Sunset at Port Townsend; Our Last Night - 6/19

Photo by Vi

The Engine Mechanic's Hat

Being a skipper means you have to have a few extra hats on hand.  I might not always know what I’m doing, but hey: that engine room floor looks clean enough to eat off of.  That’s gotta count for something.

Photo by Vi

Visitation

Customs and the Canadian Coast Guard pay Quijote a visit

Photo by Vi

Taking down the genoa

Photo by Vi

Awesome Soup and Rowdy Locals - 6/17

It was a much nicer day today, as we worked our way eastward through Juan de Fuca Strait, than it would have been if the starter motor had not decided to burn itself to smithereens.  What exactly is a smithereen?  In any case, while we waited for the replacement part, hobbled in that sorry excuse for an anchorage, a storm rolled though with gale force winds blowing up the strait.  At least in that respect, it worked out well.  Clear skies replaced stormy skies, calm replaced gale force winds, placid water replaced chop and swell and a burned out starter motor was replaced by a brand new one.  It dutifully fired up the engine this morning and off we went into the wild blue yonder.  At last.

The passage to Sooke Harbour was blissfully uneventful.  I have to report though that the boaters around these parts are in serious need of some manners.  To get into the protected water you travel through a narrow passage that makes a shallow dog leg left.  There isn’t a lot of room to maneuver, but that doesn’t stop the locals from flying through on two wheels, practically taking the paint of your hull on their way by.  I’m thinking: really?!  Is that necessary?  Apparently so.

We found the indentation that passes for an anchorage in this bay and it's full of crab pots.  Nice.  But, always a glutton for punishment, we put our hook down anyway.  All will be well as long as the wind doesn’t come up from the east and blow us in the wrong direction.

Kevin and I lowered the genoa shortly after our arrival and Vi put on a pot of soup.  The furling genoa is coming down because I’m going to hand it off to the sailmaker in Port Townsend on my through for survey.  She’ll let me know what maintenance it needs or whether replacement is a better option.  It looks to me to be in good shape, if a little green in places from algae, but she has a finer eye for these things.

And the corn soup was awesome.

On the road again! - 6/16

The new starter motor is in and working.  It was a lazy day of waiting, but after doing a whole lot of nothing for what felt like a fortnight, the part showed up late in the day. Finally there was something to do: engine work.  What fun.

Tomorrow morning we will finally be on or way to Sooke, after three miserable nights in this barely protected anchorage.

There was one other notable event around mid-day:  a Zodiak visited us carrying law enforcement and customs officials, one each.  They wanted to see that our paperwork was in order and everybody had a pfd.  I'm happy to report they left satisfied.

It feels so good to be mobile again.

Fingers Crossed - 6/15

Quijote has hit a bit of a snag, a minor catastrophe if you like.  Yesterday morning we roused ourselves early to do a 38 mile day to Sook. I asked Kevin to fire up the engine a few minutes early to give the batteries time to charge a little before we fired up the electronics.  This is becoming increasingly necessary as we proceed, so it's looking like a full replacement of the house batteries will be in my future after I return home.  Kevin did as I asked and the engine was purring away as it always does. Moments later a wail started coming out of the engine room, followed by billowing smoke.  We shut the engine down and took stock.  The starter motor was burned up. My guess is that the pinion gear got stuck in the engaged position and it burned itself up.

What to do. We were anchored in Port San Juan near the town of Port Renfrew. Thankfully Vi and Thomas had mobile phone service. Thomas had to be in Victoria the next day, so we had three things to work out: finding a new starter motor, finding a way of getting it to the boat, and finding a way to get Thomas into town and on the bus back to Victoria.

The last of those was accomplished with the help of a fishing boat and some phone calls to the bus company.  So we're down to three again.

I called a marine supply in Sook and they were able to find the right part in Vancouver. It's being overnighted to Sook, but unfortunately Port Renfrew is remote enough that no delivery service operates out here. They suggested I call places around town and see if I could find anyone making the drive.  With low expectations I called the marina, and hit the jackpot on the first try.  The woman in the office is making the trip this afternoon, when the part is expected to arrive, and will pick it up for us.  Then she'll ask her husband to run it out to us in his boat. What luck.

