Home Sweet Shilshole

It's a day early, but Insegrevious is back in her slip on Q dock again and we're back in Seattle!

We had our slip sublet through today and weren't planning on being back until tomorrow... and only half of us at that, as Mandy was going to have been dropped off in Poulsbo to go up and feed the cat and retrieve our car from Port Hadlock.

I got an e-mail this afternoon from the guy who we had sublet to saying that he had been able to get into his new permanent slip a day early and was all moved in already. Mandy was feeling rather poorly and hankering for a bath anyway (no baths on the boat... not enough water and no where to soak!) so we hauled the anchor and headed up out of Agate Pass and across Puget Sound to home.

It was another beautiful day, after the fog burnt off this morning, and I was a bit sad to leave our idyllic anchorage. But we would have had to go tomorrow pretty early anyway, and possibly in the fog, so this was probably for the best; all we're really missing is another night in the v-berth, and we had forgotten our pillows anyway. Plus, with Mandy not feeling well, it was no sure bet I would be able to send her up to Hadlock anyway, and as she can't really dock the boat on her own, I couldn't go, either.

So tomorrow I'll have to get up early and schlep myself up there the hard way, via ferry and transfers across four different transit systems. I've been wanting to get that figured out anyway, since in the future it seems like it might not be an uncommon commute for us, but I wasn't really planning it on such short notice. It's a busy week, though, and I suppose one more thing isn't so terrible. The boat, at least, is some place close and secure, and we can focus on other things for a short while.

All you can eat

...and more, would be a good description of our first outing with the West Seattle Yacht Club at the annual Steak Fry in Brownsville.  This is a bunch of folks who know how to eat, drink, and be merry.  From the Friday early arrivals potluck to breakfast today, there was chow (and booze) aplenty, and a lot of genuine, jovial people enjoying themselves.

Neither Mandy nor I are by nature joiners, so we were relieved that things went so well this weekend.  We had a good vibe when we had dropped by another outing of the club's earlier in the year, and this confirmed it... it's not one of those snooty, jacket-wearing yacht clubs, but a working man's club with a little history to it, a bunch of people who have a good time on the water and have gotten organized about it.

It was not only our first outing with the club but our first time in Brownsville, and we're kicking ourselves for not having explored our own backyard a little sooner.  The Port of Brownsville is a charming, inexpensive marina in semi-rural East Bremerton (or thereabouts... I'm fuzzy on where the lines are all drawn on land) with friendly staff and tenants, great accommodations, and a lovely view.  Sunrise this morning (which I saw only because I volunteered to help cook breakfast; a sort of warm-up for a big family gathering in Idaho next weekend that we also plan to attend) over Port Orchard and Bainbridge Island, lighting up the patches of fog and a blue sky overhead, was beautiful.  We had a patch of rain on Friday night but otherwise the weather was terrific.

We met a lot of new and interesting folks, with boats and boating preferences as varied as are available in the Pacific Northwest, from sailors to trailer-boaters to people who just like boats but don't have one yet themselves.  We were at first a bit concerned that there are relatively few sailboat owners in the club but it became clear after a few conversations that there were many sailors-at-heart; as is often the case, former sailors "of a certain age" were members who had found it necessary to give up the labors of cranking winches and balancing on the weather rail for the safer and more practical realms of powerboating.

The whole thing really did remind me quite a lot of my own family gatherings and so I felt almost immediately at ease.  Mandy was a little more reserved at first but even she had loosened up by Saturday evening.

We're missing the next outing, coming up this next weekend, but we're looking forward to the annual Halloween Cruise.  I'm not a costume guy but Mandy is already plotting something.

It's another gorgeous day here in Puget Sound today.  The fog has lifted and we pulled out of Brownsville, with some regret, just after noon.  We didn't go far; another place we had never been down here was Manzanita Bay, which is just across the channel on the Bainbridge Island side.  We have our slip at Shilshole sublet through the end of the month, which is tomorrow, so we have a couple days to wander.  Anchoring out with fancy houses and boats all around us isn't a bad way to spend them, we figure.  With solid Internet and enough Pepsi and Pop Tarts to get me through the mornings, it shouldn't be much different than working at home.  Tuesday, I'll drop Mandy off in Poulsbo to go up and feed the cat (the Graebel's are moving half the family these couple of weeks, it seems) and collect the car, and I'll get the boat back over to Shilshole, finally, for a rest.

Minor reflections on US Customs

So, I finally got around to reading the "warning letter" we almost received for our late entry into the country at Port Townsend earlier this month. We had been cautioned by the CBP officer that we had violated the law by showing up after office hours, and that hefty fines could apply, and that we should look over the pertinent regulations to ensure that future behavior was within acceptable margins.

Today, I read the letter quoting the relevant sections of US Code... and I can't find a single one of them that we violated!

I've quoted a couple sections below; though there is additional language in the letter, these are the only sections I can find with relevance to our entrance.

Section 4.2 of the Customs and Border Protection Regulations (Title 19, Code of Federal Regulations, section 4.2) which states that upon arrival in any port or place within the U.S., any vessel from a foreign port or place... master of the vessel shall immediately report the arrival to the nearest Customs and Border Protection facility or other location designated by the port director.

That's the only bit I see that has any wiggle room in it that we might have somehow failed on... the "other location designated by the port director." There isn't a facility in Port Townsend, strictly speaking... on the other hand, it was the closest locale with an office to our point of entry.

Report of arrival of vessels: The arrival report shall be made by the master of the vessel to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer at the nearest port of entry by any means of communication. (italics mine)

Which is exactly what we did. I stress the "any" because they made it sound like our major failing was arriving too late to report in person, and the after-hours phone call was an unacceptable method of making contact. If I were reading their own letter as instructions for properly entering into the US, I would have the impression that we were being instructed to do exactly what we had done.

Now, I am sure that the underlying code can be twisted or interpreted so that we could be guilty in almost any circumstance... that's the beauty of a complex legal system. But I can't see in any way, shape, or form how we violated anything as explained by the violation letter!

More of your tax dollars at work....

