How did that happen?

Somehow, we're suddenly back in the United States this afternoon. What happened?

Of course, if you don't have a a real itinerary, it's reasonable to ask, how can you ever really be surprised by where you end up, or rather, shouldn't you always be surprised at where you end up? While it may be a reasonable question, I don't really have an answer. I just thought we were going to be in Canada for another week, and now we're not.

We stayed too long in Ganges, was part of the problem, and the place just seems to have a bad vibe. The weather was pretty crummy, and Mandy demanded that if it were going to rain, she at least wanted a coffee shop she could go to. I had wanted to go to Montague Harbour for a couple of days next, but had to admit it didn't sound like much fun in the rain... trees and water in a fine mist look pretty much the same no matter where you are, and a convenient grocery store and shops to browse didn't seem like a bad alternative.

But by yesterday we were pretty well ready to be done with the place. My thought for this week had been to get down to Sidney, where we have a reciprocal moorage agreement with a yacht club and could stay for a few nights quite cheaply. We've never really spent much time there and the place is reputed to have a lot of excellent bookstores and a good grocery store. We didn't stock up on much in Ganges, since island prices for food are generally higher than elsewhere.

Unfortunately, when we got to Sidney, we found that the yacht club was sponsoring a regatta that weekend, and the guest moorage was restricted to vessels taking part in the event. Since we didn't think we could quickly disguise Insegrevious as a racer, we were out of luck.

There are a number of other places to stay in Sidney but Mandy vetoed that, and they were going to cost more anyway. The non-stop rain has really kept us from getting the boat dried out decently, and we needed a couple solid days of heat and ventilation to drop the humidity. So, we decided to just go ahead and cross back into the US. As it happens, there is no real advantage to our having done this, since we are now at Roche Harbor, which costs as much or more than those places in Sidney we might have spent the night, and it's still an island grocery store, and a small, fancy one at that (there is no real town here, just a resort). And since the cost is greater, we still can only stay one night and will be out anchoring someplace through most of the rest of the week instead of tied up somewhere with electricity and coffee shops. Hasty decisions are generally poor ones, particularly when you've already been up since six motoring through heavy fog when you have to make them. But on the plus side, it was perfect weather for crossing Haro Strait, since we got there right after the fog had cleared off, and a good fifteen knot southerly zipped us straight across. With the fog being as it has been, we might have gotten stuck over in Canada for longer than planned if we had waited.

The weather is, however, supposed to clear up a bit by Tuesday, so we might be able to at least enjoy some of the fine marine parks up here in the San Juans that we have been missing. The real issues now are groceries, Internet access, and reading material. I'd planned to have all three things taken care of sufficiently in Sidney, but now there is no bookstore to be had (and I am absolutely out of stuff to read), the groceries are probably going to be excessively expensive, and I have only one night to catch up on work with the Internet access here at the marina. I won't even have time to enjoy the pool here at the resort (access to which is complimentary with moorage, which is at least part of why the moorage is so expensive).

If there is a bright spot, it is that our experience clearing Customs back in to the US was actually quite pleasant this time. We have encountered the kinder, gentler Customs and Border Protection service. On our other trips back to the US this summer, we had been pretty impressed at the hospitable, courteous, and welcoming nature of the agents we had dealt with, but those crossings were all by means of conventional transportation. We've never had good luck on the boat.

But this time, we were cleared through quickly, with a minimum of questions, some basic respect and decency, and the golden ticket to a good Customs experience: the agents we talked to both said "Welcome home." It's not so hard to say, and it makes a world of difference to a citizen returning to his or her country to hear it, instead of the uniform suspicion and snide remarks that have characterized our return in years past.

Leaving too fast

Wow! We knew we had to leave Vancouver today, but we didn't realize we'd be doing so at top speed.

We're tied up in Sidney right now at a friendly yacht club dock, but we had expected to be somewhere up in the Gulf Islands right now, even considering the favorable forecast of northwesterly winds (which puts them at our back, just as the southeasterlies were behind us on the way up here). The winds and our destination lined up perfectly and we crossed the Strait of Georgia in some moderately rough seas at speeds up to and over eight knots. Yes, that includes a little bit of a following current in places. But it meant we were routinely at hull speed, which is around seven knots in this boat.