So we wait.  If everything works out as planned, we'll have the part in hand this afternoon, a day and a half after destroying the old one.  If the part is delayed or it's the wrong part, we'll be waiting a lot longer.  Best case, were home two days late. Worst case, we start worrying about our food, water, and battery levels.  It's been a stressful kind of boredom.

Meanwhile gale force winds are blowing out in the strait making it a boisterous, stressful kind of boredom.  Vi has been sitting in the cockpit to mitigate the nausea that comes with so much rolling around at anchor.  We can't wait to get out of here.

We're not There - 6/14 (reprise)

It's been raining off and on all afternoon. I'd been thinking that it would be nice to take the dinghy to shore and hike a while on the West Coast Trail today, but setting up the dinghy and making our way to shore in the rain doesn't sound very appealing. It's been a quiet afternoon of reading instead. Having a dry place to retreat to out of the rain feels especially comfy with folks in tents on shore. They're either waiting to begin the trail tomorrow morning or have completed it and are waiting for the shuttle back to Port Renfrew.

It stopped raining for a bit, so I went up on deck with my binoculars to have a look around. The clouds were hanging low over the hillsides and the air was saturated with moisture. The hikers were out of their tents, walking around on the sandy beach, some digging in their packs, some tending to food bags hanging in the trees around them. It must have been a relief for them to finally be able to get out and walk around.

Those of us who have done much backpacking know what it's like to be driven into the tent for long periods by rain: the difficulty of keeping wet sand out of the tent, the pervasive condensation on the inside of the rainfly, the difficulty of keeping anything dry, and the angst of a full bladder - dreading having to do something about it. Then the following morning, there is the horrid job of rolling everything up wet. But, if the next day is dry all is well, because setting up the tents early will give them a chance to dry out. If not... well, maybe the next day will be.

One thing the campers have that we don't is a stationary platform to hang out on. There's a low swell entering the bay from whatever wind is blowing out in the strait and the boat is turned sideways to it by whatever breeze there is here, so we'll be doing a lot of rolling around tonight. I wonder if they're looking at us, as thankful that they're not here as we are that we're not there.

Mulligan Stew - 6/14

We had an easy ride down into the western end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca this morning.  The winds were light overnight, so for a change there was little swell under the chop.  The farther into the strait we got the smoother it became.  Now we’re in Port San Juan anchored for the night.  A gale warning has been posted for the strait tonight, so we set our anchor well for the direction of the forecasted winds.  Then Kevin went below and made so terrific mulligan stew out of the various left-overs that had been accumulating for the last couple of weeks.  It’s raining out there now and everyone has curled up with a good book for the afternoon.  Very Cozy.

Leaving Effingham Bay

Photo by Vi

Dodger and Thrasher - 6/13

Planning for the final few days is complete.  There are separate current tables for east and west Juan de Fuca Strait.  Current in the strait gets up over 3 knots during spring tides, but thankfully it’ll be half that this week.  That’ll give us some latitude to go against the current if it makes more sense than leaving later after the chop has built up.  Final timing will depend on the whether forecast. Our priorities are safety, comfort, and fuel in that order.

We’re in Dodger Channel tonight, a shallow anchorage, staged for a run down the coast tomorrow morning and into Port San Juan, just past the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  We’ll be able to look across the straight and see Neah Bay from there.  We’ll be going along the West Coast Trail tomorrow, doing in one day what it took us a week to do on foot several years ago.  Dodger Channel is between two small islands near the town of Bamfield where the hike ends and tomorrow night’s anchorage, Thrasher Cove, will be where the shuttle boat from Port Renfrew dropped us off to start the hike.  It will be interesting to see if we can see any hikers along the coast tomorrow.  The hike was spectacular so I’m looking forward to seeing it from the perspective of the water.

We were able to dinghy to shore at low tide this afternoon.  We found an old First Nations cabin  in the trees and the rocks were perfect for scrambling around on. The book tells us there is archeological evidence of a First Nations village that operated on this site for centuries.  Oh to be able to step back in time for a quick look around.