Okay; that's my last CBP rant until next year! Return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Miracle on the Elliot

At least, that's the overblown (or perhaps intentionally ironic; always hard to tell with newspaper quotes) description of this event offered by an SPD Harbor Patrol officer.

We overheard the drama on the radio this morning as we came down to Bremerton from Port Hadlock. Due to our distance from things, the only clear transmissions we heard were those of Sector Seattle, but it sounded as if the responding boat owner, as he is identified in the article, was in fact the local Vessel Assist captain. The Seattle Vessel Assist boat is moored at the base of the ramp that goes to our slip on Q dock, so it would have been pretty well situated to respond, much closer than any police or Coast Guard vessel, assuming the skipper was nearby.

Unrelated, but moderately exciting for us avid Captain Rodriguez followers, we also overheard Remedy for the first time, at nearly the same time.

Ashore again, for a bit

We made it in to Port Townsend last night, after the second of two very long days transiting the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Right now we're very anxious for showers and laundry and getting caught up on bills and correspondence we've been missing; when I have some free time, and the ability to upload pictures, I will post some more detailed entries on what we did and saw in between Tofino and here.

We spent the balance of the interval poking around in the Broken Group in Barkley Sound, which is an amazing destination that could soak up an entire trip instead of just a small part of one. We only scraped the surface and plan to return again soon.

We departed the Sound from an anchorage near Bamfield two days ago at 0200, hoping with luck and current to reach Port Angeles to clear in before Customs closed there that day. It's a long stretch from Barkley Sound to Puget sound; 130-150 miles depending on your route. It's just about 90 to Port Angeles. The current wasn't that great and I started getting worried about our fuel state at about the halfway point (not a breath of wind was in evidence), and there are not only few inlets on the Canadian side of the Strait, but none at all with diesel. Sooke, 15 miles from Victoria, is the closest completely sheltered anchorage and the only one with fuel, so we opted to put in there instead. There are several options on the US side to either anchor or fuel up, but none of them prior to Port Angeles are customs ports--you can't legally put in there if you are coming in from Canada. So Sooke it was.

Well, Sooke is primarily a sport fishing port, although there are some commercial boats there; the big fish boats have their fuel trucked in, and the small ones take gasoline. Consequently, there is no diesel available in the outer harbour at Sooke! We puttered around looking for some in vein, then determined that we would tie up at the public floats and find a nearby gas station to fill up our spare can (which I had already put into the tank some hours before).

That almost didn't happen in the first place because the floats were pretty well full; we found a empty spot on the inside, but when we got down the narrow channel to it, there was a "Reserved" sign hanging in it! Fortunately, the harbour master's husband happened to be wandering past right then and yelled to us that the spot was open, the occupant was going to be gone for a few days. He caught our lines and helped us tie up and we mentioned to him why we were there and asked if there was a gas station nearby. He said that there was one up the road a bit, and then mentioned that he had two diesel jugs at home and that he would give us a lift up there! Bob and his wife were both extremely nice; his wife (whose name I promptly forgot, which should not in any way be taken as a reflection on her personally, but rather on my poor memory) has been harbourmaster there for twenty years and roams the floats as if she were walking the neighborhood after dinner, chatting with the tenants and visitors with equal kindness and facility. Bob ran me up to the 'garage' and I filled both jugs for just a bit less than most of the fuel docks have been charging. I was glad in retrospect that he offered the ride; it would have been a pretty long walk with a full five-gallon container!

Once we got back to the boat, the first five gallons I put in to the tank, filled it. My fuel calculations had been all wonky; we'd only gone through half of what I had expected. The tank has a gauge, but it's physically on the tank itself, and on the top aft side at that. You can only see it by crawling into the cockpit locker and wedging your head up into a small gap under the deck. My head is too big for the gap, so it pretty much has to be Mandy checking it, but putting Mandy into a confined space stinking of diesel while rolling around in seven foot swells is a recipe for Upchuck Surprise, so we didn't confirm my calculations. So, the stop in Sooke wasn't strictly necessary, but the public floats were extremely inexpensive, we met some nice folks, and there was a pretty good pub up the street where we had dinner. Not a bad experience, even with a sixteen hour day.

The next day we made the hop to Port Townsend, which should only have been about six hours with tides factored in; we even got a nice breeze (although easterly) right out of Sooke and got to sail for a bit. That died and we fired the engine up again. Unfortunately, not long after that, we noticed a leak in the engine cooling system; a hose had split on the intake line and was leaking and spraying the alternator in the bargain. To make matters slightly worse, the hose is a soft one; you can't patch it by applying pressure because it simply squeezes the hole wider. I patched it with some self-amalgamating tape and a couple of hose clamps tightened only just enough to hold the tape in place. I'm not sure if it actually reduced the rate of the leak or not, but at least it kept the alternator dry. The engine continued to run at a reasonable temperature at cruising RPM, but we weren't comfortable jacking it up to get to town any earlier.

This turned out to be a Very Bad Thing in the opinion of US Customs and Border Protection. Port Townsend is a customs port, but not a designated small boat port of entry (oddly enough, Port Angeles is, though Port Townsend is perhaps the premier sailing port of the region). This means you can clear customs here, but you have to call the local office and set up an appointment. We hadn't wanted to make an appointment too far in advance (prudently, considering the engine problem) so we weren't planning to call until we were sure of our arrival time. By that time, however (around 1630) the office was closed (at 1600!). There was a message on their voicemail with an 800 number to call if arriving after hours; I called that but it only applied for I-68 or NEXXUS program participants (which we are not). They gave me the number for the Port Angeles office and said to leave a message there, since they were probably dealing with a ferry at the time. I did; we waited about an hour and had no callback so we tried again, fortunately, since they hadn't got the message. That office gave us the number for the local guy, who in fact lives twenty miles outside of town and wasn't in the least bit happy getting a call after hours.

