Ashore again, for a bit

We made it in to Port Townsend last night, after the second of two very long days transiting the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Right now we're very anxious for showers and laundry and getting caught up on bills and correspondence we've been missing; when I have some free time, and the ability to upload pictures, I will post some more detailed entries on what we did and saw in between Tofino and here.

We spent the balance of the interval poking around in the Broken Group in Barkley Sound, which is an amazing destination that could soak up an entire trip instead of just a small part of one. We only scraped the surface and plan to return again soon.

We departed the Sound from an anchorage near Bamfield two days ago at 0200, hoping with luck and current to reach Port Angeles to clear in before Customs closed there that day. It's a long stretch from Barkley Sound to Puget sound; 130-150 miles depending on your route. It's just about 90 to Port Angeles. The current wasn't that great and I started getting worried about our fuel state at about the halfway point (not a breath of wind was in evidence), and there are not only few inlets on the Canadian side of the Strait, but none at all with diesel. Sooke, 15 miles from Victoria, is the closest completely sheltered anchorage and the only one with fuel, so we opted to put in there instead. There are several options on the US side to either anchor or fuel up, but none of them prior to Port Angeles are customs ports--you can't legally put in there if you are coming in from Canada. So Sooke it was.

Well, Sooke is primarily a sport fishing port, although there are some commercial boats there; the big fish boats have their fuel trucked in, and the small ones take gasoline. Consequently, there is no diesel available in the outer harbour at Sooke! We puttered around looking for some in vein, then determined that we would tie up at the public floats and find a nearby gas station to fill up our spare can (which I had already put into the tank some hours before).

That almost didn't happen in the first place because the floats were pretty well full; we found a empty spot on the inside, but when we got down the narrow channel to it, there was a "Reserved" sign hanging in it! Fortunately, the harbour master's husband happened to be wandering past right then and yelled to us that the spot was open, the occupant was going to be gone for a few days. He caught our lines and helped us tie up and we mentioned to him why we were there and asked if there was a gas station nearby. He said that there was one up the road a bit, and then mentioned that he had two diesel jugs at home and that he would give us a lift up there! Bob and his wife were both extremely nice; his wife (whose name I promptly forgot, which should not in any way be taken as a reflection on her personally, but rather on my poor memory) has been harbourmaster there for twenty years and roams the floats as if she were walking the neighborhood after dinner, chatting with the tenants and visitors with equal kindness and facility. Bob ran me up to the 'garage' and I filled both jugs for just a bit less than most of the fuel docks have been charging. I was glad in retrospect that he offered the ride; it would have been a pretty long walk with a full five-gallon container!

Once we got back to the boat, the first five gallons I put in to the tank, filled it. My fuel calculations had been all wonky; we'd only gone through half of what I had expected. The tank has a gauge, but it's physically on the tank itself, and on the top aft side at that. You can only see it by crawling into the cockpit locker and wedging your head up into a small gap under the deck. My head is too big for the gap, so it pretty much has to be Mandy checking it, but putting Mandy into a confined space stinking of diesel while rolling around in seven foot swells is a recipe for Upchuck Surprise, so we didn't confirm my calculations. So, the stop in Sooke wasn't strictly necessary, but the public floats were extremely inexpensive, we met some nice folks, and there was a pretty good pub up the street where we had dinner. Not a bad experience, even with a sixteen hour day.

The next day we made the hop to Port Townsend, which should only have been about six hours with tides factored in; we even got a nice breeze (although easterly) right out of Sooke and got to sail for a bit. That died and we fired the engine up again. Unfortunately, not long after that, we noticed a leak in the engine cooling system; a hose had split on the intake line and was leaking and spraying the alternator in the bargain. To make matters slightly worse, the hose is a soft one; you can't patch it by applying pressure because it simply squeezes the hole wider. I patched it with some self-amalgamating tape and a couple of hose clamps tightened only just enough to hold the tape in place. I'm not sure if it actually reduced the rate of the leak or not, but at least it kept the alternator dry. The engine continued to run at a reasonable temperature at cruising RPM, but we weren't comfortable jacking it up to get to town any earlier.

