Barkley Sound Day 15 – “I didn’t sink!”

Wow, today was busy and long… Even though we never left the boat. Morgan had seemed to be getting to a point where she just wanted to relax on the boat all day so that’s what we did. Early in the morning, Devon pulled anchor in Effingham and started heading back to Pipestem Inlet for one more day of warm water AND sunny swimming from the boat. We anchored very close to our previous spot in Pipestem before noon and it was already sunny and warm. The water temp rose from 70F to 74F over the afternoon. We had simple cereal and oatmeal breakfasts while we were underway.
After dropping anchor the girls wanted to do some art, and I worked on some boat systems stuff (the on board network mostly). Later all the girls wanted to go swimming so they jumped in the water and played for a while. At some point I convinced Devon to test out one of our Mustang automatic inflatable PFDs to see how it works, since we’ve never seen one activate in person. So she donned one of our older ones, for which I have refills, and jumped in. (We took video). It activated pretty fast and set off the OceanSignal MOB1 installed inside. About 30 seconds after it inflated, the VHF radio started beeping loudly, from the main radio unit down below as well as the remote handset in the cockpit. It’s definitely something you wouldn’t miss. So we deactivated the MOB1 and re-armed it, and I set out the PFD to dry before we repack it.
Then Morgan ended up downstairs reading her book, and Ellie fell asleep on the cockpit seat, while we played some CDs on the radio. We had another run in with biting flies, they have little green spots on their heads and are bigger than a house fly, but not as big as a horse fly. But they BITE, and not just once, they land on you and walk around biting over and over. We trapped the one that’s been stalking us for a couple days in a Pina Colada. I then pulled out the lox I’ve been curing in the fridge the last couple days to check it. It looked good so I rinsed it all off and cut nice slices off the filets so we can use the lox tomorrow for breakfast. I can’t believe I literally MADE LOX on our boat. Meanwhile Katherine had taken off in the Kayak for a while and came back, and asked me about something on the ladder that looked like a piece of grass. I was convinved it was seaweed/grass and to prove it I pulled the ladder up out of the water and the grass detached and drifted off in the light current. Satisfied, I put the ladder back down and said “see?” to which the grass responded by mocking me and moving back directly to the ladder in a very concerted manner, to which Katherine looked at me and said “See!!”. Near as we could tell it was some sort of pipefish, about 12 inches long. I’ve never seen anything like it in the wild myself, but reminds me of some things I’ve seen at the aquarium. I need to look it up when we have Internet again.
After that it was time make dinner and tonight’s feast, courtesy of Devon of course, was pork chops with caramelized onions and bell peppers, and alfredo pasta. We opened the Hard Row to Hoe Barbera for dinner which was awesome. Then the water was about 74F still so the kids wanted to swim again, and this time they wanted to go in without lifejackets. They both ended up jumping from the boat to the kayak for a while, swimming back on their own, doing pretty awesome for 3 and 5 year olds. When they eventually got tired they all dried off and we started to clean up for bed. I tried to set up a projector on the deck using the genoa as a screen, but iTunes wouldn’t let me play the move using a VGA cable since it didn’t support HDCP, and unfortunately I didn’t have an HDMI->DVI adapter I could use instead, so the projector project had to be abandoned. So we moved inside and tried to do AirPlay from my Mac to the AppleTV over the boat WiFi (which I’ve successfully done many times, but this time it wouldn’t work. Every time I tried to launch iTunes it just spun the beach ball of death and I had to kill it. After futzing with that for a while I finally just plugged my laptop directly into the TV and played the movie that way. About halfway through the movie, we paused and went up on deck to launch the Chinese lantern we’ve had on the boat for more than a year. There was a small amount of wind, but it was nice a dark so we figured what the heck.
It took a while for the flame to get going, and then to fill up the lantern with warm air, but once it was good I let it go and it took off up and away. We all watched it until we couldn’t see it anymore and then we went back down to finish the movie, and then we went to bed, very late. It was a good long day of being on the boat, without any excursions.

• Anchored on south side of Pipestem Inlet behind Bazett Island (again), Barkley Sound, BC, Canada • Engine Hours: 1443.4 to 1445.9 = 2.5 hours
• Genset Hours: 649.8 to 651.4 = 1.6 hours
• Water Consumption: 24 gallons
• Watermaker Production: 0 gallons
• Water Temp about 74.6F (even warmer than before)
• Air Temp about 78F
• Barometer 1015.8 and falling