This all took a couple hours after we actually arrived, the boring wait interspersed with various phone conversations with Customs threatening doom for various unspecified offences. When the local officer finally showed up (and I'm not blaming him for the delay or being in a foul mood; we ruined a dinner date) he said that arriving at a non-designated port after hours and without a prior appointment carried a heavy fine; also, there was some problem with our customs decal, which I had painstakingly gone to the trouble of obtaining after having problems with it last year. We told him our tale of woe and showed him the engine repair, without ever getting into the messy and unbureaucratic discussion of how exactly it is that a boat, particularly a sailboat, should be able to forecast with any exactitude what mechanical problems it may encounter or what weather conditions might intercede so as to predict an appointed arrival time. Officer Vella didn't seem like a big fan of bureacracy either; he made many of the same points above in our conversation, lamenting that he is the only CBP officer available for the Port Townsend area, and the small boat traffic, particularl during the popular wooden boat festival here, runs him ragged. At any rate, he took pity and let us off with a warning for the arrival time and gave us a clearance; the sticker problem seemed like perhaps it might be too much paperwork with a hot date waiting, so we didn't bring it up again and neither did he.

Clearly we bear a big chunk of the responsibility for the delay and the problems and I'm not making excuses for that. Certainly the whole thing is a huge argument for getting a NEXXUS pass and we'll definitely be doing that before next year. You can clear in from anywhere at any time with a phone call. And if we had made landfall at a declared small boat port, we could have avoided some of the hassle (perhaps; it's not clear still what happens if you arrive at one of those points after hours, at least so far as I have read in the section of code Officer Vella provided for us... how you can ever guarantee an arrival during business hours with the Strait being in the way is beyond me) and definitely the problem of irritating an officer personally (never a good move). And yet...

So far, coming home to our native country has always been the worst part of our trips overseas. And it's so hard to reconcile this with our experiences with customs in those countries. Coming back to the United States is like going into a corrupt third world country, not our home and the land of freedom and opportunity. Contrast all this to clearing into Canada; we have never, on the boat, seen a customs officer there. One phone call, five minutes of conversation, and we're clear for six months. This year, it didn't even take that long; they still had our records from last year, and it took all of thirty seconds to clear in.

Some people might argue that this is because US Customs is more thorough and checks inbound vessels and persons more carefully. Not so; although we had to hang around and chat with Officer Vella, wasting our time and his, he didn't inspect the boat, didn't look at our sticker number, did not, in fact, even ask to see our passports... he learned nothing more than the Canadian inspector on the other end of a phone line. It was all about paperwork and protocol, nothing at all to make this country safer or better protected.

We were grateful at least that Officer Vella, despite having every reason to be extremely irritable and unpleasant, was merely moderately grumpy and turned out to actually be a pretty decent and personable fellow coping with what sounds like a kind of crappy job. I imagine he, and many other agents, would prefer to have a little bit of initiative granted them and to be allowed to do things that actually effectively protect the border instead of simply focusing on checking the write boxes and filing the right forms to avoid incurring the wrath of the bean counters at headquarters.

Anyway, I'll stop ranting about this for now; hopefully I won't have anything more to rant about after getting signed up for NEXXUS. I just think it's really a shame that the thing we hate the most about traveling is coming back home, entirely because of Customs.

After we get some of our "regular" lives straightened out we're back on the boat again; there is a West Seattle Yacht Club event in a couple of weeks down in Bremerton so we will poke our way down there (repairing the engine first) and then be back at Shilshole by early September.

Thank you, we're sorry

So, we've been working on thank you cards for our wedding gifts during the trip (see, this is how much we appreciate you all; we could be out enjoying the bountiful wonders of British Columbia and instead we are huddled in our dank little cave by candle-light scratching out thank-you cards instead) and mailing batches off as they are done along the way.

In a lot of these places the post office consists of a shack with a slot in it somewhere, or a small corner of the general store with the proprietor wearing a second hat as part time postmaster. As you might expect, this does not absorb the fullest measure of their attention, but by and large they do yeoman's work in a thankless task for the small communities and transient boaters they serve. Nonetheless, we checked in Victoria on the rates to use for mailing cards and such to the States. It was complicated a bit by the fact that we (ahem... Mandy) picked two different sizes, which took different rates. But we thought we had it all straight... until Tofino.

There, the good folks at Canada Post informed us that the stamps we had been putting on one of the card sizes was insufficient... by almost a dollar! They said the cards would probably still be delivered, but that the recipient would have to pay the difference on the postage! This was terrible news; here we are thanking people for their immense generosity, and instead, they are having to pay even more just to read the thank you!

So; if you are among those so affected, we apologize deeply and will think very carefully on sending out additional, follow-up thank you cards, weighing the benefit of thanking you properly with the very real possibility that we will screw it up yet again and force you to pay a third time for being so nice to us at our wedding.

You call that a knife?

Do Gerber knives come with any sort of gauranty? I've had this thing for less than a year, and the blade lock (which was niftily incorporated into the frame itself) snapped off. No trauma involved, nothing particularly taxing has ever been done with this knife, and it was simply in my pocket at the time it happened. I imagine the stress fracture must have happened earlier and it (fortunately) chose a relatively sedate moment to fail.

Because the lock is a part of the frame, though, you have to question the strength of the frame over all. I have always heard good things about Gerber knives but I think maybe I'll rule them out as future nautical blade candidates.

Now arriving, Tofino

We're pretty happy with Tofino so far. It's a tourist destination that hasn't been found by cruising boaters en masse just yet, so it's got most of the amenities of the big town, without all the associated costs. We're at the 4th Street Public Dock here for two nights and it's costing us less than a day in Nanaimo. True, we're rafted off of another sailboat, and water costs a loonie for fifteen minutes, but we have power, cheap internet, and convenient access to downtown Tofino... which has all the stores, bars, and gift shops that two sailors could ever ask for.
This is what rafting up looks like; it's pretty cozy. This is a tame version, at that... it's not unusual at a lot of fishing floats to see boats rafted three and four deep. If you want to go ashore, you wander across someone's back deck or cockpit. I had always heard it was more polite to go across the foredeck, which is less like a living room than the cockpit, but here circumstances dictate we wander through someone else's social space any time we need to get ashore. Apparently the owners of the yacht we are attached to, Oceania, keep her here to live aboard sometimes, and don't often go out, so at least we don't have to worry about the spaghetti mess that would no doubt ensue if they were to depart while we would stay and move inboard.

