Travel

Heading through Johnstone Strait

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After several days in Campbell River getting some provisioning done and receiving a few packages in the mail, it was finally time to head north, through Discovery Passage, through the Seymour Narrows, and into the Johnstone Strait. Campbell River is the last large town we’ll see for a while. From here, it’s just small towns and wilderness.

Timing Seymour Narrows is not particularly difficult: the current tables are accurate, and we just had to go through around slack tide. Due to the timing, we were going to have to fight a little bit of current in Discovery Passage once through the Narrows, but getting through was easy, especially with several knots of current carrying us through. Slack tide the day we went (Friday the 13th) was at 1:11pm, and we ended up going through around 12:30.

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Early June in Desolation Sound

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Heading back towards Desolation Sound, we stayed one night in Cortes Bay before heading onto Refuge Cove on Friday morning, the second-to-last day of May. In Refuge Cove, since there was nobody else anchored, we were able to take the one spot way in the back of the bay near the creek leading to Refuge Lagoon.

Refuge Cove is really, really pretty, but there isn’t a lot of anchoring room; much of the larger bay is pretty deep, and the area near the General Store (and the associated docks) has mooring balls taking up room not taken up by the docks, which also appear to have had a recent expansion added. As we were there at the end of May, the General Store hadn’t even started their high-season hours yet and were open for only a few hours Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but we stopped in and I picked up a few lures for jigging bottom fish, since the area seemed like a good place to fish from the dinghy. On the short trip from Cortes Bay to Refuge Cove we’d attempted to troll for salmon with no success, but we’ll keep trying on days where we aren’t in a hurry and can move at the nice slow 2.5-3.5 knot speed we’d need to troll properly with the flasher and spoon rig.

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Heading North from Nanaimo: Comox and Desolation Sound

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On Monday the 19th, we headed north from Nanaimo, intending to be in Campbell River on Tuesday, stopping for the night in Ford Cove on Hornby Island. This was easily our most uncomfortable passage yet–we were able to sail most of the way, with 15-20 knots of wind on our starboard quarter, but while we were able to sail, the motion of the waves in the Strait of Georgia hitting us in the same starboard quarter made for a very uncomfortable ride. I got mildly nauseous, and my partner got a bit worse than that, feeling fairly seasick for the first two hours.

Thankfully, Ford Cove gave us good protection from the wind and waves overnight and we slept well, and the next day was as calm as could be, a welcome relief from the previous day. However, we’d been having issues with the furling main getting stuck trying to unfurl, so while we motored north (thinking we’d get to Campbell River), I made some calls until I found a rigger that could help us out; the rigger (Blanchard Rigging) was based out of Comox and said they could come see us that afternoon if we just went directly to the Comox Valley Harbour Authority docks, so we did.

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Our first two days as cruisers

As I type this, it’s just before 10pm on Friday night. But not just any Friday night: we untied the lines yesterday, leaving our (now former) home marina. It’s a bit surreal, but in that way where there isn’t some big transition, or huge set of feelings that I thought I might feel. Instead, it’s just a sense of contentment and calm. This is what I’ve been planning and saving up to do for eleven years now, and it just feels right.

We’re in Roche Harbor on San Juan Island tonight, at the All-Catalina Rendezvous. Kinda the perfect way to start our cruising life, getting to spend time with other folks that own the same make of boat. I got up this morning at 5:45am to get us going out of the anchorage at Port Ludlow, where we spent our first night. The timing allowed us to ride the outgoing tide through Admiralty Inlet past Port Townsend, and we had a 2-4 knot current all the way from just outside Port Ludlow to halfway across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Despite not having any favorable wind to sail on, the currents carried us along quite quickly while I ran the engine at a relaxed pace, and we still were seeing 7-9 knots for the first several hours of the day.

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Sailboat work and prep for cruising

It’s been quite a while since I wrote an entry here, and even longer since I regularly updated. But, given my activities since I bought my sailboat and the upcoming cruising plans, it really is time for an update, and hopefully the start of some somewhat regular updates. I would really like to get into the habit of writing weekly entries or even more often once cruising life has begun.

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