Canadian Gulf Islands to the BC mainland, July 4th-7th

From Prevost Island, we headed to Clam bay, which is a wide open anchorage and a good spot to set up for crossing the Strait of Georgia to the BC mainland.

 

Lotta wood chips

One neat feature of this anchorage is “The Cut” which is a channel that was dug out in the early 1900’s to connect Clam Bay to Telegraph Harbour. The channel hasn’t been maintained but is still passable “most of the time” by small boat or dinghy. We waited for the tide to start coming back up from a low-low before heading through with our dinghy, but still ended up getting stuck (along with some locals who had been out fishing on our side of the Cut). The tide was coming in really fast, so it was just a matter of floating along until we hit bottom, waiting a few minutes for the water to rise, then repeating- about a dozen times…

We got to the other side eventually and found the reward for our perseverance in the form of pizza and ice cream at Telegraph Harbor.

From Clam Bay, we set out the next morning to catch slack water at Porlier Pass, then out into the Strait of Georgia to cross over to the mainland. The weather was fine, with light following winds and calm seas.

We anchored in Buccaneer bay for the night, then set a course for a nice anchorage at hardy Island that we remembered from our last trip through here. On the way, we made a stop at Pender Harbour at tied up at the Municipal dock for a few hours for some re-provisioning, lunch, internet, and a very successful stop at the local thrift store ($3 Canadian for two nice pairs of boat slippers!).

Pender harbor to Hardy Island to Desolation Sound (from Sue):

After supplying up at Pender Harbour, we headed over to Hardy Island for the night. Found a peaceful anchorage where we lounged outside on the deck, listened to music and made dinner.

Then we headed up to Prideaux Haven in Desolation Sound. This was one of our favorite spots last time and we wanted to make a point of going back.

Aside from the beautiful scenery and (usually) sunny location, its a good spot for prawns. Oh yeah, definitely wanted to go back there. On the way into our anchorage we dropped our prawn pot off before heading in. I got very excited when I noticed one of the boats in the anchorage was the same as one of the reference books we’ve been using. Wow, the author was here – very cool. Not to mention he had a unique looking boat.

Unfortunately, soon after we anchored, they picked up and left before we had a chance to go over and say hi. In looking closer at the boat as it left we saw it had a different name, so it probably had been sold and wasn’t the author anyway.  Did take a dingy ride around and saw lots of jelly fish and a pileated woodpecker. Not to mention a couple of ravens having a shrieking contest – damn those birds are loud.

We set the Prawn Trap out for the night by Mary Islands just outside the anchorage and had a peaceful night on the hook.

No Signal!

So we've been without wifi or data connection for almost a week now (and no cell service most of the time as well). This is great in a lot of ways, but not so great for sharing our adventures, pictures, and videos on this blog. We have travelled from the Canadian Gulf Islands up to the Broughten Islands and are currently in Sullivan Bay where there is just enough wifi bandwidth to send this text report ("no pictures or videos allowed, and keep it short!"). We plan on anchoring in Blunden Harbor for a couple of nights to rest up for an open water crossing to Fitz Hugh Sound (North of Vancouver Island) in a couple of days. After that, we will be transiting some pretty remote wilderness on our way to Prince Rupert, and the BC/Alaska border. We are having a great time and look forward to catching the blog up with our travels when we are able to connect at some of the little villages and towns along the way to Prince Rupert. You can follow our location on one of the vessel tracking websites like "ship finder" or "marine traffic". More to come soon...

Prevost Island

We are currently at the public wharf in Pender Harbour, about 40 miles SE of Desolation Sound.

This is a quick provisioning stop before we head to Hardy Island for the night.

Found a local cafe with a good bowl of chicken noodle soup and a grilled cheese sandwich- perfect lunch for a drizzly Northwest day. Good internet here so will catch up with some pics from the last few days:

After dropping off Will and Lauren to fly home from Victoria, we left Oak Bay Marina and headed out for a couple of nights at James Bay on Prevost Island. A nice place to unwind and unpack from our transit from SF. This anchorage is open to the NW, and so we had lovely sunsets with nice weather. Perfect for cocktail hour and dinners on the aft deck.

Next day, we went ashore at the head of the bay (at low tide) and rolled our dinghy up the beach far enough so it wouldn’t float away when the tide came up. Looks like about a 10 foot tide range here, so we were super cautious and ended up rolling our boat up the beach much further than we probably needed to.

We hiked out to Peile Point - about two miles round trip through cedar forests and interesting rock formations.

