suspect was seaweed sucked into the thru-hull that brings salt water into the generator to cool it.  There’s a raw water strainer just above the thru-hull that filters and collects any debris that might be brought in, keeping it from going into the generator cooling system and causing damage.  If the strainer is full and clogs up, the generator’s temperature sensors shut it down – and presumably, that was the cause of our problem.

Kap and I both went into the engine room to open up the strainer – which we indeed found to be full of seaweed.  Once it was cleaned out, Kap pressed the generator start button and it fired up . . . but it only ran for 30 seconds or so, then abruptly stopped and gave us the same error message.  Kap fiddled and fiddled with the strainer, making certain there wasn’t an air bubble in it, but still no cigar.  Suspicion grew that the thru-hull intake tube might itself be clogged with seaweed, but try as we might – and without the proper tools – we couldn’t get the tubing off without destroying it (and we didn’t have a spare).  We thought about rigging up some sort of Roto-Router-type of snake to run down it, but couldn’t think of anything on board that was flexible and strong enough to go around a 90° bend and be able to push anything out.

After working on it for an hour, we knew it was fruitless to continue.  We needed the generator if we were going to be at anchor, and we also have to run it when we’re underway if we want to run the watermaker.  We had to get to a mechanic, and the nearest one would be in Port McNeill.  We got a message across to Steve and Shirley of our changed plans and went to bed.  Both of us spent a large part of the night trying to figure out a solution – the only one I could come up with was to give the generator a try when we’re underway, on the off chance that suction against the thru-hull at 10 knots water speed might suck out the seaweed debris.  I gave that idea a 1-in-100 chance of working.  Unknown to me, Kap had the same idea, and gave it about the same odds of being successful.

One of the best cameras we have on board Flying Colours is in the engine room. It’s particularly useful when Kap needs to go down there while we’re underway and I’m at the helm. This is a place and time where a hundred things can go wrong, and I keep a close eye on her when she’s down there. Note that she’s wearing good ear protectors – the noise is deafening, and you’d have hearing loss in no time if protectors aren’t worn. The main engines are towards the front of the camera, and she’s facing the generator in the white square-ish boxy thing – it’s a 17.5KW diesel motor that burns about 1 gallon per hour when running. I snapped this photo just as she was pushing the starter button to see if it might have cleared the debris in the raw water strainer (there’s also a remote starter unit in the pilot house). The date and time stamp on the camera isn’t correct, as we’ve never bothered to set it.

Kap and I were up at 5AM.  I made a latte and we ate a breakfast of cereal.  After that we stood around on one foot, then the other, waiting for the 6:30AM agreed-upon time to raise anchors.  The plan was, we’d head for Port McNeill and they’d go to Lagoon Cove, and hopefully we’d meet up as soon as our problem was resolved.

Anxious to get underway, we started the anchor raising process 15 minutes early – and it’s a good thing we did.  During our 3-day stay in Beaver Inlet, Flying Colours had been floating sort of aimlessly almost over the top of our anchor – which we knew because the anchor sentinel buoy always seemed to be right next to the boat.  This seemed strange, as we had backed down at least 100’ and laid out that much anchor chain, so normally we’d expect to swing at anchor about that distance from the buoy.  With the chain solidly mired in the mud on the bottom, though, we must have drifted with an outgoing tide back to the buoy, and then just stayed there.

As we began to raise the anchor, the line from the sentinel buoy was wrapped a dozen times around the chain – indicating that we’d also circled . . . and circled . . . and circled the buoy without even realizing it.  Kap spent at least 15 minutes leaning half on/half off the bowsprit untangling the mess, as I slowly raised the anchor chain.  Hmmmm, maybe that idea needs some re-work.

We cruised down Loughborough Inlet and then turned into Chancellor Channel.  Steve kept up a running commentary with us on the VHF, discussing ideas for how to resolve our seaweed-compacted thru-hull problem.  One idea was to blow compressed air into the generator side of the tubing to see if it could dislodge the debris.  We have a tire inflator on board, but it’s 12-volt DC only, and our nearest DC outlet is in the pilot house.  Couverden has a 110-volt AC portable inflator, but it still left us with the problem of how to create a seal between the inflator head and the tubing.  It was a good idea, but with some big unknowns on how to actually make it work.

While this discussion was going on, we decided to fire up the generator as we were cruising.  To our total amazement, the generator continued to run without problem, even when we put a heavy electrical load on it with the watermaker, definitely getting it up to operating temperature.  Our least practical idea had worked!  We let Couverden know of our success, and changed our cruising plans back to the original.

We hit Whirlpool Rapids at slack, which means there weren’t any whirlpools of consequence, then continued out into Johnstone Strait.  It was just as we like it – benign.  Except for a bit of ground fog, the 11 mile cruise to Fanny Island where you turn into Havanna Channel and wind your way around some islands towards Lagoon Cove.

At the east end of East Cracoft Island there’s a long, narrow, and shallow channel called Chatham Channel. To navigate safely through it one has to align very carefully on range markers on the shore ahead and behind you. Range markers are two signs, spaced one behind the other, and when the painted vertical bars line up you are correctly positioned in the channel. The channel is long enough that you can’t see the range markers ahead – even with binoculars – as you enter, so you first use the markers behind you, and when you’re about halfway through you switch to the markers ahead of you. To make it work, you need one person with binoculars to watch the range markers and giving steering directions, while the other person drives the boat. In this photo, the closer (lower) range marker is very near to the shore, and the further (higher) range marker is behind it, maybe 100’ (and you probably won’t even see them unless you enlarge the photo). We were driving from the fly bridge, and I took this photo from inside the fly bridge enclosure. The orca tail at the top of the photo is a blow-up plastic whale that we use to keep eagles away when we’re at anchor or moored – it doesn’t matter what it is . . . it just needs to flap in the wind to be effective.

Couverden hadn’t ever been down the narrow, shallow channel called The Blow Hole into Lagoon Cove, so they pulled off to let us go first. They don’t have electronic charts on board – using paper charts for their navigation – so getting through tricky channels and inlets isn’t quite as easy and safe.

The Blow Hole is safe enough to go through, provided you know which side of the channel to follow, and you stay away from the seaweed and kelp along one side. Just ahead of Flying Colours’ nose the channel shallows up – as indicated by the darker blue – and the depth is only about 20’ at the deepest part of the channel. We’ve gone through here at least a dozen times now, so it doesn’t hold any terror for us.

When you’re on an island that has no access other than boat and floatplane, just the day-to-day necessities require effort. This fast service boat stops by once a week to collect garbage – it looks like about 15 garbage bags – and hauls it away to Port McNeill. On shore is a large generator that runs 24 hours a day to supply electricity, and there’s an incinerator to burn all garbage that will burn. As we departed we saw the fuel barge approaching – two large diesel tanks on shore hold a total of 42,000 gallons of diesel, so the bill must be huge when it’s refill time.

Our obligatory overnight stop at Lagoon Cove was fun as usual.  We both needed 50A shore power, so Bill directed Flying Colours in first along the fuel dock and stern tied us to the dock perpendicular to it.  He then had Couverden back in next to us and was rafted up tight to our port side.  We’re not wild about this type of moorage, as you have no privacy whatsoever unless you lower all of the window shades, but some nights you just have to put up with what you have to put up with.

It rained cats and dogs while we were here, but nevertheless, I cooked up some hamburger pinwheels in puff pastry and that was our appetizer for the Happy Hour that had to be held inside the workshop on shore.  As usual, Bill told his bear story for the umpteenth time that we’ve heard it.  Next morning it was still raining, and Kap talked me into fueling Flying Colours – with the completely sound argument that being tied up to the fuel dock is the closest we’ll ever be to it without having to make a special stop.  We pumped 427 US gallons of diesel, and at US$5.11/gallon, it came to (sit-down-when-you-get-out-the-credit-card) US$2,182.62.  This isn’t a fuel bill you want to face very often.  I’m sure the price would be lower if we’d waited until Port McNeill in a couple of weeks, but our philosophy is, we really need these places to be here for us in future, so helping them stay in business is good for us too.

This chart plotter screen shows our route (in red) from Lagoon Cove, around the west end of Gilford Island and through Spring Passage, Retreat Passage, Cramer Passage, and into Pierre’s Echo Bay Marina. Spring Passage reputedly has some uncharted rocks, so we were very cautious there, with Kap at the bow in the hopes that any danger lurking there could be seen in time to avoid it.

Steve and Shirley and Kap pow-wowed quite a bit over cocktails about our best route from Lagoon Cove to Pierre’s Echo Bay Resort – the long way or the short way.  The long way is around the east side of Gilford Island on Tribune Channel, and it’s nice, easy, and safe (and the way we’ve always gone in the past).  The short way is around the west side of Gilford, and requires transit through Spring Passage, which is full of islands, rocks . . . and ominously, we were asked by the people at Lagoon Cove to be on the watch for the body of a fisherman on board a commercial vessel who somehow fell overboard during the transit of Spring Passage a week earlier (the comment was made, no trace was discovered during the search, and it’s about now that a body tends to rise to the surface).

No sooner had we entered Knight Inlet than Kap spotted a dolphin surfacing about 10’ off to the right of our bow. That usually indicates they’re going to bow surf on the boat, so I immediately headed for the bow with my camera. Leaning far over the railing and looking immediately to the right of our bow, I could see five Pacific White-Sided Dolphins surfing along, about 2’ beneath the surface. Body movement was almost imperceptible, indicating they were matching our speed of 10 knots (11.7 MPH) almost entirely by our bow wake. They were barely inches apart, and would swap places every minute or so as one would surface for just a fraction of a second – presumably to gulp a breath of air. Kap and I took turns watching them and driving the boat in a constant speed, knowing they were doing this for sheer pleasure, or to catch a free ride for a few miles to their next feeding ground. While we were watching them, Couverden radioed to us from about a mile ahead that they too had a dolphin pod bow surfing on their boat. What an amazing sight!

We’d never been through Spring Passage, and after plotting the course on our electronic chart plotter, Kap agreed that we should try this route.  It might not be all that much shorter, but it definitely seemed more interesting.  We set the departure time for 7AM the next morning.

Spring Passage indeed requires careful threading through the narrow and shallow passages, around islands and rocks that are seemingly everywhere.  We followed Couverden, and were really glad to have electronic charts to navigate by, with three different screens that we could zoom in and out as necessary.  I was at the wheel, and in fairly heavy rain, Kap was at the bowsprit keeping a sharp eye out for uncharted rocks that might be lurking below the surface.  There were none, and in 30 minutes we were safely through the passage – and to our relief, no sign of a body either.

There seems to be no end of fish farms that raise Atlantic salmon, regardless of the scientific evidence that’s building about the harm done by these fisheries (the worst of which is a fish lice that kills off everything around the hatchery, creating a dead zone). For some reason, Pacific salmon don’t farm well, so with the help of a Canadian Fisheries executive (who supposedly came from the plains of Alberta and can’t tell one end of a salmon from the other) they continue to thrive. Most people on the West Coast of Canada and the U.S. boycott these Atlantic salmon, but they’re a valuable export crop. The worst for us is, they need secluded, quiet bays, and those are also the best places for cruisers to anchor.

This fish factory boat was just departing the fish farm as we passed by. As near as we could tell, the grey rigamarole on the aft deck is a huge vacuum suction mechanism that probably unfolds and extends out to the particular pen that’s ready to harvest salmon. They’re scooped into holding tanks, then taken somewhere to process for export.