Of course, there are certain compensations; this, for instance, is the view from our own cockpit:

Surely there are worse things to wake up and look out upon in the morning.

We're going to stay a couple of days here, get some work done, and get the boat dried out. Two or three days of rain following a day with heavy seas over the front deck have resulted in a general dampness that was starting to get on our nerves. The solar panel got stepped on and is out of commission, so some electricity is most welcome. Our autopilot compass has been unsettled... there are no charted magnetic disturbances up here but Watmough mentions a magnetite mine up in the hills around here somewhere so there is a possibility it's simply local interference, but a good drying out couldn't hurt. Finally, our diesel stove is giving us problems again, so electric heat is nice (although today is plenty warm enough already).

So, we'll get things back in order here, but I'm glad we are as far south as we are... it's getting to that point in the trip where the stuff that is broken is starting to add up, and we didn't outfit ourselves as carefully or comprehensively as we did for last year's trip, so I have even less capacity for fixing or replacing it. We'll head down into Barkley Sound on Friday, weather permitting (it's only about thirty miles; northwest winds are forecast, however) and poke around there for a bit before heading back for the States toward the end of next week. Again, that will be weather dependent... the Strait can be rough enough when you are simply going across them, but when you have sixty miles or so to run through them in addition you want all the favorability you can muster. Unfortunately, the tides this time of month look like they are biased toward the ebb, with relatively short floods for us to ride inland. We may have to make a couple of hops to get all the way through. The winds look like they will probably be with us, though; fog may be another story. The radar has been operating less predictably over the last couple of days and we may have to put Mandy up the mast again before we head out into the Strait just to double-check all the connections. There are relatively few places to duck into shelter once you have entered them, so a positive forecast is a must-have.

But that's all in the future. Tonight we getting aired out and getting rested up to go explore the rest of Tofino tomorrow. Already I found a book shop that had not one, but two new Terry Pratchett novels, in softcover well before the softcover has hit the States! I keep forgetting that about Canada, they get a lot of good British stuff well before we do. So, anyway, I'm in reading material for the next two days, as Mandy says. We also had a great lunch at a neat little cafe. I have no doubt there is more good stuff hidden behind all the tourist traps fronting the downtown area.

Hot Springs Cove, the place to be and be seen

It's raining right now in Hot Springs Cove and I couldn't be happier.

Our rounding of Point Estevan from Nootka Sound yesterday was long and difficult, as references all suggested it might be. The wind was from the southeast and the current seemed to set northerly, and you might think this would improve the sea state as they weren't in direct opposition, but it was still far rougher than it should have been considering the relatively moderate (20-25 knot) winds. Not to mention that the combination of current and wind direction served to either push us away from the easterly course needed to round the point, or directly back onto the rocky point itself, depending on our tack. Mandy got sick, the weather was slightly yucky, and it was basically just a very long and tiring day.

So we were happy to get here in the first place, but too exhausted to make the mile and a half hike to the springs... fortunately there is plenty of anchoring room fairly close to the public float at the park, and we had no trouble setting the hook close enough to row in, but far enough to avoid the noisy generators of other cruisers.

This morning I talked Mandy into making me pancakes and then we went ashore fairly early to go to the springs. We'd heard that the daily throngs of tourists who come in by plane or speedboat from Tofino and other points south abate and disappear in the evening hours; the corollary seemed to be that they might not yet have arrived earlier in the morning, and this proved to be correct. After a calm, quiet hike through the old-growth rainforest, we found that we had the pools pretty much to ourselves. A long soak ensued, with the grey skies turning blue overhead, and the ocean crashing into the lower terraces below. Mandy went down and took a dip in one of the tidal pools warmed by the springs, where the ocean crashes in to dilute the water, but I stuck with the higher and hotter pools. They are surprisingly small; as we hiked back out and passed the throngs of day-time visitors, we couldn't imagine that all of them would have an opportunity to soak, even taking turns. We're definitely glad we brought our accommodations along with us!

It's traditional for visiting boats to carve their names into the boards of the boardwalk leading from the public float to the Hot Springs (examples here... we had a chance to inspect first hand, and that's a fine job of free-handed carving Jason and Christy!), which we did not because someone (ahem!) didn't allow me to buy a new Dremel before we left (typical conversation: Me " Wow, this sure would be easier if we had a Dremel." Her "A Dremel is never the proper tool for any job!") but anyway, it causes the 2 klick hike to take a little longer than it normally might as one loiters to check out the boat names and handiwork. As a result of this, however, we found the boat that the Canadian Sunset crew was looking for back in Friendly Cove! We were a little bit late, though... the C'est Si Bon apparently was last here in '98, at least according to their plank. Ghost ship!

We're also just happy to be here. It's a well-protected anchorage, which gave us the opportunity to sort out some sail-related issues this morning (we had a fast mainsail drop yesterday in high winds, which makes for a mess; it needed to be hoisted and refolded; also, the furler ran out of line for the headsail, which meant it all had to be pulled back out and re-wound) and will hopefully allow us to make some other minor repairs tomorrow... the GPS antenna mount is loose, the bilge pump float switch is sticking, and the secondary stove fuel pump is stuck in the on mode.

With a series of lows marching eastward out of the Pacific right now like a conga line, we should have plenty of time to get to all those things, with the occasional break for a dip in the springs (because, who cares if it's raining if you are in a hot spring, anyway?) and it matters not a whit if we are pinned down for a few days. Lack of sunshine for batteries is likely to be the limiting factor; but by the time that becomes an issue, we can probably find enough of a lull to duck out of here and get around the corner into the rest of Clayoqout Sound, which we also plan to explore at our leisure.

Warm again!