Then we hiked around the South side of the bay to an abandoned fruit orchard (too early for fruit) and kayak-in campground. Huge oysters and clams everywhere on the beaches and rocks, but not safe to eat on this part of the coast.

From Prevost Island, we re-started our trek North with stops at Clam Bay/Thetis Island, across the Straits of Georgia to the mainland, Buccaneer bay, and Hardy island. Will post more pics at our next wifi cafe stop.

Canada Day

Had we done our homework, we would have realized that this was Canada Day (similar to our July Fourth) and Victoria was mayhem (or at least the canadian version of mayhem).

The customs dock at the head of the harbor was suspiciously quiet, while around the corner downtown was in full festival mode with live music, street fair, food trucks, and everyone finding their spots for the fireworks show that evening. Of course the inner harbor was packed with boats and there were no berths available anywhere near town.

Fortunately, the folks at Oak Bay Marina (around the point, north of Victoria) took pity on us clueless Americans and let us tie up at the fuel dock for the night.

Once secured there we took a cab into town, had a killer Tapas dinner, and walked all over downtown Victoria.

Sadly, Will and Lauren had to head home the next day. They were a great crew and we hope to get them back up here sometime this summer for some proper relaxed cruising on the way home.

Leaving Oak Bay on Tuesday, we made an easy 6 hour transit to Prevost Island and anchored in James Bay. This is a nice spot, well protected and good holding in mud and shells. We have been here for a couple of days relaxing, getting things “unpacked” from the trip North, and grooving into Cruising Mode. Took a nice three mile hike onshore, met a cool local guy who was kayak camping on the beach at the head of the bay, and worked on plans for the next week or so. Will post some pics of Prevost Island when we get another spot of decent wifi.

As of now, we have decided to head up to the North end of the Canadian Gulf Islands for one more overnight, then cross the Strait of Georgia to the mainland with overnights at Gambier Island and Hardy or Nelson Island on our way to Desolation Sound.

Up the Coast (updated with a couple of videos clips)

Well, this trip went pretty much as planned, with just a bit of nasty unexpected weather at the end.
We left on Wed 6/26 at 0500 with a nice send off from our neighbors at Galilee Harbor (thanks for getting up early guys). Our crew consisted of our good friends and neighbors Will and Lauren, and Kona the cat.

Up the coast was unusually benign weather, mostly NW winds 5-15 kts and seas ranging from 4-6ft to almost zero.

Everyone's favorite spot on the bow when the weather is nice:

Saw lots of whales, pacific white-sided dolphins, albatross, sea lions, and even some sharks (blues I think).

We originally planned on 5 days (120 hrs of transit time with no stops from Sausalito to Victoria, British Columbia. We ended up a little closer to 130 hrs in transit due to a big ebb (3-5 kts) in the straights of Juan De Fuca. We also had some pretty good westerlies building through the afternoon.
This gave us some steep wind-against-tide seas for about 6 hrs heading East. The seas moderated a bit with the turn of the tide, just as winds kicked up on their way to a forecast gale later that afternoon. We managed to beat the predicted big afternoon winds out in the straights, and landed at the Victoria customs dock at 130pm on July 1st. Check in is by phone at the dock. Love the way they do things here...

-PB

Headed North

Been a while since I've posted, but we've been doing a lot of planning and prep for a Summer trip up the West coast and through British Columbia to Alaska and back. We did this journey about 10 years ago on our old boat Seabird (http://sausalitoseabird.blogspot.com/) but only had two months to work with, so just made it as far as Prince Rupert (at the far North end of BC). This time we have three months to play with so hope to have time to get up into SE Alaska.

We're leaving tomorrow morning at 0500 from Sausalito with about as fine a weather window as one can hope for this time of year. Looking like a straight shot non-stop (5 days underway) to Victoria, British Columbia. I'll do same backfilling on the blog covering some our prep and recent boat projects on the way up, then hopefully keep up with our travels with lots of pics and videos.

You can also see our progress on any of the AIS tracking sites (like Ship Finder, Marine Traffic, etc.).  More to come...

Morro Bay to Sausalito

We had projected that our last leg home would take about 36 hours however due to extraordinarily calm conditions (the highest gust we had was 13 knots and most of the time there was less than 5 knots of wind) we made excellent time.

Instead of arriving home in the early evening, we ended up cruising under the gate by 1pm. We didn't even deploy the downriggers until the last few hours of the trip when a low but persistent west swell right on the beam kept rocking us. It was a fairly uneventful trip and we quickly fell into the rhythm of life underway.

