Tuesday, July 30 through August 20

         This morning dawned very foggy.There are lovely little cobwebs attached to corners where the lifelines connect to stanchions. On a foggy morning they stand out clearly, with droplets of water glistening on them. They make such a contrast to the unclearness of everything else around us in the fog. I love fog for its way of changing the world. Snow changes the world too but in a very different way. Shapes just disappear from our normal range of sight. On land I feel so mysterious and cozy at the same time. On water or if I want to be going somewhere on the water, fog just frustrates me. If we venture into the fog it causes anxiety to no end. We had to leave the marina by noon today because the slip we were occupying belongs to someone else who is due back today. The fog didn’t cooperate and lift by noon so we just came out to the other side of the breakwater and are anchored with a smattering of other sail boats until tomorrow when we try again. The weather forecast is for cloudy skies with possible rain showers in the afternoon. Perhaps it will rain in the morning. I learned today that if there is rain there is no fog. It cleared up a bit after we anchored and had lunch. The sun is shining so so through a haze and patches of fog are still lingering at the mouth of Port Townsend Channel. It is nice to be out of the marina. There are so many distractions and work that being docked in a marina bring with it. We rushed around yesterday trying to complete tasks that were not so urgent to be completed at the start of our sailing but needed attention now. At 9:00 am we rode south on our bikes to a little community with a sign shop that would make us vinyl letters that spell out Santa Fe, NM. This is where we “hale” from. The Coast Guard requires registered boat owners to put on the stern of the boat where you the owner, come from. It still says Vancouver. Vancouver will be scraped off with an old Triple A card. Then we had to buy provisions for the next leg of our sailing journey. Luckily there is a large Safeway within easy walking distance. After grocery shopping we rode our bikes into “downtown” Port Townsend to find out what we could about the care of Teak wood on a boat. There is a wooden boat building school and a museum. We heard for the fifth time that Teak is most happy when left alone, i.e. not varnished. It loves salt water to kill off any mold that might take to growing in and on it. Varnish looks wonderful on the Teak wood but at least every year, if the boat has been outside and on the water, has to be scraped off and revarnished! To me that is something that would come close to driving me crazy! There are so many things that absolutely have to be done in maintaining a boat on a regular basis; why make more work for oneself by varnishing stuff that doesn’t need to be varnished? So much for the cosmetic look on our boat. It’s not going to happen. Besides, in spite of our non cosmetic look, so many people have come up to us and told us how much they love Cape George boats, or they once owned one and you can tell they’re sad they don’t have it any more.

later.....like one and a half weeks: Sunday, August 11, 2013

      Well we were blessed with another day of fog and one of rain and fog in Port Townsend. On the second day of fog we practiced reefing the mainsail right where we were anchored. Reefing is a way to make the mainsail smaller when the wind is too strong for the boat under sail. So far we haven’t been in such conditions and I hope we won’t be until Kieran is along with us as he is a more experienced sailor than Mike or I. There was time to fix little broken things on the boat, read books, and make phone calls to family. The third day dawned to rain. We decided to go take a look at the opening to The Strait of Juan de Fuca. Out of the “hanging locker” (a small closet where you can hang clothes) came all our rain gear, rubber boots, bright yellow, rubber, rain pants and jackets. We put it all on and were glad to have it. It was cloudy with showers on and off as we headed out of Admiralty Inlet to take a look. We went out about two hours, couldn’t see the mountains and hills across the strait and decided we would go back and wait for better visibility the next day. Saturday dawned fogless with no rain, only a high overcast with the weather forecast saying it would clear up later in the day. The Strait was very calm the first half and the second half we motor sailed with light winds.  Just after we came through the “cow pass” into San Juan Channel we started taking down our sails and there was a tour boat circling around. We looked over and caught a glimpse of some kind of whale surfacing for an instant! It didn’t come above water more than it’s dorsal fin so we still don’t know what kind of whale it was. But it was way too big to be a dolphin.

      We arrived at Friday Harbor in the afternoon to heat and sunshine. We took our dinghy to shore to do errands. The outboard wouldn’t start so I rowed while Mike fiddled with the motor. I found rowing the dingy, without very good oar locks quite the challenge.  I was exhausted in no time. Luckily for me Mike got the outboard running after my uncoordinated efforts at rowing us more than half the way. Since then I’ve taken every opportunity to practice rowing. It is great exercise, and once I find a rhythm very easy, like walking. Part of the rowing trick is putting one’s back into the oar strokes and the other, to row a straight line. is to keep one’s sights on the same thing.  