This turned out to be a Very Bad Thing in the opinion of US Customs and Border Protection. Port Townsend is a customs port, but not a designated small boat port of entry (oddly enough, Port Angeles is, though Port Townsend is perhaps the premier sailing port of the region). This means you can clear customs here, but you have to call the local office and set up an appointment. We hadn't wanted to make an appointment too far in advance (prudently, considering the engine problem) so we weren't planning to call until we were sure of our arrival time. By that time, however (around 1630) the office was closed (at 1600!). There was a message on their voicemail with an 800 number to call if arriving after hours; I called that but it only applied for I-68 or NEXXUS program participants (which we are not). They gave me the number for the Port Angeles office and said to leave a message there, since they were probably dealing with a ferry at the time. I did; we waited about an hour and had no callback so we tried again, fortunately, since they hadn't got the message. That office gave us the number for the local guy, who in fact lives twenty miles outside of town and wasn't in the least bit happy getting a call after hours.

This all took a couple hours after we actually arrived, the boring wait interspersed with various phone conversations with Customs threatening doom for various unspecified offences. When the local officer finally showed up (and I'm not blaming him for the delay or being in a foul mood; we ruined a dinner date) he said that arriving at a non-designated port after hours and without a prior appointment carried a heavy fine; also, there was some problem with our customs decal, which I had painstakingly gone to the trouble of obtaining after having problems with it last year. We told him our tale of woe and showed him the engine repair, without ever getting into the messy and unbureaucratic discussion of how exactly it is that a boat, particularly a sailboat, should be able to forecast with any exactitude what mechanical problems it may encounter or what weather conditions might intercede so as to predict an appointed arrival time. Officer Vella didn't seem like a big fan of bureacracy either; he made many of the same points above in our conversation, lamenting that he is the only CBP officer available for the Port Townsend area, and the small boat traffic, particularl during the popular wooden boat festival here, runs him ragged. At any rate, he took pity and let us off with a warning for the arrival time and gave us a clearance; the sticker problem seemed like perhaps it might be too much paperwork with a hot date waiting, so we didn't bring it up again and neither did he.

Clearly we bear a big chunk of the responsibility for the delay and the problems and I'm not making excuses for that. Certainly the whole thing is a huge argument for getting a NEXXUS pass and we'll definitely be doing that before next year. You can clear in from anywhere at any time with a phone call. And if we had made landfall at a declared small boat port, we could have avoided some of the hassle (perhaps; it's not clear still what happens if you arrive at one of those points after hours, at least so far as I have read in the section of code Officer Vella provided for us... how you can ever guarantee an arrival during business hours with the Strait being in the way is beyond me) and definitely the problem of irritating an officer personally (never a good move). And yet...

So far, coming home to our native country has always been the worst part of our trips overseas. And it's so hard to reconcile this with our experiences with customs in those countries. Coming back to the United States is like going into a corrupt third world country, not our home and the land of freedom and opportunity. Contrast all this to clearing into Canada; we have never, on the boat, seen a customs officer there. One phone call, five minutes of conversation, and we're clear for six months. This year, it didn't even take that long; they still had our records from last year, and it took all of thirty seconds to clear in.

Some people might argue that this is because US Customs is more thorough and checks inbound vessels and persons more carefully. Not so; although we had to hang around and chat with Officer Vella, wasting our time and his, he didn't inspect the boat, didn't look at our sticker number, did not, in fact, even ask to see our passports... he learned nothing more than the Canadian inspector on the other end of a phone line. It was all about paperwork and protocol, nothing at all to make this country safer or better protected.

We were grateful at least that Officer Vella, despite having every reason to be extremely irritable and unpleasant, was merely moderately grumpy and turned out to actually be a pretty decent and personable fellow coping with what sounds like a kind of crappy job. I imagine he, and many other agents, would prefer to have a little bit of initiative granted them and to be allowed to do things that actually effectively protect the border instead of simply focusing on checking the write boxes and filing the right forms to avoid incurring the wrath of the bean counters at headquarters.

Anyway, I'll stop ranting about this for now; hopefully I won't have anything more to rant about after getting signed up for NEXXUS. I just think it's really a shame that the thing we hate the most about traveling is coming back home, entirely because of Customs.

After we get some of our "regular" lives straightened out we're back on the boat again; there is a West Seattle Yacht Club event in a couple of weeks down in Bremerton so we will poke our way down there (repairing the engine first) and then be back at Shilshole by early September.

Thank you, we're sorry

So, we've been working on thank you cards for our wedding gifts during the trip (see, this is how much we appreciate you all; we could be out enjoying the bountiful wonders of British Columbia and instead we are huddled in our dank little cave by candle-light scratching out thank-you cards instead) and mailing batches off as they are done along the way.

