The Campbell River to Booker Lagoon Rodeo
Wednesday morning, we got going quickly since we had tons to do. I started work on the aft head, again. Morgan helped Devon with laundry and groceries while Ellie and I headed to the marine store, again. Then I worked on the aft head for a while with little success, finally giving up for a while to rinse all the salt off the boat and fill our water tanks.
Then I opened the access panel to our anchor windlass motor in the vberth to investigate the wetness of our bed… And I found water. Lots of it. It must be leaking through the windlass somehow when we take spray/water over the bow. Water is literally dripping off the bolts that hold the windlass to the deck. Jim Rard came over and we started to disassemble the whole unit to see if we can reseal the holes. It took us over an hour to loosen it up and we couldn’t get it apart, due to several issues we are sure to discover later. We had to leave for the next stop in another hour so we spent that remaining time sealing up the area (with Duct Tape of course) to prevent sea spray from leaking into the boat, knowing that we’d be taking some water over the bow during the next passage. Unfortunately, this meant the windlass was half disassembled and totally unusable. No anchor. We’ll be rafting up with s/v Ruby Slippers or other boats for a while until we get it repaired. s/v Foxy helpfully bought a circlip plier before their departure so we could try finishing up the repair at Booker Lagoon, two days away.
At 2:30pm we were off the dock, with a quick stop at the gas dock for 46 gallons of diesel, and then heading north up the channel toward Johnstone Strait in 15-20kts of wind, dead on our nose of course. We powered upwind for hours, through Seymore Narrows with a nice push from the current and northbound toward Port Neville. But it was windy (20-30kts on our nose) and choppy with the wind pushing against the tide causing big waves. Everyone did okay but it wasn’t the most comfortable. We buried the bow many times, and took spray back to the cockpit several times (the dodger blocked most of it). It was a rodeo. Mark on Ruby Slippers captured some photos of our bow burying in the waves, then popping up fully with water draining from the bow thruster tube.
We ended up ducking into Blind Channel to get out of the waves and meandered through some secondary channels. Several boats tied up at Blind Channel Marina for the night but we motored another two hours to Forward Harbour to get a little closer to Booker Lagoon. As one skipper relayed on the radio, “two more hours tonight is better than two more hours tomorrow.” Since we were not making it to Port Neville, any mileage we could get would help for the next day.
We rafted to s/v Ruby Slippers in Forward Harbour for the night and got a few hours’ sleep. Then at 4am Thursday, Devon was up and all the boats headed out to take advantage of the current. I slept in a bit, then got up and made coffee (strong French press). Devon managed the boat for a lot of the run north. She also got some work done since there was reasonable cellular coverage.
Side Note: Devon recently discovered a new piece of software for Mac/Windows called TripMode which detects when you tether your laptop to your cell phone and allows you to block any apps you don’t want to have access to the Internet. In Devon’s case her Mac burns 400-500MB in the first few minutes of finding Internet for iCloud sync, email, Messages, Facebook updates, app updates, Adobe updates, etc, etc. With TripMode she worked (on the Internet) for 2 hours and only used 11MB. A much-needed feature when Verizon Unlimited limits you to 500MB per day when you are roaming in Canada.
About two hours from Booker Lagoon the sky was blue, sun was out, and the seas were calm. We’d heard of humpbacks in Blackfish Channel but all we saw were some dolphins hustling by. It was time to get some fishing gear out, mostly to see what we could put together. So I rigged a green squid to a silver flasher to a yellow diving plane and set it up. We were probably going too fast to troll but what the heck. After checking the tides I realized we had a extra time before slack water into Booker Lagoon so I slowed down a while and trolled in a zig zag pattern. We first caught some seaweed, then we lost the flasher and the squid. So we sped back up and headed into the anchorage. 61nm travelled today.