From there we turned NE, winding our way through another string of islands in Retreat Passage.  This part of the route is familiar for us, as it’s one of our normal gateways into the Broughton’s from Port McNeill on Vancouver Island.

There must be a thousand islands along this route, some fairly large, but some about the size of a house (like the one in the center of this photo). It rained for most of the way, and low scudding clouds were at the treetops. The scenery is so beautiful, though, that even dreary weather can’t spoil the day.

The entrance to Pierre’s Echo Bay Marina. The building and tent sit atop a large section of the I-90 Lake Washington Floating Bridge that was towed up here about 25 years ago when the bridge underwent major reconstruction. The permanent building is a general store that has quite a good selection of groceries. The tent is the evening gathering spot for the various evening dinners that seem to pack crowds in. The fuel dock is just to the left and below the General Store. At the back of the photo is a large lodge that was moved over from the old Pierre’s Resort in Pierre Bay – does this guy like to promote his name, or what? – just around the corner to the east from Echo Bay. We were assigned moorage on the third dock in from the boat that you see on the left side, with Couverden across from us on the second dock.

This is our first return to Echo Bay since 2007, when Kap’s brother, Elliot, and his wife, Michele, flew in to spend a week with us on Cosmo Place.  At the time, it was in a bit of a dilapidated state, as the couple who built it up were aging and going through some serious health issues.  Pierre Landry had an up-and-coming resort around the corner to the east of it at the time, and with some financial backing from some local float home and shoreline home owners, he bought the place and moved his operation.  Since then he’s rebuilt the docks and repowered them for boat shore power, and the place is going gangbusters.  Pierre and his wife, Tove, are probably the most successful self-promoters in the whole of the Broughton’s, always attending a booth at the huge Seattle Boat Show each year.  They host several hugely successful potluck dinners, where they supply the main entre and the boaters bring the rest – including the Saturday night Pig Roast, the Friday night Italian Night, and a Prime Rib Wednesday night.  During the busiest part of the season, moorage is booked solid around those nights, and reservations have to be made a couple of weeks in advance.  This is not our forte, and we’ve stayed away – particularly since we’ve heard that the noise inside the tent is so high that it’s hard to carry on a conversation.  Pierre and Tove are really great people, and the boaters we’ve run into at Echo Bay are always nice, but dinners on Flying Colours are lots more to our liking.

The most unique aspect of Echo Bay is the large concrete float – it’s a section of the I-90 Lake Washington Floating Bridge, towed up here in the 1980s or 1990s when the bridge underwent major rebuilding.  This entire world in the Broughton’s subsists on floating structure, but none like this.  At one time, there were entire villages of floating buildings lashed together, made up of whole city block areas, with floating sidewalks in between the main floats.  They supported the loggers who, over a century in time, cut down the entire stand of old growth cedar and Douglas fir trees that covered this mountainous and rugged area.  When one area was logged out, the entire villages were moved to a new location.  The villages had names, and were large enough there was regular B.C. Ferry service to them.  The logging is still being done, but on a much smaller scale, and most of the felled logs are dragged to the shoreline and made up into log booms that are towed out by tug boat.  The days of permanent settlements are over, and all that remains are the floating resorts that cater to us cruisers.

Here’s an aerial shot of Pierre’s Echo Bay Marina (taken from their website at www.pierresatechobay.com). The grey rectangular structure that the General Store and function tent sit on is the I-90 Lake Washington Floating Bridge section. It’s probably 100’ wide, by 200’ long. Towing that thing up from Seattle must have been quite a project.

Our route (shown in red) from Pierre’s Echo Bay Marina to Booker Lagoon was only about 16 miles, estimated to take under two hours, with a high tension transit through the narrow, shallow rapids that guard the entrance to the lagoon. Most of the cruise was down Fife Sound, which is another of our regular entrances to the Broughton Archipelago when arriving from Port McNeill.

This stop at Pierre’s was just an overnighter, and primarily for fresh provisions – enough to last us through a hoped-for extended stay at anchor in Booker Lagoon on the south side of Broughton Island.  After tying up, we headed immediately for the General Store.  I stocked up on enough skim milk to make the necessary two tall lattes each morning while at anchor, plus some fresh vegetables.  It was Friday and the evening’s theme dinner was Italian night, with beef and chicken lasagna and spaghetti, which we declined, as I had promised Kap a special dinner on Flying Colours.

The weather forecast indicated rain for as much as the whole next week, and it wasn’t too far off the mark. As we cruised down Fife Sound early in the morning the clouds still swirled in wonderful patterns along the mountain sides. With views like this, who cares about rain?

At one point along Fife Sound, Kap exclaimed that there was an uncharted rock outcropping to our starboard side. We both put the binoculars to it, and soon realized it was a huge clump of log, branches, and seaweed that looked large enough to be an island. It made a good cruise ship for the seagulls.

The next morning was again an early one for departure.  Kap and Shirley checked, then rechecked their tide charts for riskiest passage yet – the entrance to Booker Lagoon.  Because of a current that runs over 7 knots during tidal flood and ebb, timing slack water for it was critical.  The published tide charts give a slack time at nearby Alert Bay – the First Nations village east of Port McNeill, and at least 20 miles from Booker Lagoon.  Opinions vary on the time difference between slack at Alert Bay versus Booker Lagoon – anywhere from 15-30 minutes after Alert Bay.  The cruising guides indicated that trying to make the transit even 15 minutes before or after slack could result in considerable current, as the length of slack is also very short.  Kap and Shirley disagreed on their interpretation, and later events showed that Kap was right.

Couverden starts their entrance to Cullen Harbour, a small bay just outside Booker Lagoon. The time is 8:21AM, and Kap figured it’s still 25 minutes before slack.

According to Kap’s interpretation, slack at the entrance to Booker Lagoon should be 15 minutes after Alert Bay, which was at 8:30AM.  As usual, we arrived earlier than this, and Kap figured we’d just idle around, waiting until the current was slack.  We were following Couverden, and they seemed to figure that slack should be at the same time as at Alert Bay – so they headed into the first entrance, to Cullen Harbour.  Kap wanted to wait out in Fife Sound, but after reading the cruising guides again, decided it would be OK to transit into Cullen Harbour to wait.

There were two boats at anchor in Cullen Harbour, including this colorful one – what a kaleidoscope of colors!

As we stood off the entrance to Booker Lagoon, we could see the rushing waters through the shallow, narrow entrance.

As soon as we were inside Cullen Harbour, Couverden moved over to the virtually hidden entrance to Booker Lagoon.  They reported they could see a fairly strong current coming towards them, and to our surprise, a couple of minutes later they said they were going through.  It sounded crazy to us, but it’s their decision.

The passage is only 50’ wide and 20’ deep, so if the strong current coming towards you pushes the bow to one side or the other, there’s very little margin for error.  Our beam is 16’, so that only leaves 17’ to spare on each side of us as we go through.

Five minutes later, Couverden reported they were safely through, and we breathed a sigh of relief.  We peppered them with questions on the VHF about how strong the current was, whether it was right on the nose, and whether there were any whirlpools.  They felt the current was about 4-5 knots, with a current was funneling down into a definite V-shape that we should aim the bow for.

At the entrance to the lagoon stood an ominous sign on the shore – Danger – Active Blasting, 24 hours a day, above northwest section of Booker Lagoon. The only thing we can figure is they’re blasting for logging roads, as we’ve heard there is quite a bit of logging going on there.

My attention was riveted on the passage, and besides, when you’re in the middle of it there’s very little of interest to photograph. This shot was taken from Flying Colours’ cockpit as we exited the extremely narrow passage. The swirling white water is from our wake, but I can assure you, there was a fair amount of current on our bow.

We’ve been taught over and over again that a boring passage is the safest – if it’s a white-knuckler, it’s not safe.  After Couverden went through, Kap decided to hang around a few minutes, and I concurred – which was still only 10 minutes, and several minutes before Kap estimated slack would be.  With a fair amount of trepidation, we entered the narrowest and shallowest passage we’ve been in so far in 5 years of cruising, and I know Kap’s heart was beating.

Here’s our chart plotter screen of Flying Colours as we headed into the bay on the SW corner of Booker Lagoon. Except for large logs and other flotsam that came in and went out with the tide, it proved to be a wonderful anchorage.

These are the size logs that floated in with each tidal flood, then back out with each ebb. This guy is easily the length of Flying Colours, and while he’d drift along very slowly with the tide, bumping against the hull in the night wouldn’t be good. We drifted into one like this with the dinghy while we were absorbed with baiting our prawn traps, and at a drift speed of about 1 MPH, it was a solid bump.

The next morning, this was our view to the east where Couverden was at an easy anchor, and the sun was struggling to rise and shine through the dense cloud bank on the hills. The white buoy at the lower right is our anchor sentinel – our mascot, and we’ve named him A-Oh, because that’s what’s written on him as a buoy model (sort of like Wilson in the Tom Hanks movie Marooned.

After cruising around the lagoon to find our best anchorage, we finally settled on the bay at the SW corner of the lagoon.  Depths were about 35’ there, and figuring a wind from the NW might give us a bit of a problem, we settled on 3:1 scope and dropped anchor.  Couverden came in after us and they anchored about 500’ away.

Prawning so far at Booker Lagoon has been fabulous!  There’s a “hole” right in the center of the lagoon that’s right at 300’ (295’ at low tide, and 305’ at high tide) – the perfect depth for spotted prawns.  We’ve set our traps six times now, for a daytime and nighttime soak each day.  In our freezer, we’re just about at our limit of 800 prawns that we can have in our possession – 400 per license, and we each have a license.  They are also the largest prawns we’ve had so far.

The best part is, the prawns taste wonderful too!  Kap cooked Lemon Garlic Prawns on the BBQ, and they were delicious.  I marinated them for an hour in a blend of spices, fresh lemon zest/juice, and fresh garlic.  They were served on a bed of wild rice, with roasted asparagus (also done on the BBQ).  It didn’t quite measure up to our Flying Colours Scampi, but came pretty close.

(In case you’re wondering why we would suddenly spend so much time and effort on prawning?  Well, I like prawns, but in all the grocery stores in the Seattle area – including Whole Foods and PCC – the only prawns to be found are from Thailand, Vietnam, or the U.S. Gulf.  I’m not enamored with the diligence of our USDA inspectors for international food chain operations, particularly seafood from places like Thailand and Vietnam.  As for the Gulf, the BP oil spill is still too recent, and the cleanup not yet complete enough, to make me want to eat seafood from those waters.  I’m not so sure I shouldn’t feel the same way about beef, pork, and chicken production in the U.S., but I haven’t yet found an alternative that works for me.)

Lastly, should you be curious about whether ZuZu is enjoying her cruise so far – well, the photo of her sleeping on the salon sideboard should give you an indication.  She still ducks into her hidey hole the moment she senses we’re about to start the engines and get underway – and doesn’t show herself again until the engines are shut down.  But when were at anchor, she’s definitely a contented cat.  So far, we’ve seen only one eagle, so our concerns about her roaming the deck are lower than in previous years.  ZuZu is definitely a good boat cat!

After a quick 10-day trip home to take care of family and other business, we returned to April Point Marina on July 4^th via Kenmore Air and are now aboard Flying Colours.  After a day of provisioning and getting settled in, we departed early the next morning and are now at one of our favorite spots – Blind Channel Resort.  We’ll be here for two days (maybe three if a storm out in Johnstone Strait doesn’t die down), then continue on to the Broughton Archipelago at the north end of Vancouver Island.