In a lot of these places the post office consists of a shack with a slot in it somewhere, or a small corner of the general store with the proprietor wearing a second hat as part time postmaster. As you might expect, this does not absorb the fullest measure of their attention, but by and large they do yeoman's work in a thankless task for the small communities and transient boaters they serve. Nonetheless, we checked in Victoria on the rates to use for mailing cards and such to the States. It was complicated a bit by the fact that we (ahem... Mandy) picked two different sizes, which took different rates. But we thought we had it all straight... until Tofino.

There, the good folks at Canada Post informed us that the stamps we had been putting on one of the card sizes was insufficient... by almost a dollar! They said the cards would probably still be delivered, but that the recipient would have to pay the difference on the postage! This was terrible news; here we are thanking people for their immense generosity, and instead, they are having to pay even more just to read the thank you!

So; if you are among those so affected, we apologize deeply and will think very carefully on sending out additional, follow-up thank you cards, weighing the benefit of thanking you properly with the very real possibility that we will screw it up yet again and force you to pay a third time for being so nice to us at our wedding.

You call that a knife?

Do Gerber knives come with any sort of gauranty? I've had this thing for less than a year, and the blade lock (which was niftily incorporated into the frame itself) snapped off. No trauma involved, nothing particularly taxing has ever been done with this knife, and it was simply in my pocket at the time it happened. I imagine the stress fracture must have happened earlier and it (fortunately) chose a relatively sedate moment to fail.

Because the lock is a part of the frame, though, you have to question the strength of the frame over all. I have always heard good things about Gerber knives but I think maybe I'll rule them out as future nautical blade candidates.

Now arriving, Tofino

We're pretty happy with Tofino so far. It's a tourist destination that hasn't been found by cruising boaters en masse just yet, so it's got most of the amenities of the big town, without all the associated costs. We're at the 4th Street Public Dock here for two nights and it's costing us less than a day in Nanaimo. True, we're rafted off of another sailboat, and water costs a loonie for fifteen minutes, but we have power, cheap internet, and convenient access to downtown Tofino... which has all the stores, bars, and gift shops that two sailors could ever ask for.
This is what rafting up looks like; it's pretty cozy. This is a tame version, at that... it's not unusual at a lot of fishing floats to see boats rafted three and four deep. If you want to go ashore, you wander across someone's back deck or cockpit. I had always heard it was more polite to go across the foredeck, which is less like a living room than the cockpit, but here circumstances dictate we wander through someone else's social space any time we need to get ashore. Apparently the owners of the yacht we are attached to, Oceania, keep her here to live aboard sometimes, and don't often go out, so at least we don't have to worry about the spaghetti mess that would no doubt ensue if they were to depart while we would stay and move inboard.

Of course, there are certain compensations; this, for instance, is the view from our own cockpit:

Surely there are worse things to wake up and look out upon in the morning.

We're going to stay a couple of days here, get some work done, and get the boat dried out. Two or three days of rain following a day with heavy seas over the front deck have resulted in a general dampness that was starting to get on our nerves. The solar panel got stepped on and is out of commission, so some electricity is most welcome. Our autopilot compass has been unsettled... there are no charted magnetic disturbances up here but Watmough mentions a magnetite mine up in the hills around here somewhere so there is a possibility it's simply local interference, but a good drying out couldn't hurt. Finally, our diesel stove is giving us problems again, so electric heat is nice (although today is plenty warm enough already).

So, we'll get things back in order here, but I'm glad we are as far south as we are... it's getting to that point in the trip where the stuff that is broken is starting to add up, and we didn't outfit ourselves as carefully or comprehensively as we did for last year's trip, so I have even less capacity for fixing or replacing it. We'll head down into Barkley Sound on Friday, weather permitting (it's only about thirty miles; northwest winds are forecast, however) and poke around there for a bit before heading back for the States toward the end of next week. Again, that will be weather dependent... the Strait can be rough enough when you are simply going across them, but when you have sixty miles or so to run through them in addition you want all the favorability you can muster. Unfortunately, the tides this time of month look like they are biased toward the ebb, with relatively short floods for us to ride inland. We may have to make a couple of hops to get all the way through. The winds look like they will probably be with us, though; fog may be another story. The radar has been operating less predictably over the last couple of days and we may have to put Mandy up the mast again before we head out into the Strait just to double-check all the connections. There are relatively few places to duck into shelter once you have entered them, so a positive forecast is a must-have.

