Pressing on alone through Seymour Narrows

I'll be putting Mandy on a plane in a few hours and then facing up to the next thorny problem of the journey, namely proceeding through the fraught passage of Seymour Narrows by myself.

Seymour Narrows is the passage between Discovery Passage (adjacent to Campbell River) and the main part of Johnstone Strait, the long, relatively straight path toward the north end of Vancouver Island. As advertised by the name, the Narrows are, well, narrow. Johnstone Strait and Discovery Passage are not, so much, and as they form the main channel for tidal waters reaching down into the Strait of Georgia, the upshot is that a couple of times a day a really very large volume of water tries to shove its way through the Narrows all at once, leading to wild whirpools, overfalls (basically waterfalls, only the water is falling over nothing but itself), and whitewater rapids which rival those on some high North American rivers.

The periods between these upheavals in the Narrows extend between six and twelve minutes. The Narrows are roughly two miles long; in a small craft such as our boat with little extra power to muscle through, those miles must be transited in those six to twelve minutes. While entirely possible, this calls for some careful timing, and therein lies the problem--while the currents are less outside the Narrows, they are still strong, and timing one's arrival is complicated by their influence.

Small craft are generally advised to take the smaller, but more sedate channels further east toward the mainland, which have more current gates like the Narrows, but smaller ones and less heavy industrial traffic to share them with. I'm sticking to Johnstone for the same reason as the cruise liners and tugs, though; it's straight and fast, and the less singlehanding I have to do (in other words, the faster I can make the passage) the safer and better.

I have two realistic windows for slack water tomorrow, 1130 and 1730. If I choose the 1130 window, I will have to fight flood current coming in from the direction of the Narrows all the way to it. If 1730, I will be swept up toward it on the outgoing ebb. I have to be out of the marina at 1100 either way. So right now I am leaning toward saving fuel and dawdling around in the area here until I can hit the 1730 window. It should take me an hour or less to get there, which means I have to find ways to hang out somewhere other than the marina, but out of the current, until 1600 or so... if I simply wander out into the channel, even without power, around noon, I'll get there too early just on the current.

But I think I can manage that, which leads to my next problem: since I am riding the ebb up to the Narrows and waiting for the window to pass just before it turns to flood, that means as soon as I get through I am almost immediately going to be fighting a current to get any further north--and night will be coming on. So I have to find a place fairly close to the Narrows, on the north side, to put in for the night.

Unfortunately, there isn't very much there. The two closest choices, Plumper Bay and Deepwater Bay, are not favorably reviewed as anchorages in our guidebooks, although the Sailing Directions designates both as suitable. Looking at the chart, I'm inclined to agree with the guidebooks--both are deep, and open to the northwest, which is the direction the prevailing winds come from.

The next realistic candidate is Kanish Bay, but that's another seven miles or so. Facing the current, that could be three or four hours away, making an already long day considerably longer, with no one to spell me at any moment for a rest.

However, the forecast may hold the clues to my salvation in this case. A low is forming over the Queen Charlotte Islands, well north of here, but bringing southeast winds and crappy weather with it for the next day or two. I could do without the miserable weather, but in southeasterly blows, both Deepwater and Plumper bay look far more accomodating than in northwesterlies.

So most likely I will explore a few isolated coves near Campbell River tomorrow early afternoon, head for the Narrows in late afternoon and transit at 1728 or whenever it looks calm, and then duck immediately into Plumper Bay and anchor for the night. The next day I'll head out around noon and take advantage of the day's ebb to see how far north I can ride it to a stretch of Johnstone Strait with less swift currents and better selection of anchorages.