July 17

We're here in Maple Bay, at the Maple Bay Yacht Club, on their reciprocal dock. It's a beautiful day in sunny British Columbia, although the wind outside the bay is brisk....

We left Lund with the intention of going about 3 hours to Sturt Bay, on Texada Island....well, it was sunny, warm, pretty calm and we just didn't want to anchor yet. Sooooo, we went on down to Jervis Inlet, where we dropped an anchor around 2:00pm. Well, it was rocky, and Bob wasn't feeling comfortable with how the anchor was holding, so we made the decision to pull it up and go to Pender Harbour - another 2 hours away. So, there went my desire for a short day's run! We went to Fisherman's Resort in Pender Harbour and had a relatively quiet night. After 8 weeks of being alone or almost alone in every anchorage, being in a marina packed full of partying people was culture shock. The next morning at 7 we left Pender and were going to Bowen Island in Howe Sound, just north of Vancouver. About an hour into the trip, the weather channel reported strong wind warnings in Howe Sound.....we were currently into the Straits of Georgia, and the water was pretty calm, so we just said "Heck with it" and turned the boat towards the west.....and crossed the straits, went into Gabriola Pass 10 minutes before slack, went through the pass and ended up in Clam Bay on Thetis Island at 3:30pm. So another long day......we spent 2 nights in Clam Bay, and this morning we came down the east side of Vancouver Island and here we are, in Maple Bay. We will cross back into US waters tomorrow and plan to come home the day after.....or maybe Sunday.

...And now that I have this terrific, quick WiFi at the Maple Bay clubhouse, I will show you the pictures.....

Here's a shot of the stern tie in Laura Bay:

and Laura Bay itself:

Here's that seafood dinner that Bob brought back:

and Bob's first ling cod:

Remember my sweater??? Here it is, with my homemade needles made of bbq skewers:

and the infamous (but not so scary today) Chatham Pt:

July 13

Still no pictures....I've taken them, but either they are too large for the servers, or I'm taking too much bandwidth.....so, if you want to see any pictures, let me know and I'll email them to you. :)


A few days ago (july 8th) we were in Laura Bay (one of our very favorite places in the Broughtons), catching fish and crab and just hanging out. (With Cap'n Charlie, the singer, as it turned out.) We left there on the 10th and went down to Minstrel Island. Minstrel used to be a Happenin' place - a resort with restaurant, shop, etc........but it fell to the economy about 20 years ago and went out of business. The place is shut up - buildings still there, but nobody's home.............but the docks are still just fine (they built them well). So we tied up to the dock and spent the night there. Listened to the cougars roaring during the night. (I will never doubt the existence of BC cougars again.) Friday morning we went through Chatham Narrows (has to be done at slack) and went to Port Harvey, which is the stepping-off place for going through Johnstone Straits.

Yesterday, the 12th, we cruised through Johnstone Straits, through the infamous Chatham Point, and went straight through to the Octopus Islands! A trip that usually takes 3 days, when not going down Johnstone Straits. And here's a shot of Chatham Point, when it's nice and calm (probably 3 days a year): (Okay, again, no picture but maybe some day)

And every year we learn something. Today we learned that when the cruising book says that Surge Narrows should be taken at slack tide, it means SLACK TIDE, not 20 minutes early!!! I managed to keep  Nellie in the middle, but not without some yelling (I AM staying in the middle, Bob!) and a little swearing (not really very much, I promise). It made for some excitement in my otherwise dull (ha) day.

We are now in Lund, the end of highway 101. (I think I talked about this 4 years ago in the blog)....it's really had a facelift, and has gone from a kind of funky, old, nasty place to an actual marina with a fabulous restaurant (I'm told), fantastic showers, a terrific bakery, and it's CHEAP!!! Power is costing us $6.25 a day - as compared to $20.00 a day in the Broughtons.

Anyway, we're on our way home, and we have made the decision to shorten our daily cruises (as I am getting crabby). So, to friends in Oak Harbor, see you in about 10 days!

The forgotten/lost post

Here’s the post that I never published, from before we went to Port McNeill…..No pictures because the connection is too slow here....(we're in Port Harvey)

July 2, 2014

We are still in Jennis Bay Marina – we enjoyed ourselves so much that we stayed another night! What a fun, funky place…..the owners, Kim and Kent, are terrific. Kim s really funny – she meets everyone on the dock and chats them up. Just an all-round friendly place. And really a beautiful spot.(Here’s what it looks like – that’s Kim, waving)

Bob caught his first ling cod today. A 34” fish, about 13 pounds. Ye gods, they are ugly fish! Biggest mouth on a fish I’ve ever seen.

So, here’s a picture of today’s seafood “take” – looks like prawn cocktails, followed by Dungeness crab cakes and baked cod. Yum.