Considering the progress we were making, we decided not to stop in the islands and anchor out, but come all the way on into Sidney and moor up again. I'm not sure why exactly, but it does allow one to sleep more easily when one is firmly attached to a dock and behind a solid rock breakwater, and hey, there is Internet and electric heat. The primary motivation is to put us as close as possible to the border, so we can make a fast crossing into the US in the morning and clear Customs. After that, much depends on the weather; we might strike for Deception Pass again, or try to cross the Strait of Juan de Fuca for Port Townsend. Or, though unlikely, we might get trapped in the islands for the night.

Right now, the forecast is still favorable though; more northerlies, fairly brisk, and the clear skies and sunshine that comes with them. We made good time on the way up with the southerlies at our back, but southerlies bring rain and gloom, while the fresh northwest wind brings blue sky and lovely sunsets (such as the one we're experiencing now in Tsehum Harbour... sorry, no picture, I'm too tired to dig out the camera).

I have this problem, though, where when it comes time to head home, all I want to do is get home. I don't see the point of being on the trip anymore, and I rush. It's silly; there is no real reason we shouldn't hang out here and explore a couple of days (well, there is the cat; we have people looking in on her, but we don't like taking extra time imposing on them or to leave her mostly by herself for too long) but I'm all in a hurry to get back to Seattle before the weekend. I have work to do, but I could plug in and do most of it in any marina. Maybe it's just the cost; I spent what I budgeted, now we're done, time to go. But a lot of what we might do doesn't really cost anything extra.

Whatever it is, I need to figure out some way to get over it; half of any trip is the homeward leg, it's a shame to think I am wasting by exhausting myself to get back a little faster.

Google Earth goes to sea

I suppose I have to put the disclaimer up "Not intended for navigational use" first, right? Although I did run into a gentleman once halfway up Johnstone Strait who was navigating his way from Seattle to the Aleutians using a second-hand National Geographic "Maps of the World" CD ROM. He was doing all right.

Google Earth, the program that lets you zip and zoom around the globe with a flick of your mouse, now has data covering the depths of the world's oceans. Navigate with it at your peril! As the article says "The addition of the oceans posed many technical hurdles, not the least being aligning disparate data sets so water meets land in the right places, Google engineers said." That information, of course, is sort of the bare minimum I look for in charting solutions, but at any rate this isn't being proposed as such and I don't know why I mention it.

No, I do know why I mention it, actually; I was trying to skimp and save some money last year by avoiding the purchase of small-scale route-finding maps (also not intended for navigation, though Lord knows they cost as much as charts which are) of the Inside Passage by using Google Maps. I was defeated, however, because I found that the location and distinction of the many small landmasses which make up the Inside Passage were so muddled, and the satellite imagery so blurry and indistinct, that there were no clear representations of well-known channels, let alone navigable passages. I broke down and borrowed the route maps, instead.

I hadn't tried the downloadable Google Earth at the time as I assumed it worked from the same data. Operating under the same assumption in reverse, then, I went back today to check out Google Maps north of, say, Port Hardy, and found that there is a world of difference--although some of the sat imagery is still less than pristine (I don't doubt it's hard to find clear days in that neck of the woods; clouds cover some significant patches of the area even on images further south) it is available in considerably more detail--I can actually zoom down in and check out some of our anchorages, including the infamous Boat Inlet. That lighter green patch toward the bottom of the channel, right before it opens up again, are the shoals on which we ran aground. Zoom out a little bit and you'll see how constricted the channel was--once the transmission lever broke, we were committed to going forward until we reached the larger pool at the interior. Unfortunately, we didn't quite make it.

Keep zooming out and you can see where we were in relation to Bella Bella. The Canadian Coast Guard station is where "Old Bella Bella" is marked on Denny Island.

Had everything gone as planned, we would have ducked out into Queen Charlotte Sound the next day and continued north. Funny, it all looks a lot easier on Google Maps....