(Remember, you can click on any image to see an enlargement of it.  You can also view the blog post in a better format by logging online and reading it there.)

But let’s back up and see what led up to this.

After Cortes Bay, we settled on a nice marina called April Point to moor Flying Colours while we flew home on Kenmore Air.  It’s located on the west side of Quadra Island, on the east side of Discovery Channel from Campbell River.  Tucked into a little bay, it’s pretty well protected from the weather, and with a free boat shuttle service over to Painter’s Lodge – their associated fishing camp lodge – it’s relatively handy for getting to the stores for provisioning and supplies in Campbell River.

April Point Resort as we entered the bay. The April Point Marina is tucked into a small bay around the corner from the white cruising boat moored at a private dock on the left. The resort caters to people who just want to get away, with kayaks for rent, Vespa-type scooters to explore Quadra Island, and a spa for those who just want to get their nails and a facial done.

The April Point Marina looked almost deserted as we approached it – the last time we were here it was almost full of boats, but not this year.

We were moored at an inside dock, just across from the Marabell. The Marabell has been moored here since our first visit two years ago, owned by the Oak Bay Marine Group – who also own the April Point Resort and Marina, Painter’s Lodge across Discovery Channel, as well as about five other marinas up and down the Vancouver Island Coast, plus two or three large sport fishing boats. She's about 100' in length, and probably started life as some type of coastal ferry. Most recently, the Marabell has been in the sport fishing trade, serving as a floating lodge for a couple dozen fishermen, who were launched in small fishing boats by day, and brought back to the Marabell for meals and accommodation. She’s starting to look like a rusty old heap, but she’s probably still in pretty good condition – and is for sale to anyone who might want to set up a guest fishing lodge.

In the last weeks before the trip home, we’d been getting word that Raz wasn’t doing well at “the spa” – the kennel near Sea-Tac where we left Raz and ZuZu together in a “suite” – their own private room that’s about 4’x8’ and sports a small human-style bed for Raz to sleep on, a cat tree for ZuZu, a TV on the wall to watch Disney animal movies in the evening, and windows to look out.  She was depressed, shaking like a leaf, and chewing everything in sight.  We had her taken to the vet for examination, but nothing physically wrong was found, and she was prescribed a very low dose of Alprazalam, a drug used to calm anxiety disorders.  This bothered us a lot, as it’s very unlike Raz, and we felt there were other causes.

Because of the situation with Raz, a change in decision was made for the next month’s cruising – we’ll take both Raz and Gator to stay with Kelly Brammer for July, who runs an in-home boarding facility down in Bonney Lake (near Enumclaw) – we call it Camp Kelly.  We’ll bring ZuZu back with us on the boat.

This change necessitates a considerable amount of cat glimp that we need to get in Campbell River – a litter box, litter, storage bins for food, cat food, and of course, toys to keep ZuZu occupied.  We’d have to get across to Campbell River to get all that stuff, as it couldn’t fit with our luggage constraints on Kenmore Air.

We had an extra day to kill at April Point, so Kap and I rented Vespa-type scooters for three hours at the resort and toured the island.  Not having transportation is one of the downsides to cruising, particularly when so many places that we visit are very hilly and not conducive to bike riding.  The scooter also allowed us to stop at the Quadra Island grocery store about 4 miles from the marina, and we packed home a good portion of the non-perishable provisions we’d need for the next month’s cruising.

We also took the resort’s fast shuttle boat across Discovery Channel to Painter’s Lodge at the north end of Campbell River.  Painter’s is a popular fishing lodge, and they cater to hundreds of fishermen who fly in for the salmon runs.

From Painter’s Lodge, we took a taxi into Campbell River and searched out every pet store in town for the stuff we’d need for ZuZu.  Between the four pet stores, we were successful in getting almost everything we needed.

We spotted this great sign at the head of the dock at April Point marina. It’s always nice to see a sense of humor.

Painter’s Lodge is a pretty fancy-schmancy fishing lodge on the Campbell River side of Discovery Channel (on Vancouver Island). The main lodge building has a large restaurant, bar, and lobby area. Behind the lodge are at least 6-8 additional lodge units, containing dozens more accommodations.

Both sides of the dock ramp have on-the-dock slips for the small fishing boats. Note that the fishing boats are up on the dock and out of the water. When a boat returns from a fishing trip, they first unload the fishing clients onto the dock from the bow, then the guide lines the bow of the boat up between two board ramps that are on center pivots, then guns the outboard engine and drives the boat right up onto the dock. As the boat rides over center, the ramps lay down flat on the dock, supporting the boat without the keel touching the dock.

Compare these two photos to see the origins of Flying Colours. The boat on the left is a 1972 Defever Alaskan trawler, serial number 2, built in Hong Kong.

Here’s Flying Colours at the dock at April Point Marina, taken from about the same angle as the Alaskan trawler. The design similarities are striking.

On the next dock from us was an interesting boat – which we thought at first might be a very early Fleming (i.e., like Flying Colours).  A couple live aboard her at April Point Marina, and when I stopped by to admire her lines, the couple came out to chat for quite a while.  The husband is a retired shipwright (i.e., marine wood carpenter), and his retirement project is to rebuild this classic wooden boat to like-new condition – and he has a long way to go.  We got to know him quite well, as he’s also the part-time dock caretaker who looks after people’s boats when they moor them here for long periods and return home.

His Alaskan was designed by a well-known Naval Architect named Arthur Defever, credited with originating the fishing trawler-look for cruising boats, and leading to hundreds of knock-off designs.  Anyway, the story we heard was that when Defever designed the Alaskan, he approached Grand Banks Yachts – who were building the famous Grand Banks trawlers in Hong Kong -  about buying his design.  Grand Banks demurred, and so Defever decided to build it himself, calling it the Alaskan.  The boat we were looking at was serial #2.

Shortly after that, Grand Banks decided to do a similar boat, and their designer was Tony Fleming.  They subsequently dropped the idea for whatever reason, and Tony Fleming quit and went off to Taiwan to develop his own brand of boat – and that’s when the Fleming 55 was born (this was in 1985).

Copying (or adapting) a proven boat design isn’t considered plagiarism in this business, and what Tony did was to improve considerably on the Defever Alaskan design, with the result that the Fleming 55 – such as Flying Colours – is now considered the benchmark that all other trawlers are measured against.  (It’s pretty amazing just how much of a traffic stopper Flying Colours is, and hardly a day goes by that other boaters on the docks come to see her, telling us that owning a Fleming is their dream. )

Kenmore Air flies right into April Point Marina, and we boarded the turboprop Otter right from the dock where Flying Colours was moored.  There was only one other passenger on board – don’t know where he was picked up – and our pilot said we had two more stops before heading south to the Kenmore Air base at the north end of Lake Washington.

With me in the co-pilot seat and Kap behind – and Gator getting his own seat next to Kap – we climbed out and headed east to Read Island, landing on Calm Channel to pick up our next passenger at a private residence dock.  It’s apparently a summer home for a Seattle couple, and she was heading down for a Nordstrom’s weekend (ooooh, that wasn’t very nice).  We took off again, heading north on Calm Channel, and landing in Big Bay to pick up a guy – again at his private dock.  Then we took off again and headed south, bypassing the normal Customs stop in Nanaimo, as everyone on board had a U.S. passport, and we were non-stop for Lake Washington.

Here’s what everyone needs for their next Inside Passage vacation – a catamaran float home that somehow conjures up the image of a bag lady pushing a shopping cart. This gem came in one night just before sunset and anchored in a mud bottom area about 100 yards from our moorage in April Point Marina. It’s apparently available for charter, and it might be quite comfortable, but I’m not sure how it would handle in rough seas.

While waiting for the Kenmore Air float plane to take us home, Gator checked out the airline's route map to see where we were going.

Gator was a really good sport on the flight home. There were only three passengers plus the pilot, with a total of 8 seats, so Gator got his own seat next to Kap. Kap tried foam ear plugs on Gator but he wasn’t thrilled about them. Luckily, the Turbo Otter isn’t nearly as noisy as the piston Beaver floatplane that we were expecting.

Along the flight route southwardfrom Big Bay, we passed Hole In The Wall Channel. We explored this narrow channel separating Maurelle Island from Sonora Island on our first cruise north in 2007. We were going “up the back way” to the Broughton’s that summer, and needed to wait for slack at Yuculta Rapids.

Here’s what Hole In The Wall looks like on the nautical chart – it’s the meandering blue sliver in the upper third of the chart, separating Maurelle Island to the south from Sonora Island to the north.

This is a pretty cool shot – totally unexpected, and from my iPhone camera. I aimed the lens through the front windshield of the Turbo Otter, figuring that the prop speed was no match for the shutter speed of my iPhone camera – and amazingly, it “stopped” the prop, most likely on several rotations.

In the distance is Dodd Narrows, just south of Nanaimo. This narrow slit of water is the faster way to get in or out of Nanaimo, eliminating a long passage around Gabriola Island. As it name implies, it’s narrow, forcing the flooding or ebbing tide to “rush” through it, creating havoc with boats passing through it at any other time than “slack” water – which is defined as the few minutes when the tidal current is switching from flood to ebb (or vice versus). Slack only occurs twice a day, so cruisers have to time their arrival at the narrows for the slack that suits their travel plans.

Here’s part of the reason we went home – to check on construction progress of our new house. This photo was taken on June 29th, and foundation excavation is almost complete. They’ve laid a shallow fill of 3-4” crushed gravel because the dirt beneath it turns to muck if there’s any rain between now and the time they get the foundations poured and the subflooring laid in.

July 4^th and it was time to return to Flying Colours.  This time, though, we were relegated to a wonderful and trusty old deHavilland piston-driven Beaver, which is a real pilot’s airplane . . . but probably a bit noisy for ZuZu.  She wasn’t happy at all being crammed into her small traveling Sherpa bag, and meowed even more than normal.  Check-in at Kenmore Air was expecting us with extra baggage, plus ZuZu, and we were directed to “Table #1” – Kenmore Air’s version of a departure lounge is a collection of picnic tables between two docks lined with float planes.  Our only other passenger on the trip north was a guy flying up to his fishing lodge on the west coast of Vancouver Island, so that’s the reason for the 6-place Beaver instead of an 8-passenger Otter.

This piston-driven deHavilland Beaver is our trusty steed for our return to April Point on July 4th. Just below the airplane’s nose you’ll see a dog standing there. She’s an Australian cattle dog, actually a Blue Healer, named appropriately, Blue.

Blue definitely runs the ramp operations for Kenmore Air flights departing from the North Lake Washington base. Blue runs around like crazy, showing passengers where their plane is, runs in tight circles on the dock as the plane is moving away, and grabs the tiedown ropes in her teeth. She has enough energy to make anyone want to take a nap after watching her for just a few minutes.

Again, for weight and balance reasons, I had the co-pilot’s right seat up front, while Kap sat behind with ZuZu – who had to remain in her Sherpa bag for obvious reasons.  Even with ear plugs in, the noise from the piston-driven 9-cylinder radial engine is jarring – and I can’t imagine what it must be for a cat, who isn’t going to stand for ear plugs no matter how much they benefit her.  I’m sure she dug out the pad in the bottom of her Sherpa bag, crawled under it and curled up as tight as she could to endure the two-hour flight to Nanaimo and Customs clearance.