      Since Friday Harbor we have gradually been sailing and motoring our way north to Jervis Inlet on the mainland side of these inland waters. We spent a lazy, sunny afternoon in Roche Harbor, the north end of San Juan Island. It was Sunday in the summer so crazy busy with speed boats, float planes coming and going, as well as motor and sailing cruisers. In regard to noise, it was awful. The sun was lovely and my mystery novel was good but if I was given a choice to go back on a weekend, I wouldn’t do it. The following day was clear but calm so we motored over to Sidney on Vancouver Island to check in with customs. Then we sailed over to Cowichan Bay and up the Sansum Narrows to Maple Harbor, Birds Eye Bay for the night. Birds Eye Bay was full of boats for long term moorings and had a no wake zone,Our evening turned into a most welcome quiet and tranquil one. Sailing through the southern Gulf Islands and Stuart Channel,we ended up the following evening in Telegragh Harbor between Thetis and Kuper Islands. We were anchored there for two days, fixing things and figuring out navigation for crossing the Strait of Georgia over to Gibson’s, north of Vancouver. It was hot and we went swimming off the boat and rinsed off the salt water with one of those black, plastic, passive solar shower bags. I also had an opportunity to practice my rowing around the harbor. We found home grown vegetables, eggs, and baked goods on Thetis island, sold in a little house beside the road. Knowone was there to take our money. It was set up for customers to use the honor system, we wrote down in a notebook what we bought and it’s price, there was a calculator and then we wrote down the final amount and put the money in a box with a slot. 

      When we left Telegragh Harbor we had fair sailing in the morning further up the channel. This meant we missed the time for slack water at Gabriola Passage between Gabriola Island and Valdez Island into the Strait of Georgia. Instead, in the early afternoon we decided to explore a small bay and anchor off of De Courcy Island. We’d read about the spot  in one of the many sailing guide books we have.  It turned out to be a good decision for the most part. Only a few families with children were in this small bay with a lovely beach where we went for a swim. Then we went for a walk on the part of the Island that is officially public park land. Right to the edge of the island cliffs and ledges there were huge pine trees and large deciduous trees with shiny leaves and red bark trunks. The sun was shining and it felt good to be walking in the shady woods on a hot afternoon. We went to bed at the end of a perfect day. The next slack water a half hour away from us in Gabriola Passage would be at 6:30 a.m. We planned on getting up at 5:00 and this would give us plenty of time to cross the Strait of Georgia and arrive somewhere in the daylight. The weather forecast on the marine radio for the next day was good. At 3:30 a.m. Mike and I both awoke to the sound of the wind whistling in the rigging and the boat rocking. The guide book had mentioned it was a safe place to overnight, sheltered on all sides except the southeast. So of course there was a thunderstorm down south from us and we felt the aftershock of it. We had no idea if the storm would come our way and one of the fears when anchoring anywhere is that the anchor might not hold and your boat might drift into another boat or the land! Needless to say, I didn’t sleep again until the wind quit an hour or so later. Then there was a quick snooze of 30 minutes and it was time to get up so we could go through the passage during slack current. We made a thermos of coffee before pulling up our anchor. Later in the morning as we motored into the strait we savored each cup of coffee.It wasn’t the greatest sailing for five hours. We went from gentle breezes to nothing to pulling in the jib and staysail and motoring. Then  again a nice strong breeze came up as we neared the mainland and it’s islands. Up went all the sails for about an hour only to have the wind gradually diminish to nothing as we came up on a narrow channel between two islands. We tried everything we knew for another half hour or so before the diesel was turned back on. So it goes when there are long distances to be covered with a particular destination at the end of the day. The Strait of Georgia is another place like the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where you cross it however you can and are grateful for no fog or “wind /storm warnings for small craft” being forecast.

     Five days later with two good sailing days behind us we are on the last leg of our journey to the head of Jervis Inlet, apparently like a fjord with breathtakingly, steep and high mountains  surrounding us. At the near head of the inlet we take a right and have to pass through the narrowest passage so far. It is so narrow there are rapids at all times except  slack water, when the current is at it’s least, when the tide is neither ebbing much nor flooding. According to all our guide books and people who’ve made the journey before, we will be rewarded at the end of Princess Louisa Inlet with a large waterfall cascading down into the inlet from the mountains. It’s supposed to be spectacular. 

