In early August, after moving out of our house, we headed
out for a three week circumnavigation of Vancouver Island. This was our “shakedown cruise”, and we did
this trip for several reasons. Transiting
the west coast of the island would give us some much-needed offshore sailing
experience and as we rounded the corner and starting sailing south we would get
to see some of the Inside Passage, a beautiful area with an abundance of
wildlife, remote anchorages and unspoiled wilderness.
We also wanted to spend a few weeks living aboard before
heading down the west coast of the US. Most
cruisers move onto their boats well before leaving in order to get used to the
live-aboard life. We didn’t have much
time to do that. We had to scramble to
get out of our house and onto the boat by August 1st, and now we had
another deadline: getting down the coast of Washington and Oregon before
October, when winter weather begins to take over and more storms hit the coast.
So, on August 2nd, Saviah sailed north out of Seattle,
stopping in Port Townsend for the night and then crossing the Strait of Juan de
Fuca the next day. We cleared in with
Canadian customs in Victoria, BC and headed out again first thing the next
morning. Once out of the Strait of Juan
de Fuca, our course was 10-20 miles offshore, slowly motor-sailing against the
prevailing northwest winds and swell. Our
goal was to make it around Cape Scott, on the north end of Vancouver Island,
and down to Port Hardy in as few stops as possible. This would be around 320 miles.
This was our first time to sail through the night, which was
quite an experience. Even though we had
read that three hour night shifts are optimal, we decided to start off with one
hour shifts. This didn’t last long, as
it was cold and wet, and we had many layers on under our foul weather gear. With all of the rocking of the boat, it took
ten minutes to take off the foul weather gear and ten minutes to put it back
on. Needless to say, we spent a
significant amount of time the first night just getting in and out of our foul
weather gear when we should have been resting.
On our third night, we had no wind and very dense fog with
about ten feet of visibility. We couldn’t even see the mast from the cockpit. It was a very long night, and since we don’t
have radar, we were constantly on the lookout for lights from other boats. We could hear whales around us, but couldn’t
see anything. When the sun came up and
the fog cleared, we could see two large gray whales about 100 feet away.
We hadn’t anticipated motoring so much or the low fuel efficiency
we were getting going into the wind and wave, and we left Victoria without
topping off our fuel tanks, a mistake we won’t make again. By the third night, our diesel was running
low, so we spent that long foggy night bobbing around, listening to our poorly
stowed provisions and gear shifting and crashing about in the cubbies as we
rolled in the small swell. At this
point, we were 180 miles from Victoria and 140 from Port Hardy, and it was
clear that we should find a port to get more fuel. We went about ten miles up an inlet to
Zeballos, a small fishing community. After
topping off our tank, we got a good night’s sleep and headed out again the next
morning.
During this passage, there was a big storm northwest of Vancouver
Island and a fishing boat with four people on board went missing. The passengers were never found, and we heard
the boat was eventually located off the Oregon coast. There were search helicopters overhead, and
it was a reminder that the waters here can be some of the nastiest in the
world. We weren’t in the worst of it,
but we had some stronger winds in the 20 – 30 knot range. We decided this would be a good opportunity
to rig our storm trysail. Although the
winds were nowhere near what you would normally use a trysail for, it was good
practice to run the sheets, and get it hoisted.
We learned that our lazy jacks get in the way when we hoist it and made
a note to do something about that later.
We made it around Cape Scott on the north end of Vancouver Island
just as the sun was coming up, six days after leaving Victoria. Later that afternoon, we arrived in Port
Hardy and slept for fifteen hours straight.
We stayed there two nights and spent some time checking out the town and
doing a bit of grocery shopping. Now
that we had the difficult passage out of the way, we could take it a bit slower
in the protected waters of the inside passage.
On August 10th, we crossed the Queen Charlotte
Straits and headed over to Sullivan Bay to pick up our friend Eric. He took a seaplane up from Seattle so he
could spend the next week with us cruising down to Desolation Sound. It was cold and foggy crossing the straits, the
same weather we had consistently since leaving Victoria.