Full Charge - 6/12

My itinerary had us anchoring in Frank Bay today, but we decided that Ring of Rocks sounded more interesting.  Rocks form a perimeter around the anchorage that dictates careful anchor placement, especially when the winds are blowing as they are today.

With the short days we’ve been having this week, there has been little engine time and so not much opportunity to keep the batteries charged.  We could run the engine in neutral to charge them, but it’s better for engine longevity to run under load.  To that end, we decided to visit both anchorages, starting with Frank Bay to have a look, and then on to Ring of Rocks to anchor.

It turns out to be fortunate that we were not intending to anchor in Frank Bay Nook because the Eagle’s Nook Lodge around the corner has a mooring buoy there that takes up what little space there is.  The practice of placing an unused mooring buoy in the only available anchorage makes me wonder about etiquette in such cases, or even provincial law.  Would they have had a right to object to us using it?  Perhaps.  I guess I could better see the justice of it where there is some harbor authority to approve private mooring buoy placements, but it is likely they placed it there without any such approval since the bay is fairly remote and they’re the only ones in there except for an aquafarm.

If we had tied to it, it is likely that they wouldn’t have noticed or cared.  It’s even possible that they put it there for our use.  Then again, if they needed to use it and we were already tied to it, things might have become unpleasant.  It turns out to be an academic question because we just scooted in for a quick look around.

The day evolved from overcast to bright sunshine and blue skies while we were under way,  While the wind has picked up, as we were told it would, the sun feels nice and a couple of us were inspired to take showers on the back deck.  Clean hair feels awesome.  And the batteries are charged!

No One Home - 6/12

Beyond all expectations, we enjoyed a day of sailing today.  It was glorious.  The sun was out, the wind was a perfect 12 knots, and we had ample room out in the Imperial Eagle Channel without swell or much chop.  We couldn’t have asked for a nicer afternoon.  We started the day off with a chalk talk, going over the basics of raising and lowering the sails (so to speak - both sails furl), tacking and jibing.  Then we did some dry run practicing: tacking and jibing with the sheets, but no sails.  The crew was on their game as we headed out into the channel to practice.  Before long they were tacking and jibing like seasoned veterans.  The weather and conditions were perfect for it.

We’re in our anchorage now, a little cove off Nettle Island with a rangers dock and a dilapidated hut.  Or maybe it’s just his storage shed that’s listing.  Both are on floats, but the shed appears to have lost some flotation on one side.  There’s even a little floating outhouse.  No one is home though.  Just us, reading our books in the sun after a yummy meal of leftovers.  We’re days from catching up with Kevin’s over-estimation of what we could eat when he made Swedish meatballs a couple nights ago.  Eight lbs of meat?!  I don’t know what he was thinking, but they're nice to have on hand for lunches.

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.

No Hurry - 6/10

Day two in the Broken Group.  It was nice not to have to go far; nicer still to have blue skies and calm for our one hour passage from Effingham Bay to Joe’s Cove.  We arrived to find both coves empty of boats, but yesterday several others joined us by early evening.  I’m guessing the same will happen here.  It is early yet.

The wind is supposed to pick up this afternoon, so it was nice to make our move while the gettin’ was good.

Vi is on bear watch, glassing every so often while she reads her book.  You can’t see ‘em if you don’t look is her motto.

A gaggle of kayakers came through shortly after we arrived, all chatty and in no hurry.  They didn’t look kitted out for overnight, so they must be on a one day paddle out of Bamfield or Ucluelet.  Ucluelet is at the north end of Barkley Sound.  We didn’t stop on our way south from Tofino, but I have been to Bamfield when several friends and I hiked the West Coast Trail from Port Renfrew.  Our paper chart of this area actually has the trail marked.  It was originally built to give shipwrecked sailors a path back to civilization.  I wonder how many of them it has actually saved.