But that's all in the future. Tonight we getting aired out and getting rested up to go explore the rest of Tofino tomorrow. Already I found a book shop that had not one, but two new Terry Pratchett novels, in softcover well before the softcover has hit the States! I keep forgetting that about Canada, they get a lot of good British stuff well before we do. So, anyway, I'm in reading material for the next two days, as Mandy says. We also had a great lunch at a neat little cafe. I have no doubt there is more good stuff hidden behind all the tourist traps fronting the downtown area.

Hot Springs Cove, the place to be and be seen

It's raining right now in Hot Springs Cove and I couldn't be happier.

Our rounding of Point Estevan from Nootka Sound yesterday was long and difficult, as references all suggested it might be. The wind was from the southeast and the current seemed to set northerly, and you might think this would improve the sea state as they weren't in direct opposition, but it was still far rougher than it should have been considering the relatively moderate (20-25 knot) winds. Not to mention that the combination of current and wind direction served to either push us away from the easterly course needed to round the point, or directly back onto the rocky point itself, depending on our tack. Mandy got sick, the weather was slightly yucky, and it was basically just a very long and tiring day.

So we were happy to get here in the first place, but too exhausted to make the mile and a half hike to the springs... fortunately there is plenty of anchoring room fairly close to the public float at the park, and we had no trouble setting the hook close enough to row in, but far enough to avoid the noisy generators of other cruisers.

This morning I talked Mandy into making me pancakes and then we went ashore fairly early to go to the springs. We'd heard that the daily throngs of tourists who come in by plane or speedboat from Tofino and other points south abate and disappear in the evening hours; the corollary seemed to be that they might not yet have arrived earlier in the morning, and this proved to be correct. After a calm, quiet hike through the old-growth rainforest, we found that we had the pools pretty much to ourselves. A long soak ensued, with the grey skies turning blue overhead, and the ocean crashing into the lower terraces below. Mandy went down and took a dip in one of the tidal pools warmed by the springs, where the ocean crashes in to dilute the water, but I stuck with the higher and hotter pools. They are surprisingly small; as we hiked back out and passed the throngs of day-time visitors, we couldn't imagine that all of them would have an opportunity to soak, even taking turns. We're definitely glad we brought our accommodations along with us!

It's traditional for visiting boats to carve their names into the boards of the boardwalk leading from the public float to the Hot Springs (examples here... we had a chance to inspect first hand, and that's a fine job of free-handed carving Jason and Christy!), which we did not because someone (ahem!) didn't allow me to buy a new Dremel before we left (typical conversation: Me " Wow, this sure would be easier if we had a Dremel." Her "A Dremel is never the proper tool for any job!") but anyway, it causes the 2 klick hike to take a little longer than it normally might as one loiters to check out the boat names and handiwork. As a result of this, however, we found the boat that the Canadian Sunset crew was looking for back in Friendly Cove! We were a little bit late, though... the C'est Si Bon apparently was last here in '98, at least according to their plank. Ghost ship!

We're also just happy to be here. It's a well-protected anchorage, which gave us the opportunity to sort out some sail-related issues this morning (we had a fast mainsail drop yesterday in high winds, which makes for a mess; it needed to be hoisted and refolded; also, the furler ran out of line for the headsail, which meant it all had to be pulled back out and re-wound) and will hopefully allow us to make some other minor repairs tomorrow... the GPS antenna mount is loose, the bilge pump float switch is sticking, and the secondary stove fuel pump is stuck in the on mode.

With a series of lows marching eastward out of the Pacific right now like a conga line, we should have plenty of time to get to all those things, with the occasional break for a dip in the springs (because, who cares if it's raining if you are in a hot spring, anyway?) and it matters not a whit if we are pinned down for a few days. Lack of sunshine for batteries is likely to be the limiting factor; but by the time that becomes an issue, we can probably find enough of a lull to duck out of here and get around the corner into the rest of Clayoqout Sound, which we also plan to explore at our leisure.

Warm again!