In the morning, and then again in the afternoon, we came
across a pod of dolphins. There were
around fifty of them, and they were breaching all around us and very close to
the boat. They would swim right under
the bow of the boat and stayed with us for several miles.
We stayed at a marina in Greenway Sound for a night and then anchored in Health Bay the following day. We had strong winds that night and the anchorage was a bit rough, so we got an early start the next day and covered about 50 miles. We finally had some favorable winds in Johnstone Strait and sailed along dead downwind at 7 knots under full main and genoa.
During this trip, we transited the Chatham Narrows, Whirlpool Rapids and Green Point Rapids. In the Pacific Northwest, we have semi-diurnal tide cycles, which means that there are two different tide cycles per day that rise and fall as much as 15+ feet per cycle. Where islands come together and form a narrow passage, the current can flow over 10 knots during the maximum ebb and flood with significant rip tides as well. Since our top motoring speed is 6 knots, we made sure to time all of the passages for slack tide, which took quite a bit more planning.
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| Di at the helm and marina at Blind Channel |
We spent a night at the marina in Blind Channel on West
Thurlow Island and then anchored in nearby Bickley Bay the next day. We desperately wanted to catch some fish and
tried just about every day. We tried
jigging for bottom fish and trolling for salmon. The locals recommended some good fishing
spots, but we never had any luck.
We spent another day putting some miles under the keel. We covered 32 miles before arriving at Cortes
Island. After some cooler weather on the
north half of the Vancouver Island, we were excited to make it to Desolation
Sound where it was sunny and warm. We
anchored in Squirrel Cove for a night and then moved to the Malaspina Inlet on the
mainland the next day. A small sailboat
was beached there some years ago reminding us to make sure our anchor was
holding well.
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| fishing in Bickley Bay and anchored in Malaspina Inlet |
Prideaux Haven in Desolation Sound was our next stop and the
highlight of the trip. We spent two days
in this beautiful, but crowded anchorage.
Because there are so many boats in the anchorage, a stern tie is
necessary to prevent swinging back and forth.
We dropped the anchor when the bow was facing away from the shore and
then backed in and tied a line from the stern to a tree on shore.
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| Prideaux Haven |
We spent the next few days exploring the anchorage by
dinghy, hiking, swimming and fishing.
The water in parts of Desolation Sound is warm enough to swim. It was 75 degrees in this anchorage, while
not too far from there it dropped into the 50’s and 60’s.
The next day was Eric’s scheduled departure from Mink Island, but his flight had to be pushed back a day because President Obama was in Seattle airspace that afternoon, and they weren’t allowing in flights in. We spent the evening in Refuge Cove, and he flew out from there the next day.
After Eric left, we made our way back to Nanaimo and
Montague Harbor, one of our favorite spots in the gulf Islands. Montague Harbor is on Galliano Island and
there is a Provincial Park there with mooring balls in the bay and camp sites
on-shore. During the summer, an old
school bus comes to the park every hour in the evening to pick up campers and
boaters and bring them to the Hummingbird Pub about ten miles away. We took the bus in and had dinner before we
left for the San Juan Islands the next morning.
We cleared customs in Friday Harbor and then made our way back to
Seattle.
That left us about three weeks to get Saviah ready, get our
affairs in order and say goodbye to friends before heading south down the
coast. Our shakedown cruise had
highlighted several things we wanted to improve. For example, we didn’t have a compass light
and found that when we shined the flashlight on it during our night watches, it
killed our night vision. A small red LED
light would solve that problem.
There were other things we wouldn’t have time for, but they
would remain on the project list for when we had time down the coast. For example, we bought a watermaker, but
still hadn’t installed it. We also
wanted to make sunshades for the tropics and buy and install some sort of high
frequency radio. There will always be a
running list of things to do on the boat, but we had finished the most important
items and overall felt good about heading down the coast.