the bottom of the posts; I only have enough
bandwidth to post via e-mail, but the web host I am going through messes up
the mail format and appends their
little ad to the bottom, which I am currently powerless to prevent.
I'm anchored out in a little cove in the Pearse Islands just east of Alert
Bay right now. I still have a week or so to wait
for Mandy, but I killed off about as much time as I was comfortable with
getting up Johnstone Strait, so better to wait
here.
I made it through Seymour Narrows without incident and in fact a little bit
early. Using the extra ebb current to
carry me, I pushed on past Plumper Bay where I had planned to spend the
night and made it to Kanish Bay and the
Chained Islands. Insofar as I could tell, they were not actually chined
together. However with all the abandoned
logging equipment and empty aquaculture farms, they very well could have
been. For all the natural beauty here—
and there is loads of it—sometimes and some places here seem more like
abandoned industrial sites than pristine
visions of ancient natural beauty. And it's still very much a working part
of British Columbia's resources. Tugs and
barges, with trees or ore, are the most common vessels I encounter here,
with fishing boats running a close second.
There are a lot of little runabouts, too, which serve more or less as
primary transportation for some residents. But
no one seems to live in Kanish Bay.
I spent two days there, then pushed north in a couple of hops. I spent one
night tucked into a little cove in the
islands between Race and Current Passages, and then the next at Port
Harvey. Those were where traffic picked up,
probably because it was getting closer to the weekend—I saw a veritable
convoy of powerboats go past through
Current Passage one evening, then ran into most of them as they were
leaving the Port Harvey anchorage the next
day. There were a few cabins at Port Harvey (which isn't really a port, at
least not anymore, just a large bay) but no
one seemed to be home, except for a crew at the logging operation up at the
head of the bay.
Today I came the rest of the way up to the Alert Bay/Port McNeil area,
since I was out of ice and McVitie's Digestive
Biscuits (or, as I like to call them, "Les Biscuits Digestifs Originaux")
and couldn't bear living like a heathen anymore.
With my culture restored by a short stop at the Alert Bay public wharf and
a quick jog to the grocery store, I turned
back a couple miles and came to the Pearse Islands, which someone had said
was a marine park with decent
anchorage. I can't tell one way or another if it's actually a park, but
the anchorage seems okay—right now it's just
me, tucked into a little cove, and a big mega-yacht out in the bay.
So, I have a few days to kill here, but as long as the sun stays out a
little longer today, I'll be able to take a shower,
and then, fortified with digestives and not stinking, I imagine I'll be
able to stick it out for the week before I can go
pick up Mandy at Port McNeil.
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