I snapped this photo with my iPhone camera as we passed Roche Harbor on San Juan Island. Being July 4th, the place is swamped with boats for the fireworks late that night. Right in the center of the photo, and hidden by the hillside of trees is Henry Island, home of the Seattle Yacht Club outstation, one of the most popular in the string of 11 outstations owned by the club. For the 4th, they always have a huge family day, with upwards of 60 SYC member boats crammed onto the docks, and over 150 people for the weekend of BBQs and family sports activities. For two cruisers without kids (us), it’s a huge reason not to be there.

In Nanaimo, we landed at the Kenmore Air dock, where two Canadian Customs people were waiting to look over our paperwork and decide if they wanted to let us into Canada.  We deplaned, presented our passports, and the only additional thing they wanted to see was ZuZu’s rabies certificate.  After producing that, we got back on the Beaver and took off again, this time for the hour-long flight to April Point.  We arrived at 2PM, again on the same dock where Flying Colours was moored.

After our return to April Point, Kap constantly listened to the VHF weather reports from Environment Canada for wind and waves conditions in Johnstone Strait, plus she has a nifty program on her iTouch (and her laptop PC) called Predict Wind that gives very accurate localized wind forecasts.  The decision on when to leave was touch and go several times, and Kap agonized.  In the meantime, I rented one of the resort’s Vespa scooters and made two trips to the grocery store, hauling two bags of groceries on each trip.

That night for dinner, we splurged with our first Flying Colours special Shrimp Scampi dinner with prawns caught at Cortes Island.  They were excellent!  Hard as it is to grit our teeth and kill these guys, we pay homage to them when they taste so good.

July 5^th was reserved for final provisioning.  Our original plan was to put the dinghy in the water and scoot across to Discovery Marina in Campbell River.  That would have put us very near to the shopping areas we need to visit – but the weather forecast was for high winds on Discovery Channel, and along with strong current, it just didn’t seem prudent to be out there in our dinghy.  Instead, we took up the young marina manager’s offer to drive us to the BC ferry terminal a few miles south for the car ferry from Quadra Island across to Campbell River.

Upon our return to April Point, the docks had filled in quite a bit with new boats. Here’s Flying Colours tucked in on an outside dock.

Here’s what Seymour Narrows looked like on our Furuno Navnet 3D chart plotter screen as we approached Seymour Narrows. Slack was at 9:46AM, and at our current position, we’re about ten minutes ahead of that (the tidal current arrows show that we’re still facing a current against us, and it should turn to slack at 9:46). Approaching Seymour Narrows from the north is the Western Towboat, Ocean Titan. Behind us is a tug towing a log boom, but he’s going a couple knots slower than us, so he’s not a factor. Seymour Narrows is about ¼ mile wide, which seems like a lot . . . until you find yourself with several boats alongside, plus meeting other boats and tugs towing large things.

On my trip to SE Alaska in 2003 aboard the Western Towboat, Pacific Titan towing a barge, going through Seymour Narrows on our second night out was my first-ever encounter with a “narrows”.  I had no idea what to expect, and was totally clueless of what it would be like.  As we were passing Campbell River on that trip, I vividly recall the captain, Doug Myers, calling the owner of Western Towboat at home from his cell phone, as we were a bit late for going through Seymour Narrows from the time of slack.  I was in the tugboat’s pilot house (at least 40’ off the water) at the time, and Captain Myers told the owner about the situation, that it was an ebb current (i.e., flowing north, the direction we were going, so he’d have a following sea), and he said, “the current is at x knots (I don’t remember the number), and I’m not going through unless you give me a direct order to do so” – obviously a CYA situation, where if anything went wrong the onus would be on the shoulder of the owner.  They talked it over for a few minutes, and he apparently got the order, as the decision was made for us to go through.

In the minutes before we got to Seymour Narrows, Captain Myers reeled in the tow line to where the barge was maybe 125’ behind us – to give him more steering control over the barge as we made the turn into the narrows.

I had never before seen whirlpools like we went through – they looked like swirling funnel openings in the water.  The bow of the tug slewed from side to side like it was a matchstick – and this is a tugboat that weighs almost 200,000 lbs!  What I remember the most, though, is looking out aft pilot house window and seeing the tugboat’s stern underwater – yes, and a good foot of water washing over the aft deck – as the incredible water vortexes tried to pull us under.  I looked at Captain Doug, and while he was grim-faced, he was trying not to show any emotion, but I have a feeling he too was churning inside.

If the water in a narrows can do that to a 200,000 lbs boat, you can imagine what it can do to a 70,000 lbs boat like Flying Colours.

Here’s the Western Towboat (from Seattle), Ocean Titan, a 120’ tug – similar to the one Kap and I went to SE Alaska on in 2003 and 2006 – towing a 400’ barge partially full of containers (probably empty) and heading towards Seattle.

Here’s another shot of our chart plotter screen just as we entered Seymour Narrows.

And finally, here’s what going through Seymour Narrows should look like – at slack current, no whirlpools, and almost boring looking. We entered it at 1 minute past the official time of slack.

Kap had been worried about the conditions on Johnstone Strait.  The weather forecast was for freshening winds at about noon, and it’s not uncommon for the timing to be off.  As we continued up Discovery Channel beyond Seymour Narrows, the big question was what it would be like as we rounded Chatham Point and into Johnstone Strait.

Johnstone Strait runs from SE to NW along the top 1/3^rd of Vancouver Island, for a total length of about 68 miles.  Mountain ranges near both shores force the onshore wind from the Pacific into the strait, causing the prevailing winds from the NW.  Gale force winds – winds higher than 35 knots (about 41 MPH) – are fairly common, and they whip up what are called wind-generated waves that need to be treated with respect.

Today’s conditions couldn’t have been better.  Seas were calm, the winds stayed around 10 knots (mostly on our nose), and even though it was wind against current, the waves weren’t more than 1-2’.  Nevertheless, ZuZu tucked into her covered bed, with pillows shutting off both ends so she couldn’t see anything, and slept the entire 3-hour cruise to Blind Channel.

Here’s the Blind Channel docks when we arrived – empty except for one sailboat, plus Flying Colours.

After her first day aboard Flying Colours while cruising this year, ZuZu needed a good rest to calm her nerves. One good place to do that is to squeeze into the nice warm wedge between the pilot house dashboard and the main windscreen.

The weather forecast was better for Wednesday night than Thursday, so we booked a Wednesday night dinner reservation at Cordero Lodge. The dining room at the floating resort is tiny, with seating for fewer than 20, and we had the place all to ourselves. The triangular things hanging from the ceiling are hundreds of yacht club burgees collected over 30 years.

The view of Cordero Lodge as we head home after dinner. It was really sad to know this is our last summer to have a wonderful German schnitzel dinner here, and we really hope they’ll find a good buyer for it. Everything here is on floating docks, but they have shore access so guests can use the hiking trails.

Kap driving us back home after dinner. The night was warm, but at 18 knots and on the water, it’s still cold enough that you really welcome a jacket.

This shoreline along Erasmus Island (on Cordero Channel) illustrates the challenges of being at anchor when we have the dogs aboard – getting them to shore twice a day to do their “business” is really difficult when there’s simply no place to land the dinghy on a beach. Dense stands of Douglas Firs line the shore, with branches that hang 10-12’ over the water, and vertical rock faces rise directly from the water. Dogs who haven’t grown up aboard a boat often have a very difficult time accepting the idea of using a little patch of grass in a “pup head” on the boat’s deck – that’s definitely true for Raz and Gator – and they’ll hold it for days and wait until we get someplace where they can go ashore.

Blind Channel is on the eastern end of West Thurlow, and is about as remote as you can get out here in this wilderness. The only access is by boat, and the nearest town is Campbell River, 15 miles away, first down Johnstone Strait, then through Seymour Narrows, and into Discovery Passage.

Scotty, the summer hand working the guest boat dock and fuel dock this year, is weighing our BBQ propane tank. Back home, they’d have a fuel gauge that measures exactly how much it’s filled with. Here’ he carefully weighs the tank before to find out how full it is, then fills it with the appropriate weight of propane indicated by the weight bar floating to the middle of the scale. Not very high tech, but it’s how you do it in the boonies.

The gas/diesel/propane barge sidles up to the fuel dock to pump fuel into their underground tanks. Amazingly, this barge carries up to five “cruise” passengers on its rounds during the summer months – five day cruises that really give the guests an idea of what it’s like at these remote “resorts”.

It looks like we’ll spend three days at Blind Channel.  The more we listen to the weather forecasts, the more it convinces us we want to stay put until the winds die down.  On Thursday (July 7^th), there were again gale force winds on Johnstone Strait, and in the afternoon we had a sustained gust at our dock that measured 30 knots on our anemometer.  It’s usually pretty well protected from winds in Blind Channel, and this surprised everyone here.

Throughout the day, more and more boats arrived, reporting how nasty it was out on Johnstone Strait.  It’s either bad timing, or impatient boaters who only have a couple or three weeks holiday to get where they’re going – but we’re always surprised at the number of boaters who are out in that kind of weather.  I sometimes get frustrated at Kap for her cautiousness, but as a result of it we seem to have fewer bad days on the water – when we do, it’s usually due to circumstances beyond our control (like last year when we had to leave Gorge Harbour in gale force winds because their docks were full).

We spent most of the day fiddling around with Flying Colours’ tasks – refilling the propane tanks for the BBQ, doing laundry – and chatting with other boaters on the dock.  We’ve also gotten to know some of the young staff at Blind Channel – really hardworking college-age kids who take summer jobs here and return every year.  A young guy working the docks, Scotty, isn’t a college student right now, but told me he’s out getting some “life experiences” for a few years, and has promised his parents he’ll head for college by the time he’s 25.  Another young guy and a gal are college students – he’s the noontime short order cook at a BBQ stand the resort set up on the patio outside the General Store; she works behind the counter in the General Store.  All of them fill in during slow hours doing various yard and garden work around the resort, plus fill in bussing tables at night in the restaurant.

They call their restaurant the Cedar Post Inn. It was built back in the 60s or 70s by the original generation of Richters here at Blind Channel, and it’s run by their grandson and his wife. The food is excellent, with a couple of fresh seafood dishes from the local area, three German dishes (schnitzel, roulladen, and goulash – all excellent), appetizers (locally caught spot prawn cocktail), and salads and soups.

Along the shoreline bank there’s a new (since two years ago) patio and lunch BBQ area. We were here when 3rd generation Eliot Richter was laying the stonework for the patio – and as he chatted with us he commented that he’d just laid brick #900 something. At the time, the BBQ was done from a grill wheeled out each day, but since last summer they’ve now built a little BBQ kiosk to keep out of the hot sun, wind, and rain. The open-air structure at the far left was built last summer, with the construction timed just right for the wedding of Eliot’s wife’s (Laura) sister to get married in – and now it’s a Happy Hour gazebo. To construct this, all of the materials were either hauled in on the weekly barge, or brought out from Campbell River in their 16’ runabout.

We’ve also gotten to know the family that owns Blind Channel – four generations of the Richter family who live here – starting with the 85+ year old grandfather who created the resort at least 50 years ago.  He’s retired now and we rarely see him, except for an occasional visit to the restaurant at night.  In the next generation down, the 50-year old Richter son (sort of a dour guy) manages the General Store, while his wife does the daily baking of bread and cinnamon rolls for the store and restaurant.  The third generation couple are late 20-somethings or early 30-somethings, are the new blood for the resort, having returned three years ago from good jobs in Vancouver, deciding this is a lifestyle they’d prefer to raise their family – a 2-year old and another on the way that represent the 4^th generation.

