Captain Aubrey never got bored

One thing that seems clear already is that I did not pack nearly enough Patrick O'Brian books for this trip. I'd forgotten the long, boring watches that go into a trip up the western side of the Strait of Georgia and the deep, long trench of Johnstone Strait. Other than watching for deadheads and cruise ships, there is little to take your mind off the incessant dull throb of the diesel. The autopilot does all the steering, there are no sails to trim with the wind right on the nose, and the only goal is to make as much mileage as possible while the tide holds.

While I'm not on watch, I spend time fiddling with my Eee PC trying to get the drivers for our fancy new wireless adapter to work with it. I chose this adapter in part because it does have moderately well supported Linux drivers, but the Eee is such a whittled down system that it doesn't work out of the box. I am comfortable rooting around in the Debian distribution on which the Eee is based, but I am a little hesitant to do anything dramatic out here far from regular Internet or easy recovery. There are probably few places to get access on the West side anyway; in the meantime, it keeps me busy.

Our stay in Nanaimo was pretty brief. We slept, recharged, hit the chandlery (I found everything I needed except one chart, which was for a place we might not stop anyway; Mandy finally picked up her crab trap), and took off again as soon as the tide was right. The wind picked up and a massive converted trawler moored outboard and pinned us in the dock just before we were going to go; the wind was blowing right down the dock and we were stern-out, with maybe fourteen feet of clearance between the trawler and the boat on the next float over. I recalled my last undocking in Nanaimo in such winds, swallowed my pride, and went up to ask the wharfinger if anyone could lend a hand. The dock hands were pros. They took the lines, walked the bow around, and gave a couple of hearty pushes to keep us pointing upwind while the Yanmar labored to put some way on, and we got out without a scratch.

We fueled up and it looks like we have been burning about half as much as I had calculated, a half-gallon an hour (that's assuming my metric conversion is correct!). That's pleasant news.

We anchored the next night in Ford Cove of Hornby Island. It's not an ideal anchorage but the weather was dead calm and it had the virtue of being entirely unoccupied, which left us with as much swinging room as we could stand. Even so, we only put out about 3:1 scope, as we planned to get up and out early the next day and didn't want to spend a long time hauling the anchor in. We calculated the run to Seymour Narrows and figured that with an 0500 departure we would hit the 1430 slack there. Strong winds were forecast in the Strait but our timing would put us with the tide and wind together, hopefully calming the seas. If not, we could always bail and duck into Campbell River until the weather cleared.

Mandy was excited to put out her crab trap in Ford Cove, though no others were deployed there, but she only managed to catch a plaice (flounder? halibut? I don't know anything about fish, it was a bottom-feeder that swam on one side is all I know. I'm going to make names up until someone tells me different).

Disappointed (her, not me) we turned in early, only to have the wind pick up almost immediately. I sighed and went up on deck to veer out more rode... nothing more worthless than spare rode in the anchor locker, and we didn't have to worry about swinging into anyone. We held fast but it was an uncomfortable night and I didn't sleep all that much. When we got up, the rode was caught on the keel and the current and wind were opposing, pinning us so I couldn't haul it in; some judicious application of the engine and flailing with the boat hook freed us up and we got underway at dawn. Being up and on the water on a clear day at that hour is better than coffee, though I had coffee too.

Right now we're making good time motoring toward Campbell River. The forecast has gotten even worse for Johnstone Strait, with up to 40 knot gales predicted, but I find for some reason that I am more relaxed now than before. I always get agitated rushing through the beautiful islands, towns, and anchorages in the southern Strait, always vaguely suspicious that I am leaving the better part of the trip too quickly behind in favor of the unknown and uninhabited north. Might it not be better to forgo the long-distance and enforced motoring to just hang out and enjoy what is right in front of us?

But I'm happy now; it's another beautiful day and the Strait is broad and empty. I'm no longer concerned about the time table... if we are delayed getting north through Discovery Passage, then so be it; we can't fight such winds and if it takes longer than I had hoped, then it simply will. And in the meantime we can poke northward through the many nooks, crannies, and back channels of the Discovery Passage, places we bypassed last year forecasting their availability in future voyages. This is one of those voyages now, and perhaps it is no bad thing to be forced by nature to slow the pace a bit and wind our way through some of the most magnificent geography in the world.