We're in Hot Springs Cove today, and probably will hang around for a couple of days, and we couldn't be happier.  Yesterday's rounding of Estevan Point was every bit as rough as the guide books say it can be, foiled by southeasterly winds, evil short sharp waves, and a current setting north-northwesterly, which contrived to either push us onto the many rocks surrounding the point or to push us away from rounding it entirely, depending on which tack we were on.  It was a long day, with rain, and we were glad to drop our anchor here finally last night, but too tired to hike to the hot springs themselves.

This morning we got up before the flock of tourists arrived from Tofino and enjoyed them in relative solitude for a time... even Mandy is all warm again!  Plus we got the stove working last night, so the boat is dry and toasty.  It's a good time to sit tight for a couple of days... and with what looks like a series of fronts rolling in, even better to hunker down with hot springs close at hand.  The weather this morning was pretty nice, though; if we have a few mornings like that I will be pretty happy.

Oh, and there is an unsecured wireless hot spot here.  We will be meagre with bandwidth (no pictures!) but we should have e-mail access for a couple of days.

More updates soon!

Friendly Cove: Really is friendly!

Friendly Cove lives up to its name... free wifi! We have found more hotspots in the last two days than in the last two weeks.

After leaving Tahsis, we made a short hop south to Bodega Cove, just at the south entrance to the Inlet, which we had to ourselves. There were red tide warnings posted, which might explain some of the ghoulish looking water in Tahsis... all that stuff must just get shoved up the inlet by the prevailing southerly winds. We rowed around a bit but the area around the cove is stagnant and dominated by logging operations, so it was mostly just a good place to sleep.

Today we made a short hop slightly further south to Boca del Infierno, adjacent to the old village of Nootka and adjoined by a modern fishing resort. The cove was tiny and I didn't much like the set of our anchor so we decided just to lunch there and to explore the inner lagoon whose unusual geography makes the place noteworthy.

The bay gets its name from this tight constriction at the head of the lagoon; at high tide, it fills a considerable body of water in the lagoon; at low, those waters come rushing back out over rocks creating quite a torrent of foamy white spray, which the early Spanish explorers called the “Mouth of the Inferno.”

We didn't see the inferno in full raging style, but it was impressive enough as it was flooding into the lagoon... we shot a set of rapids that would make white water aficionados jealous. Once into the interior, however, the setting is tranquil. A bald eagle had ducked through the mouth just before us and he circled silently as we rowed around in the interior, exploring marshes, streams, and small secluded bays. The sun came out as we toured and revealed green fronds waving beneath the surface.

We waited until the tidal stream had abated to about the strength of your average deep mountain creek before paddling back through. I barely made it even then... our flat-bottom dinghy doesn't track well and is easily thrown off by currents, making it hard to keep stroking in the right direction.

We continued south after that hoping to anchor in Santa Gertrudis bay. Someone else got there first, though, and set their hook right in the middle without a stern tie, which didn't leave much room. I don't blame them, there aren't all that many other cruising boats up here. But that, plus a dicey, shoal-ridden entrance, kept us going, and we ended up just around the point at Friendly Cove.

As you're probably already aware, this is the location where Cook first landed on Vancouver Island and which subsequently became the center of the sea otter fur trade, as well as a venue for global incidents between England and Spain which almost led to war. Today, it's simply a picturesque place with a good anchorage. A few small dwellings occupy the shoreline, overshadowed by the large Coast Guard light station on the headland. We passed some of the Coasties out fishing on our way in. I imagine it's a pretty plumb assignment.

A launch just pulled up next to us; turns out it is the couple from the boat in Santa Gertrudis, the Canadian Sunset. They were wondering if we had seen a Dutch boat around, friends of theirs, but we told them we hadn't seen much of anyone for the past few days. We talked up Tahsis and they will probably head up there next. They finished up their circumnavigation last year at Campbell River, some twelve years after leaving Ottawa (I couldn't refrain from pointing out, in what I hope was a sufficiently joking manner, that it wasn't really a circumnavigation yet, was it? But a few degrees of longitude don't make much difference when you're talking about that distance). The boat is for sale now but they don't seem eager to give it up: they are planning to do the Inside Passage to Alaska next year.

Today's sun is supposed to be the last for a little while, and we expect to head south for Clayoquot Sound tomorrow beating into the wind and getting rained on. But the immediate destination will be Hot Springs Cove, and as Mandy pointed out, who cares if you are getting rained on if you are in a Hot Spring? Maybe the weather will keep out some of the other tourists, who arrive by air and speedboat from points all along the island.

Edit 12AUG09: Corrected name of boat

Tahsis

We've agreed that Tahsis is just a little spooky. And we mean that in the nicest possible way. People are cheerful, friendly, and helpful... the fuel dock attendant practically sprinted around the floats to get to our assigned location to help us tie up. The marina has free wireless Internet, showers, laundry, a fine Mexican-ish restaurant, and even a free loaner courtesy car mitigating the not unreasonable hike between there and town. The water is good... “Extravagant Creek” is the name of the stream that the local water supply comes from, and as it implies, it has no shortage of fresh, clear water. The local supermarket, while nothing to compete with the average run-down Safeway back home, isn't bad as far as small town, infrequently resupplied shops go. And the scenery is beautiful, par for the course in this part of the world.

But still... the water coming up the inlet has a freaky reddish-brown tinge to it and an odd, unwordly smell. It burbles when splashed. The waterfront is dominated by the empty, overgrown slabs and piers of the defunct local sawmill, eerily huge and unoccupied. Buildings along the road into town sit empty, broken-windowed, their former uses only hinted at by form and cryptic signage. For the brief period that we were there, the town was shrouded by clouds, closed in by the green walls of mountains and a gray roof overhead. A guidebook author says he had a friend who moved there who claimed never to have seen the sun during his first ten months there. It's a Twin Peaks sort of place. If anyone offered me a piece of cherry pie and the best cup of joe I ever had in my life, I'd run away screaming.

Tahsis is mostly filled with sport fishermen and their support system, which may explain some of the slightly disconcerting feelings we got. The rhythms are different than they are for cruisers. Sport fishing is hard work. I can't believe people spend their vacations getting up at 0500 for an hour-long ride in a noisy, open powerboat to go sit stationary in rolling swells all day, watching their lines trail fruitlessly aft, only to come back in at sunset and have to wait in line to fuel up the boat again. We went to the marina restaurant at what we thought we be high-time for dinner, 1830, only to find we had the place to ourselves... no one else was back in yet. They come in late, crash, and get up to do it again the next morning.

