Preliminary note: We have been struggling to find a way to incorporate the pictures into the text so they have some context. So far no success. Only a lot of profanity. Other than that, it's a great ride!
We bid farewell to the Kibbes on Saturday morning, June 18. It was a foggy, drizzly day, and we powered out the Seaforth Channel about 20 miles to the ocean. For a brief moment, it was nice to have the rolling swell underneath us, even without wind, but we turned north east and headed up the Mathieson Channel into Fiordland, much of which is a national preserve. We were somewhat to the east of the Inside Passage – sort of an “Inside Inside Passage”, away from the cruise ships and commercial traffic. We got to our first destination, Rescue Bay, mid afternoon, and plopped the dinghy overboard to take a look around. This is wild country – trees, trees and more trees, with both big and narrow channels running every which way. In the dinghy we came across our first sign of civilization; a small tugboat slowly towing an outboard motor boat and a raft of about six big logs. Where he had come from and where he was headed was a total mystery. Eagles, seals and a variety of ducks were everywhere.
Wonder of wonders, another cruising boat showed up late in the afternoon. We said hello, but that was about it. There was no wind to ruffle the glassy calm anchorage, and we had a peaceful first night on our own. In the morning we headed deeper in to Fiordland. This is amazing country. The mountains range up to 6,500 feet, and the tops are still covered with snow. It almost looks as if you could ski down some of the snowfields! Sheer shiny black rock walls rise up all around you. The trees amazingly find a way to thrive on the steep slopes, sometimes even on vertical walls. Part of the cycle of nature here is the process of tree avalanches, when the thin soil gets too soft and a whole swath of trees will come crashing down to the water, leaving the shiny rock cleanly exposed underneath. Then the process begins again – first the moss and lichens, then some hardy bushes and small trees, and finally the large trees manage to sprout out of the rock wall and hang on. You can see this cycle in all its stages everywhere.
Perhaps the most prominent feature aside from the dense forests, towering cliffs and snowfields is the proliferation of waterfalls. These range from tiny pencils of water descending from high above you, finally entering the fiord as a gurgling stream through the rocks, to crashing torrents throwing spume high in the air. You can approach these in the boat, because the water depths right up against the rock wall shores are frequently hundreds of feet, but it must be done with caution. One particularly large one “The Graduate” in Kynock Inlet, could easily sink any boat that got too close. On Sunday, I had a nice Father’s Day lunch floating in the center of a small inlet off of Kynock. We shut the motor off and just sat there – towering walls of rock and waterfalls on every side, and we didn’t move more than 100 feet or so in over an hour in water over 500 feet deep!
We had been warned that the winds in these fiords would be light and fluky, and that has been the case. For the moment, it is a power trip. On Monday we headed up the Princess Royal Channel (of cruise ship fame), on our way to another diversion deeper into Fiordland. Fog and mist predominated this run, so we didn’t see many of the snow fields and high peaks, but it was beautiful just the same. So far the only sign of human life is the occasional salmon farming pen, and a lonely tug dragging something or other along. About half way along we passed the sad, abandoned and wrecked town of Butedale, a symbol of logging days gone by.
At the head of the Princess Royal inlet, we turned right where the major traffic turns left, headed into another fiord area. Shortly thereafter we came upon a humpback whale who possibly was sleeping. Close by, he raised his head and blew a couple of times and then treated us to a slow motion undulation of his whole immense body, finished off by a full tail fluke display. Then we saw him no more – he must have sounded and headed away.
By late afternoon we were in the early part of the Gardner Canal, which travels in a generally easterly direction about 60 miles into the higher mountains. Here we anchored in Triumph Bay, which proved to be our first adventure in really deep water anchoring – 100 feet deep with 210 feet of chain out. Just a few feet away the bottom shoaled precipitously to the grassy delta where a fast flowing stream came out of the mountains, and we would have been aground! We pulled the anchor hard up the hill, and budged not an inch all night long. The sounds of the cascading waterfall and forest birds lulled us to sleep. On this longest day of the year, we were reading in the cockpit by natural light until 10:30 p.m.
The morning dawned rainy and foggy, but we decided to head up the canal in any event, hoping the weather would at least let us see the mountains all around us. About noon we stopped at a mooring put out by the BC Park Service, and went ashore to climb in the hot spring the service maintains there. I’ve been in lots of hot tubs in my life, but this one took the cake: carefully nestled in a pretty rock pool, clear as crystal water, a view to die for, and hotter than hell. Couldn’t ask for more. The weather improved as we powered our way up the canal. This place is a jaw dropper. You might as well be sailing in the Rocky Mountains in the summer – all around you are snowcapped peaks and snowfields, shedding billions of gallons of water down cascading waterfalls. Here the water is now the greenish color of glacial melt. We anchored (again in close to 100 feet) in Chief Mathew Bay, with glaciers above us. Ahead out the bay is 5500’ Sugarloaf Peak (!)