Kona stayed busy chasing and eating a posse of kelp flies that had hitched a ride from Morro Bay.

Two events did happen that stand sharing. The first happened around 5:30am and involved our cat Kona. Peter was sleeping after doing a long shift. I was at the helm and Kona was sitting on my lap keeping me company as she sometimes does. Something caught her attention and she got up and walked across the dash to the window. When she did that I heard the engine make a small but very definite clunk. I immediately checked our instruments and speed and nothing seemed amiss. I hated to wake Peter up as I knew he needed his rest. At the time I thought maybe she had head-butted the throttle as she had rubbed up against it. I kept monitoring the instruments for awhile but soon forgot about the incident as nothing seemed amiss. A little while later Peter awoke & was getting ready to make some breakfast when suddenly an alarm went off. Beep, beep beep! We have a lot of instruments that make different noises and after a quick glance I realized I had no idea where it was coming from. Time to get Peter involved. He came up and looked around for a few minutes & couldn't figure it out either. He was standing by the helm looking down when he realized the hydraulic pump warning light was going off and it was making the noise. It was overheating as it had been on ever since Kona stepped on the button to activate it. Yikes!.....

The big 25hp hydraulic pump that powers the bow thruster and anchor winch is driven off the crankshaft at the front of the engine via a big electric clutch. When we aren't using the hydraulics we disengage the clutch from a switch panel on the wheelhouse console, which completely disconnects the pump from the engine and takes the hydraulic system offline. Because we only use the hydraulics when we are docking or anchoring, I did not install a hydraulic oil cooler. The short duration that we usually run the system is never enough to build up much heat. Kona engaged the pump (in standby mode, but still pumping and building heat) for over an hour, which eventually raised the hydraulic oil temp to ring the alarm. Fortunately, the high temp alarm worked as designed (now that we know what it is). If the temp had gone up much more, the system would have automatically disengaged the clutch to avoid cooking the hydraulic pump- at least thats whats supposed to happen- we caught the issue before it shut itself down. -PB

The other event is much more pleasant. Just off Pacifica in about 120 feet of water we came across a large raft of birds of all different varieties, all trying to muscle in on the same small patch of water. That caught our attention.

Then we saw the whales.

They were in pods and were feeding.... The highlight was seeing one of them breach (sorry, no video). When you first see something that big coming horizontally out of the water your brain tells you that's not supposed to happen and it takes a moment to process that you're seeing a whale jump out of the water. By the time you see the large splash you're caught up and it's like WOW!

What we think was happening here (whale experts, feel free to correct our hypothesis) was that the whales were rounding up big schools of baitfish underwater and driving them up to the surface. When the birds spotted the big schools of baitfish coming up to the surface, they charged in and began snapping them up as fast as they could. When the whales charged up from underneath the school of fish to feed, the birds scattered to avoid becoming a side-dish for the whales. That's what it looked like to us anyway...

This was a little hard to capture on video, but a lot of fun to watch.

After that it was a quick easy trip around Mile Rock and through The Gate- no its not usually this calm:

Under the Bridge, left turn for Sausalito...

...and back to our home dock at Galilee Harbor where we glided into our slip and tied up our lines under sunny skies. It's always odd being on land after being out on the ocean for awhile. It's hard to walk in a straight line and you still automatically lock all cabinets after opening them. Peter and I are both still having dreams about being underway and wake up in the middle of the night thinking we have to go check on the anchor or stand the next wheelhouse watch, but as the days pass those things are slowly fading.

Overall it was a great shakedown cruise. We learned lots about the boat and ourselves. We have a list (not too long) of things to alter/improve/add for next time. We feel great that this boat is very capable and comfortable just as we designed and hoped her to be. And of course we're dreaming & planning of future cruising that will happen hopefully in the not-too-distant future. Thanks everyone who followed our little story. We'll be posting more soon as we prep and plan for our next trip. More to come...

If you are interested in how we built Kamahele (from plans to launch to fit-out), check out our other blog:        buildingkoloa.blogspot.com

Basic stats for this trip:
Sausalito to Santa Catalina Island and return,16 days total,
Covered just under 800 miles
Burned 330 gallons of diesel fuel using an average of 2.5 gallons an hour
All electricity from storage batteries/inverter
Batteries charged via solar panels & engine alternator (when underway)
All potable water supplied by Spectra Watermaker
Didn't tie up to a dock for two weeks
Had a great time...

Sue & Peter
Sept 2018