Some of the fish they come back with are impressive, of course, but I am not a fish guy so that doesn't appeal to me all that much. Anyway, I'm sure it's fun for them (there are people who have trouble believing that we enjoy getting out in 25 knot winds and crashing through those same swells; to each his own) but it's all just a little bit different from what we're used to. Maybe that explains Tahsis in a nutshell. It's small, charming, friendly, and we fully expected to be murdered in our sleep or abducted by vampires.

Maybe it's the history of the place. Tahsis was the summer home of Chief Maquinna, the Nootka chief who figures so prominently in the early European histories of the place. Vancouver and Quadra negotiated the terms of the Nootka Convention here in 1792, and this is where the whole island was given it's name: The Island of Quadra and Vancouver. “Vancouver Island” is just proof that the winners (and people who dislike extra typing) are the ones who write the history books. Anyway, that's a lot of historical weight for such a small place and maybe there are resonances down through the ages that make first-time visitors nervous... as if there is some expectation that we contribute meaningfully to global history from here during our stay. Since we barely remember to fill our water tanks before going, that's a pretty tall order.

Feelings of historical inadequacy aside, we quite enjoyed our stay and will definitely be back if we pass this way again. Mandy is already hankering for another of the marina coffe shop mochas and I wouldn't mind kicking back on the floating patio near the fire and listening in on fishing stories for a while.

As a blessing of sorts, as we pulled out and headed south down the inlet toward the ocean, the clouds parted and sun graced the village.

Watch weirdness

Odd things happen to electronics when exposed repeatedly to the damp salt air.

Near the start of our trip, I kept hearing this weird noise that apparently originated from different parts of the boat at different times. It definitely wasn't natural; something electronic, yet at times it would come from places where there were no electronics! Mandy didn't notice it at first but then I got her listening for it too. It remained a mystery, until I noticed that the customary crisp "ding" didn't come from my watch to mark the hour.



At first it only did it every few times it tried to chime the hour, but now it's every hour, on the hour. The display going all fuzzy isn't a camera artifact, either, it really does that. It's no big deal, it's just a cheap Coleman watch, but the funny thing is that it still keeps good time, and the alarm still works just as it's suppose to. The hour chime, however, gives it an epileptic fit.

Contrary to forecasts... - 05AUG09

Contrary to forecasts (I wonder if I even need to continue saying that? Weather is hard to predict up here, the forecasts are frequently inaccurate) the winds were from the southeast and the skies were overcast as we left behind Barter Cove and headed for Esperanza Inlet. A few sea otters waved goodbye as we left and forlorn looking abandoned houses kept vigil over the empty bay.

The winds were light but we made them work, getting south to Esperanza by sticking close to shore but just outside the many rocks and reefs dotting this section of the coast. Mandy continued her streak of bad luck from yesterday by getting seasick about an hour out. Her hand was still swelling from the wasp sting from yesterday as well, but she managed to stand half a watch despite all the troubles.

We're in Queen Inlet now, which is not exactly an anchorage fit for a Queen... holding is okay, but it's windy and there are a lot of crab pots to dodge, no doubt placed by the inhabitants of the many houses/cabins along the shore here. Some of them are abandoned as well, including a neat old place that looks like it may once have been a church. There is also an apparently more recently wrecked (beached?) fishing boat in a cove off to one side. We're not sure what is up with all the empty places, though, this seems like prime vacation territory, and all the recreational fishing boats out and about would seem to indicate that others agree. They seems mostly to come out of large fish camps, though, rather than summer cabins and the like. Apparently this is also something of an accident of timing, since Jason and Christy of Hello World found a pretty hopping scene in the Cove when they passed through less than a month ago. It also inspired them to get out and explore and take some pictures, which they include in their post... worth a look for the other side of the story!

I did see a pretty cool outfall from a large tide pool just outside the cove entrance on my way out in the morning... Mandy was still in bed and I was too busy fiddling with the autopilot to take any pictures. For some reason the fluxgate compass doesn't appear to be tracking correctly; I swung it but need more sea room to do a complete recalibration, which can wait.

We're continually surprised at how populated the West Coast of the Island is; nothing we have read indicated anything of the sort, with words like “desolate,” “wilderness,” and “distant” featuring prominently in descriptions. Instead, it's thronged with people out fishing. We seem to have left most of the other cruising boats behind, or perhaps we are behind them, in a bubble of sorts. But there are no shortage of people or settlements around here.

Not that it gives us much sense of security; we heard a call on the VHF today coming into Esperanza from a small fishing runabout on the rocks to our south, about an hour from our position at our speeds. Despite the bay being carpeted with other small craft, none of them answered... apparently they don't use radios. The flip side to that, and it's a big plus for us, is that there isn't all the constant and tedious chatter on the distress and hailing frequency like there is on the Inside. But the Coast Guard had to come out and tow these folks back to their camp, despite there being probably twenty other boats that were closer and could have done so just as easily and much sooner.

Considering all the small craft and the notorious conditions out here, I am a little suprised that there isn't more Coast Guard presence. The call issued above was answered by the Tanu, which just happened to be off Barter Cove that morning (they're following us; we saw them near Winter Harbour as well). If they hadn't been present, as far as I can tell Tofino would have been the closest base from which assistance could be dispatched. I think Tofino and Bamfield are the only CG stations on the West Coast of the Island for that matter. There is excellent helicopter coverage from those and bases on the other side of the Island, of course, and that means lives are well-guarded (so long as flying conditions cooperate) but it is easy to lose a boat without another boat nearby sometimes.

But then, the Coast Guard is not immune from trouble here, either. Several days ago, we overheard a Mayday relay from the Otter Bay, which had struck a rock and was sinking, from the sounds of it somewhere along the Central Coast. It's rough country out here; it's a lot of fun, but it's worth keeping in mind how easily and dramatically people can get into trouble, and keep an ear out to lend a hand if need be.