The next day we retraced our steps in mixed rain, clouds, and sun. The weather here seems to be that way: most days begin with rain/drizzle and clouds, and then things slowly improve, sometimes. We’ve awoke to the sun once in a week, but we’ve never been wet all day. A climate that produces the largest trees and most fecund forests in the world has to be largely wet, however! Temperature-wise it is consistently in the 50’s. The wind off the 45 degree water is cold all the time, but when the sun shines it gets nice and warm in the cockpit.
After a stop for a shampoo and bath in another nice hot spring in a small cabin in old-growth forest, we bedded down for the night at Loretta Cove at the edge of Devastation Channel (!), in anticipation of a long day’s run up the Grenville Channel (also of cruise ship fame). Thursday night saw us part way up the Grenville, in the Lowe Inlet (Nettle Basin), with three other boats as well. Getting closer to civilization! Earlier we anchored for lunch at a tiny hamlet called Hartley Bay. This First Nation settlement is accessible by water only. So there are no cars, but an elaborate series of wooden boardwalks connects everything, and noisy motorized 4-wheelers rule here. Our principal purpose in going ashore was to buy some milk, and so at the dock we asked the first person we saw where we could buy some. “No milk here” was the reply. He said that the stores, which apparently are in various person’s homes, were all closed anyway. A young woman (apparently a store owner herself) nodded that nothing could be done. For me, this was in sharp contrast to our Newfoundland experience: if we’d showed up at a dock in any village, the first person we saw would have immediately put us in his truck and knocked on every door until he found us some milk. So be it.
As we wandered around town, we heard drumming in the local gym and were invited in. A full-blown native dance celebration was in process, complete with native garb. It seemed that the local school children, all two dozen of them, were being instructed in the ancient native dances, and were strutting their stuff. The three local school teachers, (none of them appeared to be native), were putting the kids through their paces, amid much hilarity from the parents and onlookers, including us, in the bleachers. We were glad to see the effort being made to preserve the culture. One attractive teen-age girl in particular caught our attention. She was every bit the young teen; short shorts, tight top and sandals, but she wore a full robe with native embroidery on it, and danced her native dances. What a clash of cultures! We can only hope that her life will accommodate both for her in a happy way.
We have still not seen our first bear. But in motoring the dinghy up to a waterfall in Nettle Basin we saw a tiny head swimming across our bow. It was a young sea otter, possibly being chased by a seal. He swam at breakneck speed by us, his little face and ears twitching, scampered up on the nearby rocks and disappeared into the forest. There is no end to the wildlife here.
After another peaceful night surrounded by wildlife in yet another secluded basin off the Grenville Canal, we headed to Prince Rupert, arriving here yesterday afternoon the 25th. We are nestled into a slip at the Prince Rupert Rowing and Yacht Club, which is a somewhat grandiose name for a marina largely full of sport fishing boats, and a few transients such as us. I was asked to back into a very tight slip in very close quarters, a first for me on JACA. The process went all right, but it was a little like parking an 18 wheeler in a Volkswagon parking space. A nice couple was standing on the dock watching the operation. When I jumped off to help with lines, he stepped forward and said “You are Peter, aren’t you?” When I looked a little cross-eyed at him, he said he was Ed Rutherford, JACA’s designer and builder, and he knew we would be in the area. Small world department! It was good to be back in civilization again, after eight days of intense communion with nature.
Prince Rupert is a community of about 18,000, but it is the major facility north of Vancouver, boasting a large modern container ship facility, a monster grain elevator and an equally large pile of coal. There are lots of big ships around, mostly from China. The railroad ends here, which explains the commercial traffic. There are also hundreds of fishing boats of all types and stripes. This means that there are plenty of facilities, good shopping, and some restaurants, all of which is good for folks like us. A somewhat unique feature here is the supply of eagles, which seem to have supplanted the seagulls: they fly around in flocks, making a racket and a mess. The last time JACA was here one sat on her masthead and broke the wind gear up there.
And so the first leg of JACA’s journey has ended. We’ve gone 354 miles in eight days, always under power – 54 hours on the engine clock. Our next major stop will be Ketchikan, Alaska, where I hope to post the next installment in about a week. It’s time to do some sailing!
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