The amazing thing about this operation is how remote it is, and therefore, what’s required to run an operation like this.  It’s located on West Thurlow Island – about 10 miles long from west to east, and 4-5 miles wide – located across Johnstone Strait from Vancouver island.  Outside of the Richter family at Blind Channel (which is maybe a total of seven people, plus another 4 summertime college students), the population of the island is virtually zilch, with no roads whatsoever on the island (other than logging trails), and the only access is by boat.  They provision the General Store and restaurant entirely by weekly trips in a 16’ runabout, zipping across Johnstone Strait to a landing on Vancouver Island where they’ve stashed a car.  From there they drive 15 miles south to Campbell River, returning with the boat filled to the gunnels with food and supplies.  Once a week a fuel barge stops by to fill their gas and diesel storage tanks at the fuel dock, and then runs onto the shoreline with its landing craft front ramp to refill the propane tank on shore.  Kenmore Air and B.C. Air floatplanes fly in every other day or so, neither with any supplies, but rather, guests arriving and departing on cruiser’s boats at the dock.

It’s definitely a lifestyle choice, and one that suits some people fairly well, and we’re glad there are people who will do this.  We try to support them as much as we can, and they’re here to support us – what a mutually beneficial arrangement!  It always amazes us to hear people complain about the prices for fuel, provisions, and meals that they have to charge in these areas – I guess they figure all this stuff grows on trees out back, or there’s a Wal*Mart just down the lane.

After tonight’s final dinner at Cordero Lodge, we’re hoping to head tomorrow morning for Loughborough Inlet (pronounced lock’-burro).  The plan is to anchor in a small inlet, called Beaver Inlet, about three miles up Loughborough, and see what our success is with prawning there.  The area is reputed to be very good for prawning, and if all goes well, we might land a good batch for our freezer.  We’ll also be completely out of cell phone range, plus no Internet, so I won’t be posting anything further until we reach civilization again.

It was really peaceful in Garden Bay, deep inside Pender Bay on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.  For several days the weather forecasts had been for high winds out on the Strait of Georgia, and we were content to stay put.

This is what several of our days at Garden Bay looked like – calm, overcast, often with a light misty rain falling. This shot is looking across Garden Bay from the outstation. The Royal Vancouver Yacht Club's outstation is the gray building to the left of center. The pub is the red building to the right of center.

One evening after dinner we were watching the sunset get better and better. Suddenly, a lady at a nearby dock climbed into her small rowboat and passed behind us, very obviously on a mission. I instantly knew it would be a great photo as she passed by our stern, and as you can see, it’s pretty close to being a photo competition candidate. It was quiet enough that she could hear the fake shutter sound on my Nikon digital camera, and when she looked over I apologized for taking her photo without asking, but told her that I only had a moment to shoot and decided to take it first and ask later. She rowed over to talk with us and we had a good ten minute conversation. She lives just a short ways away on the water, and she rows over every night to see an elderly friend. Sure enough, every night we saw her come and go. (This photo isn’t Photoshop’d in any way – it’s exactly as I downloaded it from my camera.)

(Don’t forget, you can click on any image to see an enlargement of it.  You can also view the blog post in a better format by logging online and reading it there.)

The last time we were here was in 2007 with Cosmo Place, our 42’ Nordic Tug, and it was our first-ever summer of cruising.  When we departed Garden Bay and turned north in the Strait of Georgia to head for Desolation Sound, all hell broke loose, with huge waves and high winds that we’d never experienced before.  After crashing through this for a half hour, with both dogs and the cat taking cover for their lives, we headed back to Garden Bay.  On the way, we hit two logs in the water, not more than five minutes apart, both perpendicular to us and floating in the wave troughs – making them impossible to see.  Back in Garden Bay we hired a diver to take a look at Cosmo Place’ hull and running gear to see if we had any damage to the hull, prop, or prop shaft – we didn’t but were extremely lucky.  Two days later we made our second departure and had a good run in much nicer weather to Desolation Sound.  We hoped this year wouldn’t be a repeat.

Earlier in the day (same day I took the sunset photo), I took Gator for a walk.  It was intended to be just up the nearby road a ways to give his (and my) legs a bit of exercise.  We ended up walking to the other side of Garden Bay to a tiny settlement that contains the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club Outstation, a couple of restaurants, a small marina, a very small general store, and a ramshackle hotel.  It was a good two-hour walk, and I think I tired poor Gator out.

During our walk, I came across three different properties that had this very strange flowering plant growing in it. I’ve never seen such a plant before, with cone-shaped leaves that are at least 18-24” in diameter, and with foliage near the stalk that looks like fern.

At the pub, I found one under a tree outside, and it had a sign in front of it (click on the photo to see the enlarged version). As you can see, the sign says “Gunnera Manicata”. When I Google’d that name, I found it’s a Brazilian plant of the giant rhubarb variety. That’s a new one!

This photo looks back across Garden Bay to the Seattle Yacht Club Outstation – Flying Colours is in the very center of the photo, but there’s no way to make it out at this resolution.

The Royal Vancouver Yacht Club Outstation clubhouse.

The John Henry general store in the tiny Garden Bay settlement. It had more bait and tackle than foodstuffs.

As I was working on dinner one evening – and Kap was in the cockpit straightening things up in the lazarette as she’s wont to do – she called out for me to come outside. An eagle was diving on a family of geese just 100' off our stern, presumably a mom and pop, and three goslings. As it repeatedly dove from about 100’ above the water – obviously aiming for the goslings, but missing each time because the parents were loudly issuing orders to the goslings to dive underwater for safety. I just knew the eagle would come up with a gosling in his talons, but was very relieved it wasn't successful. Soon a second eagle joined in. They might have tired from the strenuous dives and climbs, as they soon headed for a treetop on the shore. They chatted loudly for several minutes, sounding like they were frustrated, either with each other, or with the family of geese now paddling away as fast as they could to safety. (The eagle’s voice is not consistent with the majesty of the bird – it’s high-pitched, almost squeaky, and isn’t melodic at all. It is distinctive, though, which is rather fortunate for us when we have ZuZu on board.)

Finally, after four days of reported high winds on the Strait of Georgia, Kap decided it was time to go – it was Wednesday, June 15^th, and Desolation Sound was calling us.

As we neared the entrance to Pender Harbour, the day was so calm, little wind, and skies a bright blue, we knew the odds were in our favor that we’d have a good ride to Desolation Sound.

We were up at 5AM, and with a suggested best time of 7:30 from our Nobeltec chart plotting software, we left the docks at the Seattle Yacht Club Garden Bay Outstation at 7:25AM.  Sure enough, it was calm as we pulled into Malaspina Strait – the mile-wide passage between Texada Island and the mainland.

A few miles north of Pender Harbour is Jervis Inlet, a quite large inlet, with one arm leading through Skookumchuck Narrows to Sechelt Inlet, and a lot of water to ebb into Malaspina Strait on the outgoing tide. We were on a spring tide, and the swift flowing current can create a lot of eddies and whirlpools in Malaspina Strait, as well as clusters of logs and other debris that’s lifted off the shorelines.

We were catching an ebbing tide that gave us a 2 knot push, so this was a good excuse to throttle back, save a bit of diesel, and enjoy the free ride that mother nature was giving us.  There’s no free lunch, though, and at the entrance to Jervis Inlet we were on the lookout for strong eddies and whirlpools that are created out in Malaspina Strait by the rushing water flowing out of Jervis Inlet.  The previous spring high tide would likely have lifted logs and debris off the shorelines too, so we were on the watch for logs in the water.

Skookumchuck Narrows, inside Jervis Inlet, is a very narrow neck that connects Jervis Inlet and Sechelt Inlet.  It’s so narrow and constricted that the tidal difference between the two sides is huge and the current clocks through it as high as 16 knots.  It’s a kayaker’s paradise, with a standing wave that defies belief.  I received a link from an SYC member to a very interesting video shot by some kayakers a couple of years ago, showing what can happen even to larger craft if they aren’t careful in Skookumchuck Narrows.  The tug driver is lucky to be alive.  Take a look at it at:  http://dashpointpirate.typepad.com/the_dash_point_pirate_woo/2009/07/video-of-tugboat-capsizing-at-skookumchuck-narrows.html.  Turn your sound on and you’ll hear the kayaker who’s filming it.  The jet engine sound you hear a minute or so into the video is the tug’s engines racing when it’s upside down and the props are out of the water.

The Skookumchuck Narrows had also unknowingly given Kap fits for the past several days as she tried to plot our course to Desolation Sound while waiting out the weather in Garden Bay.  The Narrows are only a few miles north of us – over land, at least.  As Kap plotted our course along Malaspina Strait (and then the Strait of Georgia) between Garden Bay and Desolation Sound, the Nobeltec software kept giving her very screwy course times and best departure times.  I could hear lots of blue comments coming out of the pilot house as she wrestled with the problem, and knew I should keep my head low and let her sort out whatever the problem was.  Finally, she figured out that good ‘ole Nobeltec was using the closest currents in its calculations, and since Skookumchuck was physically closer to us than the currents out in Malaspina Strait, it was using them in its calculations.  Once she figured that out, she could tell Nobeltec to ignore that current and use the next closest one – in Malaspina Strait.

Cruising to Desolation Sound was just as we like it – smooth and easy-going. Ahead on the left is Discovery Channel, with Campbell River on the left, the snow-capped mountains on Vancouver Island, Quadra Island directly ahead, and Desolation Sound to our right.

The five hour cruise to Desolation Sound was without a hitch . . . and smooth – just as we like it.  By 1PM we were approaching Cortes Island, with plans to moor for a few days at the Seattle Yacht Club Outstation in Cortes Bay.  To our amazement, as we approached I put the binoculars on the dock and saw there wasn’t a single boat there.  Either the weather, the economy, or the price of fuel was keeping boaters home this year, at least early in the season.  Our bet was they were staying closer to home this year.

The minute I open the pilot house doors to set up the lines and fenders, Gator wants out on deck and usually heads straight for the bow. He seems to know that the SYC outstation is on the left as we enter Cortes Bay.

There are a couple dozen waterfront houses scattered around Cortes Bay, and obviously one or more of them don’t like the inconsiderate boaters who race in and out, creating waves that erode the waterfront. This sign is at the entrance to Cortes Bay.

The second outstation in a row – when we arrived there was absolutely no one there, and we’d have the place all to ourselves . . . at least for a short time.

So much of what we do is conditioned on the tides and currents, and this is something newbie boaters to the Northwest really have to pay close attention to.  In California, for example, tidal differences are barely a foot, and on the East Coast of the U.S. it can be even less.  And obviously, on fresh water lakes, there’s no such thing as tidal effects, so the whole concept is new when going from fresh to salt water boating.  (See the nearby two sets of comparison photos to see just how significant high and low tide are at this latitude.  We were at a “spring tide”, so the effects are a foot or two more than normal for the rest of the month.)

A shot from the floating dock to the SYC clubhouse. It’s a low spring tide, so note how steep the ramp is from shore down to the floating dock. At high tide, the water line is over 15’ higher, and the ramp is almost level. This is why an astute person waits until high tide to haul trash to shore or to bring provisions down to the boat.

Here’s another shot from the same spot, taken at high tide – the ramp ashore is almost flat.

