Relaxed, Sort of - 6/11

We’re finding the Broken Group in Barkley Sound to be a lovely archipelago. Stunning anchorages are scattered among small islands with relatively few boats around in early season to share them with.  Stunted, wind swept trees cover the islands that are large enough to sustain them.  Smaller islands and clusters of rocks are under constant assault from the ocean surf.  Meandering through this landscape with the benefit of electronic charts and global positioning feels both safe and scary.  It would have been a lot more challenging to navigate these waters with nothing but paper charts and a compass - all the more so before the area was charted.

Notwithstanding the breathtaking beauty of this place, it would be hard for me to spend more than a few days here.  I say that because it is difficult for me to sit still for much longer than that.  It takes less than an hour to get from one anchorage to the next.  Yesterday we had breakfast, did our dishes, and were underway relatively early.  We motored through still water without a breath of wind, made our way into Joe's Cove and were anchored by ten o’clock.  Not a bad day’s work.  And then we sat. We read, we listened to audio books, we watched the birds, the kayakers and the tide come and go.  In the afternoon, the wind picked up and we had lunch.  It was very relaxing.  And a little boring.  The rest of the crew seems to be happy as clams to unwind and let the day spill past them without a care in the world.  It leaves me feeling a little… antsy.  I’d rather be doing something. Anything.

Sometime in the late afternoon a 50’ sailboat scooted through the narrow pass that we had come through.  The difference was that while we had motored in, and would have motored in even if the wind had been blowing, these guys were under sail. They rounded the cove under sail, and smartly dropped anchor under sail.  It was very well done.  I began to wonder what it would take for us to do that.  It would take a lot more practice than we've been getting.  They have a crew of six and each person is certainly well versed in each station, so that as the helmsman adjusts the steering, each person commensurately adjusts the sails without being told what to do.  With a crew that is unfamiliar with the boat and with sailing in general, a lot of explanation is necessary.  Unfamiliar terminology is met with blank looks and more explanation.  It takes a lot of training and practice to get beyond all the confusion about what to do and when to do it without detailed explanations that there might not be time for in this neighborhood.

There’s a part of me that thinks: we should be spending all this extra time practicing our sailing technique.  But… it’s calm right now.  When it’s not, we’d need to be doing it out in the open, away from the rocks, with some room to move and make mistakes.  Out in the open there’s chop on a 5-10’ ocean swell, which would make the sailing more work than fun and not a very good environment for learning. But more than that, the crew appears to be quite content with the relaxing.  And so am I, but there is another side of me that thinks about what fun it would be to sail on the other boat for a couple of hours.

The winds are forecasted to come from the northwest finally, so when we continue our way down the coast on Wednesday, maybe we’ll be able to make some real progress under sail.  Stranger things have happened.