Barkley Sound Day 12 – Gunkholing and Hiking at Lucky Falls

Only one small photo again today due to updating via satellite…

Today we got up to a quick cereal and oatmeal breakfast. We wanted to get off the boat in time to leverage high tide for today’s excursion, which turned into a sort of Jungle River cruise. Last night as we were getting ready for bed, a thunderstorm rolled through, over 50 strikes in the 3-4 mile radius around us as it moved from North to South coming within a mile to our west as it passed by. It was pretty fun, the thunder was the long and rolling/rumbling kind and seemed to mostly be coud-to-cloud lightning.

One thing we have never done is actually clock the dinghy to see how fast it does go. Since we wanted to figure out our time to different destinations we needed to find a way to get an accurate speed. So I broke out the trusty Garmin Quatix 3 watch which seemed to fit the bill with a little sailing activity I had set up that provides actual speed in knots. After breakfast we packed changes of clothes, the lunch sandwiches momma made last night, some water and had our swimsuits on. Then we loaded up in the dinghy to check out the two little river/creek inlets nearby. With all 5 of us, plus a backpack and few other goodies we got her up to a tad over 15knots as indicated on the Quatix. Not bad considering the number of people. I suspect if we got up on a plane with only 1 or 2 people we’d be well over 20knots.

First we checked out the inlet at Cataract Creek a bit to our east. We went up the inlet slowly, watching depth and eventually got pretty far up until there was shallow rapids only a few inches deep, which the dinghy obviously couldn’t go. So we slowly headed back out, snaking down the creek inlet with the deeper section until we got to the mouth, where we saw two women rowing their dinghy up the inlet. We chatted with them a bit, we’d seen them walking on the boardwalk back in Bamfield also, and it turns out they sailed here through the Panama Canal about 6 years ago from Nova Scotia and this is their sixth season cruising around this area. After the quick chat we set off across Pipestem Inlet to check out the famous Lucky Creek falls. Again, it was like a little Disneyland-like Jungle Cruise up the inlet as the water snaked back and forth, us staying in the deeper outer edges of the curves as we made our way upstream. Then suddenly we rounded a corner and up ahead there were waterfalls.

Once we got to the falls we found a little rocky area to disembark the dinghy and hike up the hill, there were even ropes pre-hung on some parts to help the climb. At the top of the first climb we saw all the pools, cascading from a large falls. Someone had a rope swing tied in a tree for jumping into the pool of water. It was really pretty awesome to see. We found a little round rock beach to sit on and the girls played in the water. Devon and Katherine jumped off a high rock into the pool and realized it was quite cold–not like the warm water around the boat. While we were there we ate our sandwiches, and talked briefly with another sailor who came up the inlet in her dinghy to check it out as well and then we started to get dressed and head back. Just as we needed high tide to get up to the falls, we needed high tide to get back out as well. The girls got dressed very slowly, apparently being cold makes you stand there and do nothing rather than putting clothes on to get warmer, not sure how that works in the logic train.

Once free and clear of the shallows of the Lucky Creek Jungle River Cruise I opened up the throttle and we bombed back across Pipestem Inlet to our waiting Mobert, floating peacefully in glass-like water. Back on board Devon made hot cocoa, we fired up the genset to make water and charge the batteries, and electronics, and most everyone decided to take a little nap, except the girls couldn’t seem to actually do that, and kept moving around the boat, complaining about how they were just “trying to take a nap”. They finally quieted down with their blankets lying on the floor of the salon.

While they napped I re-calibrated the boat’s water temp sensor against the Garmin Quatix’s sensor, and it turned out that while the boat indicated the water temp as 66F it was actually 71F. Explains the nice swimming yesterday. I then decided to try making Lox from some of the Salmon we had–I had thawed one pack last night so I opened them up and meticulously removed the bones from the filets, even resorting to a pair of tweezers to pull out the little tiny bones. Then I crusted the filets with raw sugar (we don’t have any brown suger, or molasses, on board) and salt, wrapped them in saran wrap, put some weight on top and dropped them in the fridge. We’ll see how they are doing Wednesday or Thursday.

Then the girls started getting up and it was time to work on dinner. Katherine made up some arepas and we bbq’d flank steak and fried up some onions and bell peppers to make a sort of fajita style arepa.

Morgan has been starting a journal and wanted me to post her first couple entries to the blog, so watch out for “Captain Morgan’s Log”, meanwhile Devon’s video project is not working out well since her laptop has new OSX and new Photos app, but old ’09 iMovie, so there are issues with photo and other media integration into iMovie. And since there is pretty much no Internet, there’s no much we can do about it right now. So we drank vodka instead.

During the dinghy excursion we managed to tear the whole zipper for little bow cover on the dinghy from the rubber flange. Combined with the cockpit canvas zipper we are 0 for 2 on zippers this trip. On the plus side, after rinsing off the boat really well with salt water (via the wash-down pump) while we were at Nettle Island the other day, last nights brief hard rain during the thunderstorm rinsed all the salt residue off, so now the boat feels and looks cleaner.

I’ve been playing with the SSB and feel like it’s not working correctly. I was able to confirm that it doesn’t seem to want to “Tune” with the automatic tuner, it always switches back to “Thru”. I also hear lots of strange digital sounding noise, which I traced almost entirely to the fridge and freezer. So I may need to add some RF chokes to the power wires for the compressors and/or the SSB. I did get to listen (was very hard to hear) to the NIST time report on 15.000.0MHz so it’s getting *some* signals. Oh, and the split ring came off one of the life line pelican hooks and the spring and ping flew into the water, so that pelican hook is out of commission now.

The rest of the night was Free Willy, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, and Popcorn.

• Anchored in 50 feet of water behind Bazett Island near the mouth of Pipestem Inlet, Barkley Sound, BC • Engine Hours: 1441.5 to 1441.5 = 0 hours
• Genset Hours: 639.5 to 644.9 = 5.4 hours (Batteries Charged at 642.0, rest of the time was charging the electronics and making water) • Water Consumption: 18 gal
• Watermaker Production: 34 gal
• Water Temp about 71 F
• Air Temp about 72 F
• Barometer 1014.1 and rising again

Posted (slowly) to AndersonsAbroad.com by email via Iridium/Xgate Satellite