We’ll take off for Port McNeill tomorrow. We’ve got a good weather window, so we’ll go over and fill up our water tanks and do laundry. We were going to stay here in Drury Inlet another day or two, but the water shortage is currently preventing showering! Not a good thing. J

July 8, 2014

Okay, back to the regularly scheduled programming…..we left Port McNeill at 5:15 yesterday morning, in fairly calm seas and a light fog, which turned into lumpy seas and a thicker fog within a couple of hours….but, on the bright side, we are no longer sitting in Queen Charlotte Straits, waiting for calm winds (which hardly ever happens, btw).

We’re sitting in Laura Bay, which is one of our favorite places in the Broughtons. We come here every time we’re up here. Because this is a smallish little bay with a very L A R G E rock in the middle, we have to stern tie, which simply means that once the boat is anchored you run a line to shore and around a tree and then take it back to the boat. (Operative word: “simply”) This prevents the boat from swinging around with the currents/tides. There is absolutely nothing simple about the process. It entails setting the anchor (in this case, in rocks), which we do all the time, so no biggie…..then, Bob takes the dinghy to shore, towing a polypropylene line, takes it around a tree and comes back. This is accomplished while the wind is blowing us towards another boat, Bob is yelling to me to “back the boat up” (ummm, we’re hooked to an anchor, Bob, it won’t go back, that’s the point, remember?) and then coming back to the boat e v e r so slowly – because it was only a couple hundred feet, he rowed over…….all of this time, I am running back and forth from the helm inside, where I’m attempting to keep the boat from hitting the other guy’s boat, to the aft deck, where I am attempting to unravel the stern line (since the reel broke when Bob first pulled on it) and muttering to myself about “if you’d just come back to the boat a little faster, Bob, this would be a lot better…for God’s sake, row FASTER.” I was happy that we provided dinner theatre (or lunch theatre, since it was only 11:00am) for the other boaters.  Once we got the line back to the boat and pulled it all tight, everything was fine………and this is what it looks like:

The guy in the boat next to us (we’re closer than we would like to have been, but nobody cares) is a super nice guy. He’s the commodore of the Tacoma Yacht Club, so he and Bob have been trading yacht club stories and sharing laughs. Yesterday he came over and gave us a couple of rock fish that he’d caught (and didn’t want, because he just wants the heads for crab bait), and we gave him some big prawns….this morning he brought us a couple of crab because you can’t keep them up here and he caught too many. So, thanks to him, we had fish last night and it’ll be crab tonight.

As y’all know, I brought several knitting projects with me, since I don’t like to fish, and crabbing and prawning take, oh, 15 minutes a day to pick up the pots and clean the critters………while I have upwards of 25 books (hey, I like to read), one can read only so many hours at a time. Thus, 4 knitting projects. That said, I have finished the socks – going around Cape Caution, remember? – I’m a little tired of the beading project (I’m teaching myself to bead while knitting – it’s a little tiresome), a shawl that I started in Maine, and a sweater for Bob. The sweater is the key thing, here, in this story…..

See those sticks? Ahhh, yes You see, I didn’t bring the right needles with me to finish….the sweater requires 2 sets of double pointed needles, sizes 2.5 and 3. I didn’t remember the size 3 doubles. Now, this sweater is fun to knit, because it’s just hard enough to be interesting, but not so hard it’s frustrating. One of the things that makes it interesting is that there are no seams at all – so when it came to the sleeves, that’s where I needed the double pointed needles. Now, I could have just put it down and done something else for the rest of the trip, but I’m into this project now so I don’t want to stop. (My knitting buddies, and you know who you are, will totally understand this. The rest of you will just remind yourselves that I tend to be a little freaky at times, okay?) So, Bob make me a set of knitting needles! Yes, he did! The bamboo skewers I bought for cooking prawns on the bbq are the same circumference as a size 3 needle. So, a little sanding paper, et voila! I have knitting needles………they were a little rough at first, but after a few inches they got smooth. Maybe I’ll start a cottage industry, making knitting needles out of kitchen utensils and make my fortune.

July 6

We're still in Port McNeill, waiting for the winds to die down enough for us to go out into Queen Charlotte Straits and get back into the Broughtons. Our radio hasn't been working properly, and we discovered that LED lights are causing some static....on the other hand, the macerator is working fine and we have 200 gallons of clean water.

I'm blogging from a coffee shop in town, so no pictures until I can use the PC.....

If the weather cooperates, we will leave tomorrow morning and make a run across the straits before the afternoon winds come back. We'll head for Laura Bay, where we will probably stay a couple of days, then go over to Echo Bay for a night. After these 4 days, we're tired of being in a Marina, so we will be anchoring out most of the time until we're home.....probably in  about 3 weeks. ( unless Bob catches more fish, in which case he isn't going to want to leave)

Happy birthday, USA!

July 4tg, of course, is not a holiday up here, so I can get all the routine stuff done here in Port McNeill. Six enormous loads of laundry done...now I'm $35 poorer but I have no smelly, fishy clothes on Nellie. Yay!