Klaskish Basin and Barter Cove - 04AUG09

It's hard to find more contrast between where we spent last night and where we are spending tonight.

Klaskish Basin, buried in Brooks Bay, is a magical, sheltered oasis, hemmed in by forest and field, populated by the sound of babbling brooks, with deep green cloudy waters beneath, almost phosphorescent in the sunlight. We spent a peaceful night there, finding plenty of space with only three other boats anchored there for the evening. I don't know what's up with the streaky photos I took of the narrow, winding inlet but trust me, it was unstreaked in person. See how green that water is? I'm not making that up and it's not a camera malfunction. It seemed like it glowed as we slid through it at 2 knots.

And check out the vista from the interior... all that green opens into a broad, grassy valley leading up into the forested hills. A fantastic place!

Barter Cove, in the Mission Group of islands, is rolly, buzzing, and windswept. Abandoned homes populate the shores, and small runabouts from nearby Walters Cove zip through and about on their way elsewhere.

It was a rough day getting here, and this is icing on the cake, if the cake were made out of mud and the icing were mouldy worms.

The sailing was still fantastic, lots of wind blasting down from the northwest and fairly flat seas for our rounding of the somewhat formidable Cape Cook. But after that, things went downhill; our furling line jammed and after spending a half hour bouncing around on the bow working on it I finally just had to drop the headsail. Two more slugs on the mainsail broke (the first broke a few days back; I didn't think to mention it but three seems like a bad batch of slugs!) which about puts us out of ready spares (I still have parts to fabricate more from, it's just slow going). Finally, Mandy got stung by a wasp after we dropped anchor. She made dinner and went to bed early, while I decided to take a tepid shower and do the dishes.

Days like this are only to be expected and truth be told it wasn't the worst day ever (heck, it could have been raining) but that doesn't make it any more pleasant. It does make our choices stand out against the alternatives, though; we are rushing a little bit, even after I promised myself I wouldn't, this time because Mandy needs Internet access for work. While the West Coast is hardly the wilderness that the guidebooks portray it, it isn't set up for cruising boats and wireless internet is pretty much nonexistent. There is supposed to be a marina with Internet in Tahsis, though, so we are pushing to get there soon. If things were working out better, I wouldn't be complaining, probably; it's still good sailing and beautiful country. But I would rather have stayed in Klaskish an extra day or cut in to the highly rated Bunsby Islands ten miles north of here than to do what we actually did today, or to end up where we actually have.

This puts us only two days from Tahsis, though, two fairly reasonable days. After that, I can hope for more leisurely cruising again (and to be fair, we aren't exactly pushing crazy hard... thirty miles a day isn't that much, although navigating various rocks and shoals probably adds 25% to the distance made good). I just hope it's worth it.

Turning south - 01AUG09

After so much anticipation, our actual rounding of Cape Scott was both prolonged and rather uneventful.

We picked what we thought was a good time to go, morning high slack at the Nawhitti Bar on a day with forecast of the typical moderate-to-strong northwesterly winds blowing, and this seemed validated by other vessels at and around Bull Harbour (our anchorage the previous evening) that came out around the same time and headed the same direction.

The winds didn't materialize as we motored down the stretch from Bull Harbour to the Cape itself, which was calm, with moderate swells from the west. Once the wind did appear, it was more southwest than northwest, and by the time we got nearly to the Cape and decided to kill the engine and raise sail, it was south/southeast, where it stayed for the remainder of the day. The seas were confused, but relatively low. Mandy had a long and tiring shift and when I came up the relieve her we decided that the unheralded wind change, and a prediction of thunderstorms later, militated for a stop a little earlier than we were hoping... Sea Otter Cove instead of Winter Harbour further south. Sea Otter Cove is in many ways still part of the Cape proper and so we didn't consider ourselves completely in the clear, but it was the only good shelter for a good many miles in either direction.

It seemed that everyone else had the same idea, as all four available mooring buoys there were occupied when we pulled in. Getting into the Cove is slightly nerve wracking, with shallow depths from the entrance on in and many, many rocks. We managed it okay but if the waves were any higher it would have been no picnic. The Cove is not well-sheltered from the south but the entrance at least is at right angles to the sea, so swells don't come in. We anchored outboard of the buoy line and tucked in for the night, preparing to leave mid-morning the next day. As I turned the anchor light on before bed, I could see evidence of the thunderstorms; dim flashes in the clouds to the north silhouetting the masts of the boats behind us.

The cruddy weather continued, however, and the forecast predicted fog and southwest/southeast winds through the next day until they switched back to northwest in the early afternoon. Afternoon was a bit late for us to leave to make the next port of call, though, so we decided to wait the whole day and try on the follow morning, when they were forecast to continue (and some of the fog predicted to dissipate).

Mandy came down with a bit of a cold so it was just as well that we had time to hole up and let her rest. Fleeing the crud outside, two more boats came in through the day, and only one departed in the afternoon to take advantage of the improving conditions. Later in the day, more thunderstorms came through, though we saw no lightning.

We also used the time to get our diesel stove metering valve replaced. After some trial and error Mandy thinks she got everything working properly and in honor of the occasion shined the whole thing up very nicely. We won't have a chance to test it until the weather goes bad on us, though... no sense heating the cabin up more than it already is.

The next day had a strong forecast in our favor, and with that in mind we got up early and got underway, as did most boats in the cove... no one missing an opportunity. Once we got clear of the frightening entrance (again negotiated at near-low tide) we raised sail and had the sort of day we had been hoping for two days earlier... clear skies, sunshine, great downwind sailing in moderate conditions. We reached Quatsino Sound in about four hours.

To say that it isn't what we expected may be a bit of an understatement. There are more small craft out here fishing than we saw in any one place coming up the inside. There are a fair number of cruising boats; we have anchored early in North Sound, just south of Winter Harbour, and there are three in sight already, not counting the big powercruiser moored off a “party barge” occupying the southern part of the harbour. There is a constant background buzz in the air, and the yells of excited teenagers carry across the water from the float house. Clearcuts decorate the hills around us. This isn't the remote wilderness that any of the guide books have described, even the more recent.

