Queen Charlotte Strait, Port McNeill, … and the path ahead

I had a good sleep while it lasted(!) An hour and a half ago, nature called after which I couldn’t force my mind to settle down and go back to sleep. Half an hour ago I arose, dressed, and am sipping a cup of coffee presently. My mind was going everywhere after I crawled back in bed. Too many thoughts in too many random directions. Thankfully, not all mornings are like this!
First, I make a couple of notes about Echo Bay and Booker Lagoon where we stayed after visiting Kwatsi Bay. Echo Bay hasn’t fully wakened from winter. Its redeeming aspects were Chip, the black lab mutt, who has learned to walk along 4″ wide borders around the coarse steel grating decks, and more PACIFIC LOONS calling from the outer bay. Booker Lagoon was a fabulous gunk hole that, while tough to get in and out of owing to a narrow tidal current-affected channel, is decent sized, had reasonably nice winds, and afforded us the longest continuous sail aboard our dinghy Bravo since I built it.

The essence of boating and especially sailing, in sporty conditions was captured in a hilarious article in Cruising World I read late yesterday that made me laugh. A guy recalled his earliest sailing (racing) experience on the Thames River in Connecticut aboard small boats. It was rude, unforgiving, and, as he put it, the fastest path ever to getting better. Every move, every thought, every reaction within a small boat had immediate and usually good or bad consequences the sum of which amounted to losing, far more often than not, a race. Each race left the students with much to discuss. That was yesterday after we flew out of Booker Lagoon’s very narrow channel in pre-dawn darkness with a two to three knot and growing ebb. That’s one way to spell t-e-n-s-i-o-n.
The wider channel wasn’t wide enough leaving us to wish we could raise the main. Shortly later we encountered what was a spot-on forecast for 15-20kt winds in Queen Charlotte Strait, turned into it to raise the main, and got the sail up only to see that our very long new top reef line (longest of any aboard pushing 100 feet) had knotted itself six feet below the Antal ring through which it passed coming back down to the boom. Murphy suffers no one fools or not! In the gyration that followed, we slacked the main four feet to generate slack in the knotted reef line so I could try to muscle out the knot from the end of the boom (failed), turned down-wind to reduce relative wind speed, which resulted in the second from top leach batten hooking the starboard lazy jack line creating an most ugly hourglass in a big sail not designed for that (failed to eliminate the knot), and then turned upwind with the intent of fully dropping the main. With Murphy come miracles, sometimes. Having pulled considerable slack out of both first and second reef lines going down wind, and with apparent wind gusts breaking 20kts, I looked up with considerable relief to observe the knot had vanished. Had we been smarter at that moment, we would have pulled hard on the first reef line and set the main accordingly. We were not, raised the sail fully, turned south to Port McNeill, and very carefully deployed the Genoa to its second reef mark. I chose to test our new Hydrovane on a broad reach with Encore lunging forward in moderately rough seas at 6.5-7kts. We should have reefed the main. While it “worked”, Encore wanted badly to round up forcing me to set a port main rudder bias of several degrees to “assist” the Hydrovane. This is not how one is supposed to use a Hydrovane. It (we really need to come up with a name) is much happier working with balanced sails. So on we raced reaching at top speed, captured by instruments, of 8.8kts until we passed into the lee of Malcolm Island in an hour and a half.
If you look on a map, you will find Port McNeill south of Port Hardy and north of Telegraph Cove along the northeast shore of Vancouver Island. The little town that could, and we loved it, and not just because of affording us the first showers since 26 April. All the key elements are within a short walk within a few blocks. Restaurants. Showers. Grocery. Bank. And Devil’s Bath Brewery. And ready access to people and tools to fix most things on one’s boat. To boot, people are really friendly. We will come back!
Anticipating poor internet accessibility in the next four days, I pass along the itinerary that we roughed out last night. Over the next two days, we will transit the infamous Johnstone Strait. Day one, today, will bring a northwest wind – the axis of the strait giving us a dead run – to carry us 46 miles to Kelsey Bay. That sounds wonderful and it will be … until the tide becomes an ebb around 9am and carries on until 3pm. Water flowing against a wind becomes unhappy and choppy just like we experienced coming along the strait westbound four days ago. It will be interesting to compare the downwind experience to last week’s upwind jaunt. And after yesterday’s flail, we will take no chances and start with both main and jib reefed. Mid-afternoon, we’ll get a decent flood to carry us the last ten or so miles. Will let you know how that goes. Day two, a leg of only 31 miles, will bring no wind and another tidal cycle shifted an hour later. That sets the stage for a wild morning the third day shooting first the lower Okisollo rapids immediately followed by a left turn to race through the Hole In The Wall. We were there leaving Octopus Islands on May Day morning and hit, for us aboard Encore, a speed record of 13.4kts to give you a sense of what tidal velocities can be like in this part of the world. Day three will take us to Scobell Island in Desolation Sound where we first found this piece of heaven in 2009, and we’ll depart there for Lund (and internet) after two nights on the hook with a stern-tie for the first time this trip. We’ll then cross the Strait of Georgia to Deep Bay (recall it’s a new favorite place), thence visit Silva Bay on Gabriola Island southeast of Nanaimo, wander south to Montague Harbor adjacent Galliano Island, at which we’ve stayed numerous times, and finally check in to US customs at Friday Harbor, San Juan Island on 15 May. The 16th affords us a 65nm transit to Eagle Harbor Marina, with following seas and hopefully a following breeze.
I’ve babbled enough and with no pictures to share since Kwatsi Bay save the one below shot this morning at Port McNeill Harbor! Some might note that, Esperanza, the boat in the foreground is a vintage Catalina 38 like Palancar that we enjoyed sailing for 15 years, in fact on our first visit to Desolation Sound!