The Mad Dash for Quatsino

There was deliberation this morning.  A weather system is moving into the Canadian coast tomorrow, bringing high winds.  For a while all we could get was a weather forecast from Prince Rupert, which didn’t include the west coast of Vancouver Island, but what it did talk about was forty knot winds as far south as Queen Charlotte Sound, where we were.  We debated the merits of hunkering down vs running south while the weather is still good.

In the end, we did finally catch a forecast that included the west coast of Vancouver Island and it told us that getting around Cape Scott would be easy, but tomorrow afternoon the weather would catch up with us.  So the plan was to make hay getting around Cape Scott, The northernmost point on Vancouver Island, skip Guise Bay, and anchor in the next day’s cove, Sea Otter Cove.  That will allow us to get up bright and early tomorrow morning and make a dash for Quatsino Sound where there’s ample protection.  We’ll arrive early enough in the day to hopefully miss most of the high winds that are forecasted.

We have a couple days planned for Quatsino, plus the extra day that we didn’t spend on the way down, so that should allow us to hunker down until the weather passes and we can make our way around the Brooks Peninsula.  South of the Brooks, they say, the weather turns tropical by comparison to the north end of the Island.  We’ll see.

With that, we’re in Sea Otter Cove tonight and we had a lovely day getting here.  The north coast was wild and the rolling waves coming in off the Pacific Ocean were big, big enough for me anyway.  Two to three meter seas rolled underneath us and continued on to the rocky coast line.  We could see them crashing most of the way, especially outside the entrance to our cove.  We had to trust our sources, trust our route, and squeeze through a narrow, rolling kelp clogged passageway to get into the bay and through shallow water to the four mooring buoys.

Thankfully all went as planned and we’re in, on our own for another night.  The buoys look like they’d hold a cruise ship in a hurricane.  Not that a cruise ship could get in here.