The Artful Dodger - 6/9

It was a bit of slog getting down to Barkley Sound from Tofino today, but we arrived without incident.  The winds and seas were on the mild side compared to other times we’ve made longish days out into the ocean swell.  One arbiter of the violence of wave action on the boat is the over-temperature alarm at the wheel.  When the seas are big, it makes the alarm chirp at us.  This was somewhat worrisome at first as I wondered if it portended an engine temperature problem.  Thankfully the temperature gage shows normal; I’m convinced the problem is with a weak relay contact being force to close when the boat lurches, generating an erroneous error.

Today we heard no such chirping, so the seas weren’t too bad and the winds never exceeded 18 knots.  They were big enough to give Kevin a touch of sea sickness, but he rallied when we hit the anchorage in calmer waters.  There was a lot of rain throughout the day.  In foul weather, we usually have just one person at a time out in the elements steering the boat while the rest stay huddled under the dodger.

That dodger is awesome.  It’s the perfect compromise between visibility and protection.  I’ve been in boats that encase you in a protective bubble and others that give you an ear full of sea water with every other wave; this dodger does neither.  It makes keeping an eye out for logs and crab pots easy while keeping up to four people dry in the cockpit.  The helmsman... not so much.

The tide was a little lower on our way out of Tofino than it was on the way in - enough  so that we bumped the bottom on our way out.   I get the sense the depth is greater at the dock than it is slightly away from the dock.  Whatever the case, we made our exit as quietly as possible to prevent waking the neighbors as we untied from them.  We did a little skid through the mud and were on our way.

We’re in Effingham Bay tonight, part of the Broken Group in Barkley Sound.  It’s so lovely.  We’ll be cove hopping here for the next several days, before making our break for the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Crusty Old Coot - 6/8

It’s been a grim day.  I watched the warm front pass over head on my barometer.  It looks like a 24 hour sawtooth: the pressure a steady progression downward followed by a rapid increase over the last several hours.  It’s been pouring rain all morning.

The crew are scattered in Tofino.  Kevin is mooching off coffee house wifi, taking care of business on the home front. Vi is visiting galleries.  It was hard to go anywhere without getting soaked.  I went to find myself a chai tea latte and had to lean into buffeting headwinds and driving rain to get there.

Hoping to do a little mooching of my own and not seeing many people out, I anticipated finding the coffee house deserted, but of course that’s where everyone was hunkered.  Crowds of early season tourists were pretending to nurse a cup of coffee for several hours rather than go back out into it.  I bought my drink and shoehorned myself onto an empty barstool.  Considering the crowd and the number of laptops, the wifi was surprisingly responsive.  The tea was good too, if expensive.

Tofino is a nice little town with a young population.  It caters equally to commercial fishing, recreational tourism and artistic tourism.  There are a lot of adventure tours, a lot of galleries, and a shoddy little marina.  It is certainly not a destination for recreational boating.  That’s not surprising I guess; we’re a long way from anywhere.

It was stressful getting in here yesterday.  We knew it was going to be tough.  The book said as much and talked about the difficulty of handling the traffic and currents, the paucity of space, the shallow depths.  If all that wasn’t enough the wind was supposed to start blowing in the afternoon.  Winding our way through a double set of narrows studded with submerged rocks on the approach sounded easy by comparison.  So we started off at 5am yesterday morning, getting through the narrows and arriving to refuel and seek moorage shortly after low tide at 7:30am. Low tide is better than strong current or strong winds I say.  I’d also hoped that an early arrival would offer ample moorage, but that didn’t turn out to be the case.

Most of the public dock is reserved for commercial boats.  There is only one finger for recreational boaters, room for maybe a dozen boats, and there are live-aboards taking up most of that space.  Half of what remains is too shallow to be useful for a boat with more than a six foot draft.  When I talked to the harbormaster on the way in, he told me to take anything on E dock that I was comfortable with.  Ha! approaching the dock, still thirty feet away, it was 7.5 feet deep and getting shallower.  WTF?  Rather than continue further, we tied up to a sailboat that was already there at the end of the dock.  When the owner came out to see what was going on I told him the harbormaster told us to raft up to him - a bit of a stretch, unless you interpret “wherever you’re comfortable” to include rafting.  Thankfully he was friendly and helpful.  Our power cord is strung across his cockpit; as was the hose while we were filling the tanks.  It took us four hoses (two from the marina, one borrowed from another boat, and one that is ours) to reach the water tank from the nozzle.  This west coast is a crusty old coot in so many ways.