We're in Hot Springs Cove today, and probably will hang around for a couple of days, and we couldn't be happier.  Yesterday's rounding of Estevan Point was every bit as rough as the guide books say it can be, foiled by southeasterly winds, evil short sharp waves, and a current setting north-northwesterly, which contrived to either push us onto the many rocks surrounding the point or to push us away from rounding it entirely, depending on which tack we were on.  It was a long day, with rain, and we were glad to drop our anchor here finally last night, but too tired to hike to the hot springs themselves.

This morning we got up before the flock of tourists arrived from Tofino and enjoyed them in relative solitude for a time... even Mandy is all warm again!  Plus we got the stove working last night, so the boat is dry and toasty.  It's a good time to sit tight for a couple of days... and with what looks like a series of fronts rolling in, even better to hunker down with hot springs close at hand.  The weather this morning was pretty nice, though; if we have a few mornings like that I will be pretty happy.

Oh, and there is an unsecured wireless hot spot here.  We will be meagre with bandwidth (no pictures!) but we should have e-mail access for a couple of days.

More updates soon!

Friendly Cove: Really is friendly!

Friendly Cove lives up to its name... free wifi! We have found more hotspots in the last two days than in the last two weeks.

After leaving Tahsis, we made a short hop south to Bodega Cove, just at the south entrance to the Inlet, which we had to ourselves. There were red tide warnings posted, which might explain some of the ghoulish looking water in Tahsis... all that stuff must just get shoved up the inlet by the prevailing southerly winds. We rowed around a bit but the area around the cove is stagnant and dominated by logging operations, so it was mostly just a good place to sleep.

Today we made a short hop slightly further south to Boca del Infierno, adjacent to the old village of Nootka and adjoined by a modern fishing resort. The cove was tiny and I didn't much like the set of our anchor so we decided just to lunch there and to explore the inner lagoon whose unusual geography makes the place noteworthy.

The bay gets its name from this tight constriction at the head of the lagoon; at high tide, it fills a considerable body of water in the lagoon; at low, those waters come rushing back out over rocks creating quite a torrent of foamy white spray, which the early Spanish explorers called the “Mouth of the Inferno.”

We didn't see the inferno in full raging style, but it was impressive enough as it was flooding into the lagoon... we shot a set of rapids that would make white water aficionados jealous. Once into the interior, however, the setting is tranquil. A bald eagle had ducked through the mouth just before us and he circled silently as we rowed around in the interior, exploring marshes, streams, and small secluded bays. The sun came out as we toured and revealed green fronds waving beneath the surface.

We waited until the tidal stream had abated to about the strength of your average deep mountain creek before paddling back through. I barely made it even then... our flat-bottom dinghy doesn't track well and is easily thrown off by currents, making it hard to keep stroking in the right direction.

We continued south after that hoping to anchor in Santa Gertrudis bay. Someone else got there first, though, and set their hook right in the middle without a stern tie, which didn't leave much room. I don't blame them, there aren't all that many other cruising boats up here. But that, plus a dicey, shoal-ridden entrance, kept us going, and we ended up just around the point at Friendly Cove.

As you're probably already aware, this is the location where Cook first landed on Vancouver Island and which subsequently became the center of the sea otter fur trade, as well as a venue for global incidents between England and Spain which almost led to war. Today, it's simply a picturesque place with a good anchorage. A few small dwellings occupy the shoreline, overshadowed by the large Coast Guard light station on the headland. We passed some of the Coasties out fishing on our way in. I imagine it's a pretty plumb assignment.

A launch just pulled up next to us; turns out it is the couple from the boat in Santa Gertrudis, the Canadian Sunset. They were wondering if we had seen a Dutch boat around, friends of theirs, but we told them we hadn't seen much of anyone for the past few days. We talked up Tahsis and they will probably head up there next. They finished up their circumnavigation last year at Campbell River, some twelve years after leaving Ottawa (I couldn't refrain from pointing out, in what I hope was a sufficiently joking manner, that it wasn't really a circumnavigation yet, was it? But a few degrees of longitude don't make much difference when you're talking about that distance). The boat is for sale now but they don't seem eager to give it up: they are planning to do the Inside Passage to Alaska next year.

Today's sun is supposed to be the last for a little while, and we expect to head south for Clayoquot Sound tomorrow beating into the wind and getting rained on. But the immediate destination will be Hot Springs Cove, and as Mandy pointed out, who cares if you are getting rained on if you are in a Hot Spring? Maybe the weather will keep out some of the other tourists, who arrive by air and speedboat from points all along the island.

Edit 12AUG09: Corrected name of boat