We ate the first ofBobs ling cod last night - really, really good. Tonight we may have to enjoy some of the 24 prawns we got yesterday morning. Mmmmm, coconut or scampi? Decisions, decisipns.

The plan was not originally to return  here, but we needed water and we realized that our macerator wasn't working....so we came to the only pump out we know of. We think we've gotten it working, but Bob will be spending a few hours making sure....if it isn't, we'll just head for home from here. We'll have to find pump outs every 3 or 4 days. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I'm not ready to leave the Broughtons yet.....I enjoy the quiet so much, and there are all those PEOPLE in Desolation Sound ( which begs the question: why the heck is it called that when it is anything but desolate?)....that said, I'm kind of enjoying being in an actual town today....there's a car show ( they've got 3 cars and a pickup, eh) and I'm writing this in Mugz coffee shop....good coffee if you like dark roast (which I certainly do) , and then I'm going to the drug store for Afterbite, since I forgot it and I'm being eaten alive by deer flies and Mosquitos. Maybe a quick trip to the IGA for real eggs....

Other than a suspicious sewage system, Nellie is running just fine. We continue to look at all the big boats up here....at 40 feet, we don't usually feel like the " little boat" on the dock, but at Jennis Bay after Steppe & Mary left, the other boats were all over 58 feet.....the guy behind us on the dock was 64' and he had brought it up from New Zealand. (!)

No pictures today....maybe I'll go over to the car show.....

July 1

         

Happy Canada Day! We are sitting on the dock at Jennis Bay Marina. This is the first time we’ve ever come up Drury Inlet, even though we’ve been up here before. I always thought it was just a short, narrow inlet with a rapids in the middle that we didn’t much want to negotiate….au contraire, ma frere……it’s huge. The rapids must be run at slack tide, but that’s okay, the tide is based on one that is close to this area and easy to find…..we went through a little early (about 20 minutes) and we probably won’t do it again. We came through fine, but Nellie just doesn’t go fast enough to make that comfortable.

We left funky, fun Sullivan’s Bay on Sunday morning, after pulling in 16 nice prawns. We got in touch with Saratoga Sue (Mary & Steppe’s boat) and met them around noon in Claydon Bay, a nice anchorage about 5 miles from Sullivan’s. We each dropped a crab pot and had a great time visiting. A shared pot luck dinner of chicken, prawns and salad, and life was good. The next morning we pulled up the crab pots and took off for Napier Bay – another place we’ve never gone. (We have read in the Waggoner’s Cruise Guide that Napier Bay is not a good anchorage, so we have avoided it.) Mary & Steppe anchor in here a lot, so we followed them in – what a terrific spot. 

A shot of the entrance to Wells Passage on our way to Napier Bay:  What I thought was fog was actually a cloud lying on the water.

Quiet, peaceful cove…….around 5 pm, we were having happy hour on board Nellie when Mary pointed and said “Bear!” Sure enough, on the shore was a black bear, foraging for his dinner. We watched him until he left, and then accused Steppe and Mary of bribing the bear to show up, just so I could see him. I’m convinced it’s the same bear everyone else sees….then, this morning around 7:00, Mary called over and said to look off our bow – there was the bear, swimming from one side of the island to the other. Did you know bears swim? Why, yes they do! Quite well, in fact. I would have guessed it was a seal except for the extra hump behind the head……….he got to the other side, clambered out over the rocks, accompanied by a fair amount of grunting and chuffing, and then walked along the rocks for a while. It seemed like a smallish bear to me, until a gentleman on another boat got off his boat (he was tied up to the ranger’s dock, so I’m guessing he was the ranger) and he looked really small (I have no sense of distance at all, so it was clearly a lot farther away than I had thought) – well, the bear looked at least as big as the man, so it was more likely a LARGE bear, not a little one. As we were leaving the cove, Steppe radioed to us that there were 2 bears on the shore – I have decided that they really paid extra to have that bear swim in front of our boat then get out, climb into some SUV or something and then go hang around on the shore waiting for us to leave. Must’ve cost Steppe a fortune!

So, we’re back to today – and we’re at Jennis Bay. Mary & Steppe are taking off from here and going eastward a little, then homewards, and we are going to hang around here in this part of the Broughtons, hoping to catch some cod and/or halibut…..but it cannot be a gigantic fish, because there is only so much room in the freezer (which is working just fine, thanks). 

Across the dock from us is the Deer Leap, an 85-foot wooden boat built in 1929 and lovingly restored. What a boat and what an undertaking! The inside has huge built-in buffets, filled with crystal and silver pieces, crystal chandeliers, and everything that just screams 1929. There are lace curtains on the windows, and an aft deck that you could have a dance for 20 on. She's kept in Port Orchard, WA, all winter and cruises up here all summer....and here's her picture:

on her roof there are 3 kayaks, motorcycles, an aluminum boat and the original canoe that came with the boat...........