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| 2010 CRUISE REPORT, WEEK SIX
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July 19, 2010.
Shearwater to Shearwater. It’s Saturday morning and we’re at Shearwater again, after the nearly 200-mile run to Prince Rupert and back, nearly 400 miles total. The weather was mostly rainy. We had some long days chug-chugging through the gloom. Cabin heat made a big difference.
We got in late yesterday afternoon. In the morning I had called from the channel off Klemtu to reserve space at the dock, and Steve Cappello, the Harbour Master, had a nice spot for us close to the ramp to shore. (Klemtu, like the other Indian villages along the way, has excellent Telus/Verizon cell phone service.) Cruising the Inside Passage sure has changed in the last 20 years. It used to be that boaters came up here to get away. Now we take it all with us, and fret when we’re out of contact for even a day.
Marilynn did several loads of laundry last evening. I changed oil in the engines. Shearwater is a good place to change oil. A wide platform makes it easy to empty the bucket of old oil into the tank, and a separate barrel is marked for used oil filters only. There’s room to stack the empty containers, and a bucket for dirty oil sorbs. Changing engine oil is still one of the less-enjoyable tasks on a boat. But it’s done. I don’t have to think about it until this fall, when the cruising season is over.
Marilynn has her own version of my oil changing: refrigerator defrosting. We have two under counter refrigerators with little freezer compartments, and they ice up after a few weeks. She’s at it now. With the help of a pan of hot water and a hair dryer, it’ll take about an hour.
I took a break to pay our moorage. Steve Cappello pointed to two lacrosse sticks standing in the corner. “Tell lacrosse players to bring their sticks,” he said.
Anchoring. We had been tied to docks nearly every night as worked our way north. At last we had a chance to get the anchor wet. The north coast of B.C. is all but empty of people. There’s Klemtu, 40 miles from Shearwater, and the rough docks of Butedale, farther up, and the Hartley Bay Indian village 70 miles from Klemtu. Then nothing for the remaining 70 miles to Prince Rupert. It felt wonderful to put the hook down in an empty cove and enjoy our little self-contained and self-sufficient vessel as it swung around. Rain pitter-patting on the overhead had a sedative effect.
Except for that two-hour stretch in the middle of the night at Nettle Basin in Lowe Inlet, Grenville Channel. We had anchored in calm and gone to bed around 10, shortly after sundown. Just before midnight I was wakened by a roar of wind and the rattling of the Canadian courtesy flag tied to our starboard side radio antenna. This was combined with a low rumble of anchor chain along the bottom. Where had this wind come from? More importantly, were we dragging anchor? Equally important, was the boat anchored a short distance away dragging?
Marilynn says I shot out of bed. I just remember being suddenly at the helm seat, looking for the neighbor boat’s anchor light and trying to orient myself with what little I could see around me. As far as I could tell, both boats’ anchors were holding.
This was the first real test of my deep-water anchoring theory. Nettle Basin is around 100 feet deep, and I had only 200 feet of chain out. I figured that gave me something like 100 feet of chain on the bottom. At a pound per foot, we had 100 pounds of chain on the bottom before we got to the anchor. Our 44-pound Bruce is a short-scope anchor. It doesn’t need as much chain between it and the boat. So far, my 2:1 theory had worked, but it had never dealt with storm winds and wild arcing.
That night in Nettle Basin the 2:1 approach worked. We swept through an arc of more than 90 degrees. We tugged this way and that. Tongues of wind propelled down the mountain side and slammed into us. I wrote down latitude and longitude coordinates from the GPS, and watched as patterns developed. Since the bow was pointing about north into the wind, if latitude didn’t move south, we were holding. I watched as the latitude moved north at the ends of an arc, then back through its south reading at the bottom of the arc. Longitude readings stayed within their parameters.
The wind died away a little after 1:00 a.m. I waited for its return, but the air stayed calm. I went back to bed. The next morning the anchor took some effort to break out. Nettle Basin has a great anchoring bottom.
Drift. Earlier in the trip I was struck by the absence of drift floating in the water. Now I know where it went. It went north of Seaforth Channel. We’ve had to work our way through floating trees, logs, limbs, chunks and sticks. Thick lines of floating rubble have stretched from one side of a channel to the other. Eddies have assembled football fields of floating debris. There’s a reason even fast boats tend to motor along at 8-10 knots. Substantial pieces of log often lie low in the water and are not apparent until you’re very close. If you tangle one with a propeller you’re in trouble.
Repairs. At Hartley Bay the skipper of an Albin 25 powerboat told us the Albin he was cruising with would be towing him to Kitmat. Blown transmission. Parts were coming by air from Sweden. At Prince Rupert a sailboat was heading south after spending two weeks getting a new engine. The engine had to be air freighted from Sweden. Anything can happen. We go slow, keep our fingers crossed and knock on fiberglass.