Back on the Grid - 6/7

We’re in Tofino a day early.  Getting to town and leaving the following morning can be a bit of a rush with all there is to do.  It’s been a day of chores even so and we haven’t started reprovisioning yet.  Kevin and Vi got all the laundry done.  Two weeks laundry for three people and a boat makes for quite a pile and takes a pocket full of loonies.

I had to make a run to the Marine Supply store to buy a power adapter.  My shore power cable isn’t long enough for this marina.  An extension is over $200 (in this town) so I had the bright idea of adding my tool power cord with adapters at each end.  I’ve never given it much thought, but my shore power cable must be 240v, because it has four wires where the tool cord has only three.  Whatever the case, we can charge our electronics with this setup, but not the boat.  That’s OK, the boat is already pretty well charged.

The down side of spending another night tied to the dock (actually tied to a boat tied to a dock) is the constant stream of commercial boats coming and going.  They’re passing by about fifty away from us with nothing to dampen their wake.  We’re getting tossed and our fenders are taking a beating.  I guess we’ll survive.  At least we’re not having to dinghy back and forth into town.

I can’t imagine living aboard in this marina.  But people do.  The folks we're tied up to have been here for a couple weeks.  That’d be about thirteen days too long for me.  A beautiful wooden boat on our dock with a couple of long legged deck ornaments doing some sun bathing this afternoon has been here for three years.  I wonder why.

Two sea otters climbed onto the dock next to the boat this afternoon.  I’ve never seen that before.  They must be used to handouts.  I had to walk around them and I was a little nervous about it, wildlife being as unpredictable as it is.  We stared each other down, each taking stock of the other, wondering who would blink first.  Thankfully I have better mobility on a dock than a sea otter does, so they did and slipped back into the water.  I could have taken them.

Thomas will be joining us tomorrow.  Quijote Crew goes to four!

Clean Again - 6/5

High pressure over Vancouver Island has been giving us glorious sunshine yesterday and today.  We celebrated by taking showers on the back deck this morning after arriving at the anchorage early.

It’s a loose term: shower.  There’s a deck fitting that’s connected to the boat’s pressurized fresh water system, supplying hot water though a shower hose.  If water was unlimited, it might be considered a “real” shower, but as things are, with the water-maker down, we have to be careful about how much water we use.  I use the shower hose to wet my hair in short bursts over a bucket, then suds up the hair and use the sudsy water caught in the bucket to scrub my bod.  The last step is to try to rinse using as little water as possible.  We probably end up using a half gallon or so each - a minor amount of water in the scheme of things.  It feels delicious to be clean again.  That should hold us until we’re in Tofino three days from now.

Only Two Weeks Left - 6/4

As is typical, the afternoons in our anchorages have been gusty lately, while mornings are calm.  The wind generator and solar panel were keeping up with the electrical demand of our refrigeration all afternoon yesterday; everything else was turned off. Today the wind has been blowing less consistently: blowing like a banshee one moment and dead calm the next.  Not that I know how a banshee blows.  Or even what a banshee is.  My life is a constant stream of things I think of to look up whenever I next see Internet service.  But I’ll forget by then.

Today is Sunday, which means that we are scheduled to arrive in Quijote’s home port of Lake Union two weeks from today.  I’m hoping the Straight of Juan de Fuca settles down some time between now and when we’ll be there.  They’re predicting gale force winds in the Strait for the next few days.  The nice thing about scheduling short hops between anchorages is that we can time our run for it: giddy-up while the getting is good; hunker down while it’s not.  With an eye on our marina reservation, I’d rather not arrive early or late to Victoria, but stuff happens.  Safety First.  In the mean time, we’ll enjoy the protection of the islands in the Tofino area for the next several days, then make a one day run from Tofino to the Broken Group, where we’ll tootle around for another few days.  We’ve heard a lot about that area and I’m looking forward to it.