Here are two before/after shots shat show the increasingly low/high tide differences as we continue north (in SE Alaska, the tidal differences are a full 25’). The floating docks are anchored by 16” pipes sunk deep into the bedrock in the bay. At low tide (shown here), the tops of the pipes are higher than Flying Colours. This photo was taken at 1:39PM.

Here’s the same photo, but taken at high tide at 6:56PM, five hours later. The tops of the pipes are only halfway up on Flying Colours.

Sure enough, our new friends, Doug and Barb Crim arrived the next day in their Nordhavn 50’, Seaclusion, followed by the new SYC member they’ve just sponsored in her 36’ Grand Banks, the Hattie C. They were also at Garden Bay with us, and Doug has been giving us tips on prawning techniques.

Kap spent the better part of the day working on our prawning equipment and figuring out how we’ll get all that glimp into the dinghy on the way to/from the prawning locations, as well as how to manhandle the gear as we set and retrieve the traps.  We’ve reached the conclusion that our current dinghy just doesn’t do the job if we’re going to stay serious about the prawning, and we’re looking at a different make and model that we might get this fall – a Boston Whaler Sport 11 or 13.

Kap has the dinghy arrangement almost figured out – but it’s going to be cramped with all the prawning glimp aboard. Thanks to Bill Schmidt at Yacht Masters NW for getting our prawn trap puller (an Ace Line Hauler) mounted last winter – without that, we’d probably give up on the idea of pulling two 20+ lb traps up from 350’ water depths. And an even bigger thanks to Kap’s brother and sister-in-law, Elliot and Michele, for giving us a matching pair of “foulies” – actually, they’re rubberized flagman suits, but being lightweight they are perfect for the prawn trips in the dinghy, where you not only get wet, but it keeps us protected from bits of detritus from the incredibly icky prawn bait.

Kap is really good at the fiddly aspects of getting all of the prawning glimp sorted out. Here, she’s sorting out the prawn trap lines, including exactly where to place the lead weights that will ensure extra line isn’t floating on the surface to foul a passing boat’s prop.

Our 11'-6" dinghy is so cramped for what we're doing that on the way out to the prawning area, Kap has to ride with the prawn traps on her lap.

One by one, Kap sets up the bait in the bait holders – the orange plastic cups with lids – then closes them up in the net webbing in the center of the trap and closes up the overall trap netting. The squeeze bottle in her hand is the foul smelling anchovy oil that (presumably) creates the feeding frenzy that attracts the prawns to our trap.

Finally, on Friday morning it’s time to set our prawn traps on our own for the first time.  Kap is most familiar with how the lines are all set up, so it’s decided she’ll be in the bow of the dinghy and I’ll drive.  Our dinghy is right at the minimum size to handle all this, so she ends up with the prawn traps on her lap as we drive out of Cortes Bay and over to Twin Islands where the local favorite prawning area is.

Prawns tend to live at about 300’ water depth, and all of the pundits tell us they get best results if they set their traps on a seabed slope that’s going down from 300’ to about 350’.  There are several such “holes” just off the Twin Islands nearby, so we head for these.  We have a Garmin “fish finder” GPS that’s console mounted on our dinghy drive console, and hooked to a sonar transponder.  The little 5″ color screen shows underwater depths, and most importantly contour lines of the changing sea floor.  As we cruise along, it’s just a matter of watching the depth sounder console and it will lead us directly to the best spot to drop our traps – that is, if we know what we’re doing.

When we get to the area, there are already two orange floats on the surface, marking prawn traps set by a commercial fisherman.  Protocol is to drop your traps somewhat away from other traps in the area, first so as to not lay your line (and the traps) over the existing traps, and second, to not diminish the prawns that the nearby trap might otherwise get (there’s enough down there for everyone).

We cruise around until we find just the right spot, and Kap gets to work setting up our traps with bait.  This is a messy job, and you really don’t want to get any of it in the boat as it makes a mess and it’s hard to clean up – besides which, it smells to high heaven.  You start with “prawn pellets” – some incredibly putrid pellets that look similar to rabbit droppings (which have been soaking in some equally putrid “prawn scent” that we bought at a local outfitter store in Anacortes).  Then you add some canned cat food, and finish it off with a squirt of the foulest stuff of all – anchovy oil that we got at place Steve Clark (of Couverden) knows about in Victoria.

All of this “stuff” goes into a bait can that’s sealed with a lid and has small slits in the side to let the dissolved food escape into the current – and hopefully attract the little prawn guys.  They pick up the scent and scramble over to the trap, where they cleverly find little openings – net gateways into the trap that are about 3” in diameter – then crawl through to get at the food, only to find that they’re now trapped in our trap.  It must be incredibly frustrating for these little guys, being so close to the food but can’t get to it – and worse, they now can’t get out because they don’t understand the little one-way openings – but it’s the only practical way to catch them.

Kap’s rubber chicken keeps watch over our prawn trap. The origin for this idea came from a prawn trap buoy that we’d see year after year on the channel into Ganges in the B.C. Gulf Islands. From a distance it always looked like a rubber chicken floating on the water, and only when we got close to it did we see that it actually wasn’t, but rather, just a float with some “stuff” on it.

Then, it’s over the side for our prawn traps.  We’re using two traps on a single line to the surface.  The traps are tied together by a 50’ polypropylene line, and they presumably settle to the sea floor that distance apart – the theory being that we increase our prawn catch.

It’s not legal in U.S. waters to “gang” traps together like this, but in Canadian waters, under a recreational fishing license, up to four traps may be fished on a single ground line – and the regulation allows up to four traps per fisherman.  Commercial fisherman have totally different regulations, and they often fish a multitude of traps on a single ground line.  (If you’re interested in this, complete regulations can be found at:  http://www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fm-gp/rec/law-loi/gear-equipement-eng.htm.

The last thing to go overboard is the surface float that brings your trap’s ground line to the surface.  These can be a navigational hazard that you constantly have to watch out for, and fisheries regulations spell out what’s required.  We chose a fluorescent yellow surface buoy, with a second buoy attached to it that Kap (with her crazy sense of humor) mounted a rubber chicken on from Archie McFee’s in Seattle.

After setting the traps, it’s back to Flying Colours, and we let our traps “soak” for two, four, six hours, or maybe even overnight.  When it’s time to retrieve them, we head back out.  The surface float is retrieved, unhooked from the line, and the line to the bottom is run through the pulleys on the electric hauler sitting right next to me at the dinghy drive console.

A trap is hauled in and we get our first look at the catch – this time it’s about 20 prawns that you can see in the bottom left of the trap.

Pulling hand-over-hand on the line with just a couple of pounds of pull, the puller brings the line in with incredible ease compared to hauling it up by hand.  The line is “flaked” – basically, just dropped – into a 5 gallon bucket as it comes in, and it’s ready to be let out when the traps go back down, without any tangling of the line.

When the first trap is on the surface, Kap hauls it aboard and we get our first glimpse of what we’ve caught – it looks like about 20 prawns in this trap.  The trap netting is opened up, and the first order of business is to remove the bait can, and get it safely in another 5 gallon bucket where it can’t make a mess.  Then, with gloves on, the shrimp are taken out by hand and dropped into a third bucket filled with salt water.

Then, with the first trap tied off on a cleat at the dinghy bow, the second trap is hauled in and the process of removing the bait can and removing the shrimp repeats.  (Oh, I forgot to mention – a tradition that we picked up from Steve and Shirley – on the way out, a wager is made between us on how many prawns we’ll get.  The closest to the correct number is paid a loony – a Canadian dollar.)

On our first trap retrieval, we had a total of 32 prawns – not a large catch, but certainly better than our previous best from last year – when we got one measly prawn (using the wrong prawn traps was our conclusion).

Kap is just about to snap the head off one of the prawns.

This prawn in Kap’s gloved hand is easily 7-8” from head to tail.

Then the hard part begins – snapping the heads off the poor little guys . . . an indispensable aspect of being a carnivore when you’re hunting and gathering your own food.  The task falls to Kap, as she’s in the only position to do it (don’t worry, I get my own duty later).  We learned how to do this last fall when prawning with Steve and Shirley – you hold the body in one hand, grasp the head with the other, and with one quick twist you snap the head off at the joint with the body.  It took me a while to get up the nerve to do it the first time, but it gets easier . . . particularly if you tell yourself each time that it’s worth it when you get to eat it.  I’m loathe to kill anything, so I’m a real hypocrite when it comes to being a carnivore.

Some of the prawns we got were outstanding – about ½ again the size we were getting with Steve and Shirley last year in Desolation Sound.

Back on Flying Colours, my task is to fully rinse the prawns in fresh water, then cool them down as quickly as I can by putting them into plastic containers (we reuse soup containers that we’ve brought our favorite soups in from Metropolitan Market in Seattle).  About 20 prawns fit in a container, and it goes into the fridge – drained of water as much as possible.

This photo shows a batch of prawns still in the shell. Note the color - they're the color that most people think of with already cooked prawns, but these are spotted prawns, and they're pink when they're raw, and turn more of a white when cooked. These guys are pretty good sized, and are definitely in the BBQ size category.

Here’s the whole day’s catch, shelled and ready to be frozen.

After shelling, they’re rinsed again – some people really like the pink syrupy goo that prawns give off, but not me, and I give them one last rinse – and then into a Ziploc bag that I can vacuum seal for the freezer. These are marked as 20 prawns from Cortes Island, and the date is 6/17/11.

The next day, my task is to sit down at the salon table, with the teak wrapped in Saran Wrap so that the fresh prawn juice won’t stain the wood.  Then, one by one I shell the prawns, including the tail.  The hard part is unwrapping those first 2-3 shell layers – holding the prawn in the palm of one hand, you have to gently get the thumb of the other hand under first shell layer by catching it with the fingernail.  You then work the back of the thumbnail around the prawn, peeling the shell layer away as you twist the prawn with the other hand.  This all has to be done gently, otherwise the fragile prawn body can get mangled.  At least 2-3 shell layers have to be unwrapped.  The easy part is next, when the prawn body is halfway unwrapped – you then squeeze the tail between two fingers and it “squirts” the body out of its shell, and the intestinal track is pulled out with it.  You don’t have to slit them down the back to remove this bit that isn’t too good to eat, as you do with store-bought prawns.

Then, after one last rinse in fresh water, a meal’s worth (for two) of prawns are bagged into a Reynold’s Handi-Vac  bag.  (These neat gizmos seem to have disappeared from the store shelves.  You could find two different brands and models in any supermarket, or at Fred Meyers or Target, five years ago, but for some reason they’ve disappeared.  I managed to track down three or four of them (to have spares on hand), and I’ve recently found the bags available on E-bay under the Debbie Meyer label (the green bag lady).  The bags are quite expensive, but the vacuum sealing is very easy, and the little vacuum hand-gadget is slick as a whistle.)

The prawns are only one layer thick in the bag, and when frozen they stack nice and compact in the freezer.  Each bag is labeled with the prawn count, where we got them, and the date – this is essential if you ever get boarded by a fisheries boat to ensure you have a legal limit on board.

The daily catch limit in B.C. is 200 prawns per fishing license (so since Kap and I both have a B.C. fishing license, we can bring up 400 total on any given day), and our total in-possession limit at any one time is 400 per license (or 800 total).  That’s a lot of shrimp, but it’s what we hope to have on hand by end of the summer.  (By the way, our annual B.C. fishing license costs C$115 each, so the cost per prawn for sport fishing is pretty pricy.)