Chatham Sound. We should have waited a day before crossing Chatham Sound, but in Hartley Bay we had called the Prince Rupert Rowing and Yacht Club, and had reservations. The lighthouses were reporting “three-foot moderate” seas, which we already know are not “moderate” enough for our pleasure. Holland rock was 14 knots of northwesterly. The run north in Grenville Channel and even to the edge of Chatham Sound had been easy (drift excepted). The tide was flooding, putting wind and current together, which would flatten the seas. We stuck our nose out.
The problem with sticking the nose out is that the bad news doesn’t come until later, when it’s a little late to point the nose the other way. The seas weren’t too bad at first. Then they got higher and steeper. They didn’t get to the dangerous stage unless we would happen to come down on a log, but they wetted the boat down quite thoroughly and changed a pleasant passage into a hang-on experience.
With that lesson clearly in mind, we cut our planned three-day stop at Prince Rupert to two days. The weather window was open on the third day, and we took advantage of it.
Prince Rupert. If you need parts or repairs, Prince Rupert is a good place to be. They keep a large commercial fishing fleet going. If you need to reprovision and/or reliquor, Prince Rupert is a good place to be. The big Safeway has a wide selection and huge stock, and the liquor store is big and busy. If you need a quality dinner out, the Cow Bay Café is famous. We had lunch up at the Crest Hotel, and it was excellent. After our rough crossing of Chatham Sound, our supper at Breakers Pub next to the yacht club was quite good and also quite welcome, since Marilynn had informed me she was Not Cooking Tonight.
And if you need to play a little golf, the nearby 18-hole golf course is challenging and beautiful, with lovely greens that defy reading. (Yes, I did play. Marilynn was happy to get rid of me for a few hours. I will not reveal the score or the number of balls donated to the woods. I keep thinking that if I plant enough of them, they’ll take root and grow an ongoing crop of new golf balls. Silly me.)
When it comes to moorage, however, you need to bring low expectations and a flexible attitude to Prince Rupert. The bigger the boat, the more this is true. Conditions there are tough. On the day we arrived, the current from a 20-foot tide combined with the wind we had endured in Chatham Sound pinned a gleaming white 100-foot yacht to the outside of the long dock. They were supposed to depart to make room for arriving boats with reservations, but the wind and current were too strong and they couldn’t get off.
Up at the Safeway, we chatted with the owners of a 61-foot boat whose longstanding reservations couldn’t be honored. There isn’t much of a Plan B in Prince Rupert. You can anchor across the way or take your chances at the Rushbrooke docks a cab ride from town. The 61-footer went to Rushbrooke, where they rafted off a fish boat that hadn’t gone anywhere in a long time. “There are a lot of fixer-uppers at Rushbrooke,” the husband said. “But the people there are really nice.”
Another larger boat thought they had reservations for two days to attend to chores, shopping, and scheduled maintenance for the missus. The yacht club had them down for one day, and they had to move. They weren’t very happy.
If your boat is 40 feet or less, the chances for moorage at the yacht club are pretty good – if you have reservations. Our boat is 37 feet. We started in one slip, but it was pretty active from wind waves and the wakes of fish boats coming and going. We asked if another spot might be available, and it was.
So we moved, which unfortunately is not the end of the story. The wind grabbed the boat as we prepared to leave the first slip. Marilynn was aboard. I was on the narrow, wobbly finger float and saw the boat, engines running, float away. I had one chance only to get aboard, and that was to leap head-first over the rail and into the cockpit. I am 70 years old. I don’t do those sorts of things anymore. Or until that moment I thought I didn’t. I leaped. My nicely-padded middle flopped on the cockpit cap rail, and I rolled into the cockpit. Marilynn helped by grabbing hold of my belt and pulling. Up on my feet and gazelle-like I bounded to the controls. I made it in time. We backed out, touching nothing.
Now came the task of backing into the new slip. Several helpers were waiting on the dock. I had to deal with current from the 20-foot tide pushing the boat into the new slip, and that blasted crosswind grabbing the bow and pushing the boat sideways into its neighbor. Timing, timing. Square the boat away upwind from the slip. Back down, guessing and approximating when to add power to back in. I did pretty well but not well enough. Lines were thrown and much shouting. With half the boat in, the bow took off sideways. We made it but I’m not proud.
Wildlife. Every year is different. We’ve seen large numbers of humpback whales, and one pod of orcas. Bears are always iffy. One year we saw 12 bears in a single day. This year, until a couple days ago we hadn’t seen even one. It was a good sighting, though. Verney Falls, Nettle Basin. Afternoon, high tide. A dark colored bear with a hump over its shoulders was trying to catch salmon in the falls. We took the dinghy up and fired away with both cameras. We got pictures. The bear didn’t get a salmon.
On our way to Ocean Falls a couple weeks ago or whenever it was, a large pod of Pacific white sided dolphins spotted our boat and ran over to play. They leaped, they swam beside, they patrolled in squadrons to accelerate, turn, and look up at us. They didn’t like it when we slowed from 8 knots to 6. They swam under the bow and jumped in front of the boat. “Come on!” they seemed to be saying. When we went back to 8 knots they were clearly pleased. Pacific white sided dolphins have to be the world’s happiest creatures. v
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