A long night...

The predicted southeasterly gales came up around 5PM last night and I guessed correctly that the island just to my south was close enough to shield me from the worst of the wind. The halyards were making a racket but I had a lot of rode paid out and the anchor was holding just fine. Since it was dark and cold and blowing, I had some dinner and went to bed, planning to move on later in the afternoon with the second ebb of the day. The gale, however, had some consequences which I had not foreseen.

Around 2AM I woke up to a banging sound on the hull. It was more than just the slapping of the anchor line you hear sometimes when the wind shifts--it was something large and insistent coming through over the pattering sound of the rain on the deck over my head.

I got up and grabbed the spotlight and bounded out the hatch to see what was going on. It was rainy and cold and dark and miserable. Off in the distance, out in the strait I could see a dim green jewel marking some tug's bow light. No other boats were nearby, at least none running their lights. I turned on the spotlight and moved up onto the foredeck to see what the banging was, which I could still hear.

These waters are in the heart of some of the greatest forests in North America, and logging is one of the major industries, and towing log rafts and booms from where the trees are cut to where they are processed is the favored method of transportation. Consequently, you spend a great deal of time when sailing avoiding drifting bits of wood and trees in the water which have got loose from these big operations at some point.

I did not realize, however, that it would still be necessary to dodge floating trees while resting at anchor.

The banging sound was a 20 foot log pounding insistently against the starboard bow, driven on by the waves and wind. As I raised the spotlight to look around, I saw that the cove I was in was almost carpeted with every bit of floating wood, seaweed, trash, and tree flushed out of Johnstone Strait by the storm. Some of the logs were 30 feet long, nearly the length of the boat. And it occurred to me, then, that all the driftwood and such which litters the beaches nearby so artistically had to pass through my spot to get there at some point. That point was apparently going to be tonight.

I ran back and grabbed the boat hook. In the distance, the tiny green speck became brilliant as some bored watchstander, jarred awake by my own spotlight stabbing about, tried to see what was going on from the tug. but he could no more make me out at that distance than I had been able to make him out, and the light soon diminished to the green point again.

I spent the next couple of hours fending off logs, including one bad boy which got tangled up in my anchor line. I tried to get the stove going so I could at least duck in and get warm from time to time, but it's been particularly finicky the last few days and won't start and stay lit without about a half hour of constant babysitting. So I stayed on deck and kept at it until the wind subsided and the spotlight revealed no more floating junk to windward.

Then I crawled back in my berth looking forward to sleeping in and having time to fiddle with the stove in the morning.