Earlier in the day (same day I took the sunset photo), I took Gator for a walk.  It was intended to be just up the nearby road a ways to give his (and my) legs a bit of exercise.  We ended up walking to the other side of Garden Bay to a tiny settlement that contains the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club Outstation, a couple of restaurants, a small marina, a very small general store, and a ramshackle hotel.  It was a good two-hour walk, and I think I tired poor Gator out.

I think it’s safe to say that Kap and I have truly graduated to “hunter/gatherers” – at least for the shellfish that we eat.

Sunday, June 12^th.  With fair skies, light winds, and again a temperature of 57ºF, we pulled in our lines at the Nanaimo Yacht Club, and turned 90º to the north to make our way to Departure Bay to exit Nanaimo.

Late one afternoon we heard what sounded like turbofan jet engines low to the water, and when we looked around a Canadian Coast Guard hovercraft was making a close “flyby” behind us at the marina. We’ve never seen one of these out on the water before, and have a hunch the Coast Guard just got it.

It was obviously just a lookey-loo drive-by, passing about 50’ off the end of our dock, then gunning the engines, sending up spray behind them. I haven’t seen a hovercraft since my Air Force days in Belgium, when I took it across the English Channel a couple of times, then again in 1995 when I took my parents on a European tour.

Shortly after the Coast Guard hovercraft was out of sight, we looked up and saw a Canadian Orca class patrol vessel, the Caribou. She’s a training vessel, at 105’, and after watching her dock we could tell that most of the crew were Navy recruits. Two of her sister ships, the Raven and the Renard, were across the dock from us in Ganges during Canada Day last year.

(Click on any image to see an enlarged version.)

Our stay in Nanaimo turned out to be longer than planned.  The temporary fix using something called “life caulk” for our painful garfoso on Flying Colours’ starboard port window frame wasn’t curing, plus the weather forecast across the Strait of Georgia didn’t look good – strong winds and high waves – and that isn’t a crossing to take lightly.

On Thursday we made the move from the Port of Nanaimo Marina to the Nanaimo Yacht Club where we could get reciprocal moorage – first night free moorage, then ½ the price we’d been paying for any further nights we stayed.  There were only two other boats on the guest dock when we arrived, and we took the best location available.

While at the Nanaimo Yacht Club dock, some friends dropped by for expected hors d’oeuvres – but we had to tell them it wasn’t a good idea to feed them.

Friday night we cheered on the Vancouver Canucks in their Stanley Cup Playoff series with the Boston Bruins – when you’re in Canada and that close to Vancouver you have to root for the home team!  We were told the bar at the Yacht Club was open during the game, so we figured it might be fun to sit around with the local Canucks, as everyone in the region is in a frenzy over this (since Vancouver has never before won the Stanley Cup).  We stopped by at 5PM when the game was due to start – and the place was totally empty.  We decided to watch it back on Flying Colours.

Nanaimo and Victoria (and maybe Vancouver too) use these cute little water taxis. What a great idea!

By Saturday afternoon the life caulk seemed to be cured, and we felt it was OK to withstand heavy waves crashing into it on Sunday, so we got ourselves ready to go.

Luckily we got a call from Kap’s father in mid-afternoon wishing us a Happy Anniversary – both of us had totally forgotten it this year.  We quickly decided to celebrate with a very nice dinner of Steak Diane on Flying Colours.

Looking back along the channel separating Nanaimo on Vancouver Island and Newcastle Island.

We were up at 6AM Sunday morning to check the weather.  Our navigation software indicated a 10AM start was our shortest time, but with winds due to kick up in the afternoon Kap wanted to be out a bit before that.  After a morning latte, we hauled our garbage up to the dumpster, took Gator for one last walk, and decided to get out of Dodge.

The cruise across the Strait of Georgia was estimated to be about 3½ hours, ending at the Seattle Yacht Club outstation at Garden Bay.  With light winds and a clear blue sky along the inside channel of Newcastle Island, we figured it would be a smooth crossing.

As we turned eastward at the top end of Newcastle Island into Rainbow Channel, the wind picked up earlier than forecast and deep sharp-frequency waves began to pound us.  Suddenly, it looked like a repeat of our horrendous cruise out of Gorge Harbour (near Desolation Sound) last year.  We were in a wind against waves situation (i.e., the wind blowing in the opposite direction as the waves were running), which creates the steeper and rougher waves.

Kap immediately expressed concern and suggested we consider turning back to Nanaimo, or turning south and retreating to the Gulf Islands.  I felt the decision was premature, holding my counsel on it, and within a few minutes we were able to turn a bit northward after passing Five Finger Island and now riding the waves instead of meeting them head-on.  Things smoothed out considerably, although it was hard to maintain a straight course (even with autopilot) as we crested the tops of swells and rode into the troughs.  We could tell Gator wasn’t taking it very well, and he looked a bit green around the gills, and was looking for some comfort.

For an hour we rode out the wind and heavy seas as we traveled NE across the center of the Strait of Georgia.  As we passed the southern tip of Lasqueti and Texada Islands things smoothed out even more, and it actually became a pleasant cruise.  I took over the helm while Kap got the water maker system running to top off our fresh water tanks and brushed up on our detailed chart for Pender Harbour (where the Garden Bay Outstation is located).

The entrance to Pender Harbour is obscured by several islands blocking the channel. There are two openings wide and deep enough to go through – the larger and deeper one on the left where there’s a bouy marker – and we chose that one.

Even at the main entrance channel it’s difficult to visually see what’s inside Pender Harbour, as more islands block the view.

Once inside, though, it opens up and you suddenly realize this is a popular weekend retreat for Vancouverites, with summer homes lining the shore – many of them very nice and some very large.

On the approach to Pender Harbour, we passed between the tiny Martin Island and the much larger Francis Peninsula, and discussed the possibility of dropping our prawn traps at the spot Steve and Shirley had recommended.  Being our first time ever on our own for prawning, this seemed sort of risky, as it would involve mixing the messy bait in the teak-decked cockpit of Flying Colours.  If you spill any of that nasty, messy stuff on the teak it wouldn’t be pretty.  There are tricks to setting the pots in the exact right location – we’d heard that from all the old salts we’ve consulted so far – and it would be much more difficult from Flying Colours than from the more controllable dinghy.  We also didn’t feel comfortable about the weather conditions for the return trip by dinghy to retrieve the pots, so we opted out of that idea.

The entrance to Pender Harbour is dotted with islands, but with today’s electronic navigation charts it’s pretty easy to wind your way through channels that would otherwise have you constantly watching paper charts (which we still do, but not as our primary navigation aids).

We passed the Madeira Park Marina, with its Government Dock that provides dinghy tie-up service for the provisioning grocery trips.

On approach to the Seattle Yacht Club Garden Bay Outstation, we could see that all three docks were completely empty. We’d have the place all to ourselves!

On shore, the outstation consists of a very nice clubhouse with a covered BBQ patio area (at the head of the dock ramp), and giving quarters for the permanent outstation managers hired by SYC.

The Seattle Yacht Club Outstation is about halfway into Pender Harbour, at the NE tip of a small bay called Sinclair Bay.  From about ½ mile away I put the binoculars on the outstation to see if there would be room for us to moor.  I was incredulous that it appeared totally empty of boats.  Last time we were here was in 2007, our first year in the Seattle Yacht Club, at about this same time of year, and it was so full that rafting was required.  We figured that fuel prices and the poor summer weather we’ve had so far must have kept a lot of people at home.

Our solitary moorage on the three docks at the Garden Bay Outstation. You can’t get much more privacy in what’s otherwise an RV park.

We picked the best spot in the house and headed for it, still amazed at our good fortune.  It didn’t last long, though.  Within the hour we saw another boat coming in – a Nordhavn with a couple we know who keep it near Anacortes.  Behind them was a 42’ Grand Banks traveling with them.  We helped them at the dock, as is customary whenever another boat arrives at an SYC outstation.  We’d been advised by another friend to chat them up about prawning, as they’re very experienced – so this was a good time and place to meet up with them.

Throughout the afternoon, Kap worked on final details of getting our prawn pots ready for their first test.  The plan was to wait until tomorrow – hopefully when the winds and rain die down – and then head outside of Pender Harbour with the dinghy to set them.  We’ll see….

As I was in the middle of fixing dinner, two more SYC boats showed up.  While I slaved over the hot cooktop, Kap went out to help them tie up lines on the dock.  So much for having the place all to ourselves, but it still beats the 15+ boats that were in here on our first visit in 2007.

A Google Maps satellite view of Pender Harbour. This is taken from the Fleming Owners web site, and shows the location of Flying Colours as the red boat image.

Interestingly, the SPOT Current Location marker (marker #11 that’s visible now) puts us up on shore at the outstation.  The Fleming Owners Map that plugs the SPOT GPS coordinates onto a map also shows us up on shore – wich is strange as it’s the first time I’ve found their GPS positioning to be inaccurate.

Flying Colours moored at the outstation.

The SYC clubhouse from the top of the dock ramp.

An SYC member with a talent for Native American carving created a unique identification sign for every outstation.

The inside of the SYC clubhouse.

The BBQ patio outside the clubhouse. It’s nicer than we have at home!

The setting for what could easily be an award winning photograph was right from the dock where Flying Colours is moored. It’s a neighbor’s cabin and dock next to the SYC outstation.

Our solitude ended within two hours of our arrival, when four more SYC member boats motored in. The fourth, almost hidden by the three boats on the left, is a small-ish Grand Banks (36’ or so) that’s cruising single-handedly by a young woman who is a brand new member of the SYC.

Tuesday, June 7^th.  Under gray skies and a cool-ish temperature of 57ºF, we departed Port Sidney Marina at 9:22AM bound for Nanaimo.  Kap figured the tides and current to get us through Dodd Narrows at 2:28PM for slack water, so we needed to depart no later than 9:40 to get us there at our preferred cruising speed of 9 knots.

We departed Sidney with heavy gray skies threatening rain. Sidney is well known as a retirement community, with a very high geriatric population that rides around on motorized wheelchairs – so many, in fact, that they have “senior” parking rather than handicapped parking stalls, and more motorized wheelchair paths than bike paths. It was also the center of rum running to drop-off points on dark moonless nights to San Juan beaches during America’s Prohibition days.

If you’re reading this from the e-mail subscriber copy, I should point out that it isn’t all that easy to read.  Photo captions show up as regular text, so reading it is somewhat disjointed, and the formatting isn’t as good.  The e-mail is good for notification when a new post has been published, and if you have Internet access, you might want to logon to www.ronf-flyingcolours.com to read the actual blog post.

Also, click on any photo to enlarge it.

As planned, we’d spent a long 3-day weekend in Sidney, filling the fridge with enough provisions to last us until we head home for our first weeklong return trip on June 20^th.  Our best find was a German sausage deli that supplies meats to the Suisse Bistro in Sidney that we like so much – a place called Starkes Deli, located near the Victoria International Airport.

This gaff-rigged two-masted sailboat passed alongside us going south as we cruised northward from Sidney around Coal Island.

Steve and Shirley Clark returned Sunday night, and over cocktails we picked their brains on prawning techniques – in addition to giving us two meal’s worth of spotted prawns to tide us over until we can (hopefully) start pulling up our own.

Our route to Nanaimo takes us due north out of Sidney, then we turned west on Satellite Channel to head up the west side of Saltspring Island through Sansum Narrows.