Part of this may be that we are here on BC Day weekend, which (we assume) is like any three-day summer holiday weekend, with more people out on the water than usual. But the cruising boats don't fit into that category; like us, they have to be out a month or more just to get here, so clearly there is a lot more interest in the northwest coast of the Island than there has been in the past, or that anyone writing about it noticed.

This doesn't really bother me at all; it's still beautiful up here, I just have this nagging sense that I should be able to check my e-mail if I am not really “away from it all” but in most other respects I enjoy it. It's no different than when I was younger, on Lake Couer d'Alene or Lake Roosevelt, and the background boat traffic just makes me want to lay in the sun and read until I am hot enough to get in the water (not there yet!). It grates on Mandy, however, just like a similar scene did at Spencer Spit last year. I think she wants to be someplace calm and quiet, where she can get the sense she is exploring, and it's hard to feel that way when there are drunk fishermen and bogie boarding fratboys in every picturesque cove you sail past. I don't know what to tell her... it probably won't be quite so busy down-coast, where the inlets don't lead back almost to the east coast of the island (which is no doubt how most of these smaller craft get here). Perhaps we won't spend as long up here as we had planned, in favor of quieter precincts further south. But still, the preponderance of big cruising boats (and we are one of the smaller craft here in that category) makes me think we're likely to have company just about anywhere we might be.

She wants to make friends though, so perhaps that is a good way to look at it. Certainly we are intruding on the solitude of others as much as the reverse might be true... if we are all in it together, then, maybe we should make the most of it.

The Endless Immensity of the Sea

Thoughts of Mandy's:

Antoine de Saint-Exuperie is quoted as having said, “If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Things along this trip do seem endless and immense, and it isn't hard to see how the early explorers and settlers thought it all could never end. Surely, when the streams seem to keep coming from the hills and mountains, one after the next when looking one direction off the boat, and the never-ending sea is all that exists when looking in the other, those people must have thought it would be inexhaustible. How could an ocean so immense ever run out of fish? How could endless hilltops of timber have all been felled? When imagining every islet run over with sea otters, how could the trappers have ever thought the playful little animals could be trapped to near extinction?

Yet every little settlement we pass has notes in our guidebooks about how it was once a bustling fish offloading dock up until the fisheries collapsed, or some similar story. Now most of these places have gone one of two directions. Either they are near ghost towns, or have learned how to harness tourism, mostly sport fishermen. Tahsis, where we are now, has a large, waterfront paved yard slowing being grown over by the evergreens. That yard was the sawmill that made this town. Now it is empty, quiet, fenced in, and derelict. Still, when we look off into the mountains surrounding the inlet into here, clearcut after clearcut is visible. Some seem to have been cut a few decades ago, and are filling in again. But some seem to have been cut in the last few years, the fresh brown scars of the landslides obvious to even an unseasoned looker. I wonder if the logs are just being processed elsewhere, or if there are too few left to keep so many places open, or if demand has just dropped and so fewer are being cut. I'm quite curious on the matter.

And I wonder if the local fishermen were angry when the sea otters were re-introduced a few decades ago. What do they think of the added competition searching for the dwindling fish population. And I wonder if the fish population had an unnatural surge a hundred years ago, when they sea otters were first harvested so fully. Without the otters preying on the salmon, did the salmon population boom, making the new commercial fisherman think there were always so many fish in this sea?

I think I'll keep my eyes open for some books about the natural resources of this land, and the changes that have occurred in the last few hundred years. I wonder, too, where it is headed.

There is time to think about these things when slowly passing through the beautiful narrow inlets of Vancouver Island. But when we're sailing in the open sea, there is time to think of none of that. Never have I had more fun sailing than when running downwind along the coastline of the Pacific Ocean, being pushed by the swells from behind. Every now and then a swell will break, just as it crosses under the stern of the boat, leaving the soft sizzling of millions of tiny air bubbles surfacing around us as the boat sinks back down into the trough of the swell. After a few more moments, the boat is at the peak of the next swell, being pushed along again. For my light little self, it take all of my body to keep the boat pointed where I intend it to go. At the end of my three-hour shift, all of my body is tired and wanting food, food, food. After food, then sleep. But it sure was fun!

Fun as it is, the trip under motor to this little village was a relief for my tired body. Moreso, even becuase a tiny hornet got the best of my right hand a few days ago. Apparently I have a mild allergic reacition to hornet stings, because my right hand, all the way through my elbow and up to my shoulder is sore from it.

...Exuperie was right about the motivation that the longing for the endless immensity of the sea can create. I can't imagine a crossing a boat this size, but the wanting to do it, possibly someday in a bigger boat, does keep me working while on this trip, always hoping we can make enough money to squeeze a lifestyle out of this. My work has nothing to do with sailing, but sailing has everything to do with motivating me to do the work!

Hello, outside world!

Just a quick note to let people know we are in Tahsis, BC, almost halfway down the west coast already!

This is the first spot with Internet access we have found so we are spending the night and letting Mandy get some work stuff caught up. Things are going pretty well, and it's a good time to stop, since the weather has gone a bit south and should be getting back to good over the next couple of days. We'll spend that time working our way out through Nootka Sound, and it's typically more sheltered and a bit nicer up the inlets here, so it should work out well for getting back out on the ocean with sunshine and fresh breezes by the time we are ready.

I have a few blog entries saved up from the northern part of the trip, which I'll post from here with annotation indicating the timeframes involved. There are some new pictures up on Flickr as well.

Hope everything is going well down south there. I see that Paula Abdul has left "American Idol" and I suppose that must be quite devastating for all of you. It's funny reading the news after being away from it even for a little bit; the things they emphasize aren't really what we are interested in!

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go look for an enchilada or something at this "licensed Mexican restaurant" they have at the marina here (yes, I know what licensed means up here... but I can't suppress an image of a short guy in a sombrero with a clipboard making sure the place is "officially" Mexican enough)!