Barkley Sound Day 9 – Marveling at Marble Cove

Today we woke up and decided it was a cleaning day as the boat needed to be organized and cleaned pretty badly. After a very tasty French Toast with blueberries breakfast the girls headed off in the kayak with Katherine and we started to clean. Devon then got a wild hair to do laundry so she filled up a bucket with warm water and detergent and we all collected our dirty clothes. After a couple hours of Devon washing and rinsing, Katherine helped hang the clothes on a line from bow to stern so they wouldn’t fall off, or overboard, in the wind and/or while we sailed.

We ran the generator to charge the batteries and make fresh water, and hot water while we did all the cleaning, I used the mini handheld Dyson to vacuum everything I could and when the girls came back from Kayaking they wiped down the walls, cabinets, and counters in the heads and galley. After all the cleaning the boat looked great and we took some chicken and rice leftovers, added egg and turned it into a sort of quiche for lunch. Then the girls started quiet time while we brought up the anchor and made our way out of Dodger Channel to head Northeast toward Marble Cove.It’s only about an hour away, but the incoming ocean swell made it hard to just go directly there, so we headed into the swell at about 40 degree angle, away from our destination for about 20 minutes, then when we were lined up with the swell and our destination we turned back east and followed the swell straight in.

By the time we got to Marble Cove the swell had subsided and we slowly cruised in to the cove. It’s very pretty, but a bit hard to anchor. The chart shows a shelf coming from 70 feet up to 7 feet some ways off the shore but we couldn’t verify that without risking the boat, so we basically anchored directly in the middle in 70 feet of water. We put out over 160 feet of chain and set the hook pretty hard, so we should be pretty secure. There are no other boats here but there’s a fish farm of some sort, a couple floating houses, and a few crab pots which added to the anchoring difficulty.

We took the dinghy out for a little excursion to check for the charted shelf (couldn’t find it) and to drop the crab pot. We are trying it deeper this time (70 feet instead of 30 feet). We did a little high speed run out of the cove and back for fun and then hopped back aboard the boat to get ready for dinner. Devon prepared some of the salmon filets for grilling and I cleaned and warmed up the BBQ. Then it was BBQ salmon and cucumber salad for dinner, with a little Pinot Noir (HOB NOB 2012) with it. For dessert we added an Oreo cookie to the ice cream and the kids were pretty ecstatic (and so was I).

I realized there was little chance I was going to get blog posts and photos out from my laptop over the next few days, as I already had 3 written and no way to upload them. So I decided posting them from my phone could work when we are moving between islands the cellular coverage works a tad bit. So I set about trying to copy the text I’d written from MS Word on my Mac to Blogpress on my iPhone. This turned out to be far more difficult than I was hoping. None of the iCloud or any other based services can sync without Internet, even though we had Bluetooth and active WiFi networks. I even tried AirDrop from my Mac but it never saw the iPhone for some unknown reason.

I was about to give up and then realized I had a little Raspberry Pi on board hosting Kahn Academy and some other stuff I’m experimenting with. It also has a web server. So I copied the text from Word into Terminal directly to an open HTML file I created on the Raspberry Pi’s Apache web server. Then I loaded the web page in Safari on my phone and copied/pasted the text to Blogpress. After that I had to fix a little formatting and attach the photos (which were already on the iPhone) and the posts were ready to upload. It should have been WAY easier, but alas everyone who writes software seems to think that you will always have Internet, which is not the case for boats. Something to consider if you are writing software in the future, how will someone use it if they can’t actually access the Internet.

One of those nice dinghy’s with a console, chartplotter, etc came through the cove with 6 people aboard, scoping out the area and they stopped by to say hi and see where we were from. Turns out they are from Mercer Island and cruising in a power boat. I forgot to ask where they were moored but I assume they are in Robbers Passage around the corner where I saw a few boats as we came in here. We have this whole anchorage to ourselves tonight, again.

I wrote a bit more for the blog (this post specifically) and then the girls went down for bed. Our view of the sunset tonight was perfect (again), somehow these last two anchorages have perfect little openings to watch the sunset between rock stacks and reefs.

* Anchored in Marble Cove, Barkley Sound, Vancouver Island, BC
* Engine Hours: 1436.7 to 1438.7 = 2 hours
* Genset Hours: 631.5 to 634.1 = 2.6 hours
* Water Consumption: 340-170 / 8.1 = 21 gallons
* Water Produced from Watermaker =28 gallons
* Barometer at 1017.8mb and falling