This 3-way split-screen shot of our Furuno Navnet 3D navigation screen shows us entering Sansum Narrows (we’re the red pointy-boat near the center), winding our way through the Narrow’s S-curve. On our starboard side is Saltspring Island, and on our port is Vancouver Island. The close contour lines on Saltspring Island attest to the steep mountains that dominate most of the island. Around to the west from Separation Point on our stern is Genoa Bay (unnamed on the chart at this zoom level), where there’s a nice quaint resort and plenty of protected anchorage. Ahead and to our port side is Maple Bay, with another small marina that we’ve stayed at a couple of times in the past. Ganges – where I picked up our wine over the weekend – is on the east side of the island and at the head of the long inlet to the NE of our nose.

It’s surely raining outside as we pass through Sansum Narrows. The wind is also gusting to 20 knots and starting to whip up wind-waves. On our starboard and ahead is Mt Vesuvius, not looking at all like its namesake in Italy, but presumably reminding someone of it when it was named.

As we followed the channel up the west side of Saltspring Island, the winds rose more than forecast, with an apparent wind reading of up to 28 knots on our nose.  With our speed over ground at 8 knots, the true wind was 20 knots.  Rain was moderate but steady.  Kap was concerned about possible winds after we left the Narrows and announced she wanted to stop at the Seattle Yacht Club outstation on Ovens Island if the winds persisted.  Ahead, though, we could soon see lightening skies on our course.

As we continued into Stuart Channel, passing Chemainus on our port side and Telegraph Cove on our starboard, the sky turned blue, with light cloud cover, very calm seas, and it became a wonderful day for cruising.  Kap had been at the wheel for about two hours, and after fixing us a couple of sandwiches to snack on, I took over the helm.

By 1PM we could spot Dodd Narrows in the distance, and with slack water at 2:28PM it was obvious we were ahead of schedule and would arrive while the current was still flooding south through the very narrow channel separating Mudge Island from Vancouver Island.  I was at the helm and Kap was taking a much-needed snooze, and reduced our speed to a scant 5 knots – it’s more interesting to do that than arrive ahead of time and have to wait around.

Gabriola Island is quite a large island that lies off the east coast of Vancouver Island and in the Strait of Georgia. It would present a fairly narrow choke point by itself, but Mudge Island jammed into the south side of it makes it a serious narrows – called Dodd Narrows. While the Narrows is deep, the current sweeps through its dogleg bend at 9 knots – the speed we normally cruise at, and faster than most sailboats cruise under power. On our chart plotting screen, Flying Colours is the pointy red boat thing at the bottom of the screen. A red arrow is smack in the middle of Dodd Narrows, alerting us that the current is still running against us (and if you zoom in, it tells you the predicted current speed at the time). Boats waiting to transit Dodd Narrows from south to north gather around Round Island, normally queuing in the order of arrival, but there’s always some jackass go-fast boater whose life is “all about me”, and jumps the gun, roaring through at top speed and setting up a wake that all the rest of us then have to contend with. Behavior like that often brings a sarcastic comment on the radio about the boater’s parentage, but chances are, he (it's always a guy) doesn't have the radio on – and if they did, wouldn’t care.

Through binoculars, we could see at least five sailboats milling about, one with full sails up, tacking back and forth across Stuart Channel – at least he was having some fun while waiting for slack.  Another sailboat came through Dodd Narrows to the south, and with the 2 knot current figured he could maintain sufficient rudder control.

In past years, we’ve gone through Dodd Narrows without problem as much as ½ hour before slack.  We passed Round Island – about ½ mile before the entrance to Dodd Narrows at 2:00PM, and it was obvious the 5-6 boats ahead of us were going through.  The conga line procession, and after passing a sailboat ahead of us who was traveling 1-2 knots slower than we were, we too entered the line.  Kap asked if I was “up” to piloting us through the Narrows, and having done it two or three times before, I had no problem with that.  Normally, I defer to her to be at the helm, as it keeps me free to snap away with photos.

I snapped this photo as we entered Dodd Narrows, and just before Kap made our Securité call. Ahead, you can see two sailboats that we followed through. There were 3-4 boats behind us. From the looks of the sky and water, you’d think this was a glorious day. It was – at that moment – but almost immediately after we crossed through Dodd Narrows and into Northumberland Channel, the wind picked up and the sky turned angrier.

Normal protocol is to announce your entry to the Narrows with a Securité call, but we’ve noticed that sailboats almost never do – most likely because they don’t have their VHF radio handy at the helm station.  A 32’ power boat in the middle of the line made the call, mentioning that he was in the middle of a line of sailboats.

The sailboat that had been tacking back and forth in front of the narrows still had his sails up, and it became obvious he was going through under sail – a seemingly foolhardy stunt to my mind, as the wind is likely to be very variable as you wind through the S-curve of the Narrows, and the last thing you need is to lose rudder control in the very narrow and swift-running current.  Luckily, it looked like was going to hold back until actual slack, and we pressed ahead of them.

As we entered the Narrows, Kap picked up the VHF microphone and gave the Securité call:  “Securité, Securité, 62’ motor vessel entering Dodd Narrows to the north, in line with several sailboats . . . any concerned traffic come back on Channel 16.”

The current was running at just under 2 knots, and with the slower sailboats ahead of us, our speed through the water was about 5.5 knots, so we had good rudder control and could cover the ground at a good enough clip to make it through.  The electronic charts make it very easy to see exactly where the deepest part of the channel is, so passing through the Narrows is pretty easy – provided you don’t do anything stupid.

Once through the Narrows, Northumberland Channel opens into an expanse of water that’s ¾ miles wide.  The wind from the NW kicked up, and within a few minutes we were in 5-6’ seas.  On this trip, Gator has replaced ZuZu as our “rough-O” meter, and almost instantly he was pacing around in the pilot house looking concerned (since he’s low to the ground and can’t see out the windows, he probably gets a touch of seasickness).

There are a lot of ugly boats on the water, but this vessel takes the prize – not even its designer could love this one. As we passed it at anchor on the SE shoreline of Protection Island outside Nanaimo, we wondered exactly what it could be, concluding that it was most likely a drilling rig of some kind. Shortly after arrival at our moorage in Nanaimo, I downloaded e-mails and there was a cruise log from our friend Linda Lewis on Royal Sounder with the same photo in it. Sure enough, her caption was wondering the same thing, and her husband, Dave Parker thought “it is a Jack-up Oil Drilling Rig. The three similar towers end up being the legs of the platform. The triangular tower is the drilling rig. Why is this here? Dave thinks it is in transit to or from Cook Inlet, Alaska.”

Our usual moorage in Nanaimo has been the Nanaimo Port Authority Marina as it’s near a Thrifty grocery store and a BC Liquor store.  In fact we’d made a 2-night reservation to stay there, but after talking to Steve and Shirley in Sidney, we decided to try the guest dock at the Nanaimo Yacht Club – they have a reciprocal with the Seattle Yacht Club, giving us two free moorage nights instead of the $100/night we’d pay at the marina.  It’s not quite as close and convenient to city services, but with our provisioning already completed in Sidney, this shouldn’t be a problem.  We figured an advantage of early June cruising is the smaller number of boats on the water, and therefore, moorage options are better.

As we cruised into Nanaimo Harbour past the downtown buildings, we could tell with our binoculars that the entire 400’ outer dock that’s reserved for guest moorage was full.  When I’d called the night before, a club employee who answered the phone mentioned there was an empty member slip on the inside, and if the guest dock was full when we arrived, to call and remind whoever answered of this.  I called the club on my cell phone, and a woman who answered told me we could use slip #18 on D-dock.

The wind was blowing a steady 15 knots, and as we started to round the end of the guest dock to make our way into D-dock, we could see that it was a very tight turn – in fact, we’d have to make three very tight turns to get in, and Kap didn’t feel comfortable at all about doing making those turns with the wind.  We opted to bag the yacht club, and I picked up my cell phone and called the Nanaimo Port Authority marina to see if we could still get in there.  It was getting late in the day, so this was one of our few remaining options.

A young woman answered the phone and I asked if there was room for us on S-dock – the dock for boats over 50’ that don’t fit in the inner harbor.  Sounding very tentative, she asked what our overall length was, and I lied that it was 55’ – after all, we’re a Fleming 55, and 9 out of 10 other Fleming 55 owners save a few bucks by claiming their boat is 55’ – when in fact, it’s just a shade under 62’ when you include the swim step and bowsprit (both take up dock space, so I normally “do the right thing” and say we’re 62” and pay for that amount).  She put me on hold for a moment, then came back with a definitive statement that there was no room available on S-dock.  Somehow I didn’t believe her, but what could I do?

This photo shows where we originally tied up on the “large vessel dock”, normally reserved for boats over 85’ and with a high freeboard. The boat in the photo has a freeboard at the cockpit that’s almost a foot higher than on Flying Colours, and they are OK with the height of the dock.

That left no other options but the “large vessel dock” next to S-dock – and with our low freeboard (the height from the water line to the top of the cap rail), putting out fenders to protect us from the dock would be difficult.  I asked about it anyway, and she came back with a query about whether we had at least 4’ of freeboard.  Again, I lied and said we did, thinking that we’d figure something out.  I’ve seen other Fleming 55’s on that dock during earlier stays, but hadn’t paid attention to what they do.  I told her we’d head for the large vessel dock.

When we approached it, the wind was still blowing steady at 15 knots – directly abeam of us and blowing us onto the dock.  I was set up for a starboard tie with lines and fenders, but didn’t know how high to raise the fenders until we got closer to the dock.  Using the aft helm station, Kap backed us down the fairway, and as soon as our bow cleared the boat in front of us, she started to walk us sideways to the dock.  The wind pushed us faster than we expected, and we “kissed” the dock a bit harder than we’d like to, but the rubber rub rail near the top of the dock sufficiently held us off.

Unfortunately, the rub rail also hit right at the height of our hull port windows, and after getting safely tied up we noticed that it had significantly bent the chrome shroud around one port window, breaking the seal around the window.  With the seal in that condition, there’s no way we can leave until at least there’s a temporary fix.  We immediately got voice mail messages and an e-mail with a photo attachment off to Jeff Sanson at our Fleming warranty yard back in Seattle, as well as to Mike Radding (our technical specialist at Chuck Hovey Yachts in California).

Then we noticed that S-dock directly across from us had two empty sections on it – both with plenty of space for us to get Flying Colours tied up there.  I immediately called the Warfinger’s Office (that’s what the Canadians call the Harbormaster) and spoke to a guy on duty there, to ask if we could move over to S-dock.  “Sure, if there’s room, go ahead,” he told me.  Damn!  When I called 15 minutes earlier and talked with the obvious summer trainee college student, she didn’t know what she was talking about – and that cost us some expensive damage to Flying Colours.  I felt like having a few choice words with her.

Instead, we waited until the wind died down a bit, then untied Flying Colours and moved her across to S-dock.

Overall, it had been a 7-hour cruise for the day, and we were beat!  After taking Gator for a well-deserved walk to water the bushes, we left him on board and headed for Penny’s Palapa – a surprisingly good Mexican place on a floating dock next to the marina office.  We really needed a margarita!

Penny’s Palapa – a floating Mexican cantina tied up to a dock next to the marina office. They serve fresh lime margaritas, and although the menu is small, the food is always pretty good.

Next morning we learned that the fix to the damaged port window frame isn’t all that bad.  We’ve now calked the ¼” wide crack to seal it up, and have made plans to return Flying Colours to Sidney for our return home on the 20^th and it will be properly repaired at a Fleming warranty yard while we’re gone.