Saturday, August 17

     Well we made it to Chatterbox Falls yesterday at around 5:00 p.m. after spending most of the day in rain.  We motored from an anchorage at the top of Agamemnon Channel into Jervis Inlet for five hours. Then we had two and a half hours to wait for slack tide at Malibu Rapids, just drifting around in the inlet in the rain. We had some lunch first. Then to kill time Mike decided to see if he could pull Pinniped using the dinghy and the outboard. He was able to do it just fine. Apparently Kieran had to do this under real circumstances when one of the boats he was in charge of while working in the Caribbean, lost it’s propeller. To kill more time Mike tried rowing the dinghy and pulling Pinniped. It worked but at a much, much, slower pace with quite a physical workout involved too.  We also did some yoga in the rain, fully decked out in our bright yellow foul weather gear. Finally it was time and we came through the “rapids”, the narrowest place we have had to pass through thus far (besides marinas) just fine. The water definitely was slack and we realized our anxieties were way out of proportion to the reality. As we came up Princess Louisa Inlet through rain and low clouds we were treated to waterfalls cascading down steep, 2,700 foot high fijord walls. Somehow huge pines and juniper/cedars grow on the sides of the fjord,which are interspersed with grey cliff walls. When it rains the water comes tumbling down the cliffs. It reminded me of flash floods in New Mexico only the water just dumped itself into the fjord which is already between six and eight hundred feet deep.  No worries under these conditions. Also the water wasn’t muddy. Too much rock I suppose. As we came up to the famous Chatterbox Falls, spewing water and spray at the very end of the inlet, people stopped to help us tie up the boat to the park dock in the pouring rain. 

     We spent two days at the falls, always hoping the sun would come out. It did for an hour or so each day and transformed everything with the sunshine. The water on the trees glistened like diamonds in the light and the contrast of shadow and bright light was wonderful on the evergreens growing on the fjord. My spirits lifted with the sun. That was on Saturday afternoon. I had hight hopes for a sunny Sunday but only woke up to more mist and rain. The propane looked like it was running out too. My mood plummeted. The sun came out for an hour around 1:00  and I remembered the rainy family vacations when we would be camping by a lake somewhere in upper New York state. It would be cold and wet but if the sun came out even for an hour we would jump in the freezing lake and swim around. Well I jumped in the dinghy and rowed around the falls. That helped a bit. When I got back we ate lunch and things got better after that even though it kept raining off and on into the evening. 

       Monday morning dawned cloudy/misty with rain showers off and on. Mike asked me if I wanted to wait another day in hopes of it clearing up. I had to say no. I didn’t want to revisit the mood I’d been in yesterday. It was definitely not a comfortable place to be. So   we left in time to come through the rapids at slack water although we went through a little early and we could feel the current on our way through. We came out of that narrow cloud shrouded inlet into larger Jervis Inlet and within half an hour the clouds had broken up and the sun was coming out on the hillsides. It felt good to be moving again and to have some sun, even if it was partly cloudy. We decided to spend the night in Hotham Sound at the Harmony Islands. This was a lovely spot where the mountains were high but one felt more like they were related to the Rocky Mountains, not a dark fjord in rainy British Columbia. Plus by late afternoon the sun was shining full force. We had a heck of a time finding a good spot to anchor. We tried four times and three of the times the anchored just dragged across rock at the bottom. We were starting to wonder if we would find good ground when the fourth try worked. I jumped in the water and swam around and took a solar shower on deck. It was one of the best days yet.

     

Wednesday, August 20, 2013

     Today we are back in Pender Harbor since yesterday afternoon. The weather is sunny again but it’s supposed to rain this weekend. I have to remind myself; that’s the reason it’s so green here.  We are gradually working our way south to the States once again. We have to get back in time to attend a wedding of a nephew in early September. We want to cross the Straight of Georgia with a different route this time. We’re hoping for favorable winds to Lasquetti Island tomorrow,then crossing over to Vancouver Island to a place called French Creek in a day or so. I hope everyone is well. We haven’t had a chance to check e-mail for the last couple of weeks. We are restocking our larder here and hopefully finding an internet cafe today.

     Until the next post,

                   Tina