We’ve spent the last five days anchored out front of the Haida village of Daajing Giids relaxing, resupplying, getting our laundry done, and going to the mandatory orientation required for visitors to Gwaii Haanas. The weather has been mostly gray and rainy, though we had sunbreaks in the late morning on Saturday when we attended the very small farmer’s market, and on-and-off sunshine on Monday and Tuesday. The village is lovely and being somewhere with restaurants meant we could take a break from cooking dinner for a few of the days. Blacktail Restaurant provided us with an elegant arrival celebration dinner (the mushroom pasta was everything I hoped for), and the Korean fried chicken style sandwich Steller’s Jay Community Pub served up was spicy, sweet, delicious, and great with a cold beer.
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Through the Outside Passage and Across the Hecate Strait
After overnighting at the Shearwater Marina to get our laundry done, we did a bit of final shopping in Bella Bella, as well as dealing with a few items we needed internet connectivity for, we set back off-grid, heading north-west to an overnight anchorage that would give us a good starting point the next morning.
Perrin Anchorage (52°16’38″N 128°22’38″W), between Ivory and Watch Islands, and unnamed on Google Maps, doesn’t look like much from the satellite image, but as you can see from the charts, has reasonable protection in settled weather with a bunch of reefs that dry at low tide. I don’t think it would be comfortable in a southerly blow, but suited our purposes in the weather we had quite nicely.
Spider Anchorage and north to Bella Bella
On Sunday the 22nd we departed Pruth Bay to begin heading north towards Bella Bella, but instead of going directly there, we decided to go somewhere a bit more remote and dropped anchor inside Spider Anchorage, a large series of small coves southeast of Spider Island.
With pleasant weather and a beautiful location, we opted to stay anchored there for another three nights baking, cooking, fishing (unsuccessfully), and checking out the nearby beach where the few other boats that stopped near us (all sailboats we’d also seen in Pruth Bay) took their dogs to shore.
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North of Vancouver Island: Cape Caution & Pruth Bay
Leaving Port McNeill, we staged up for our crossing from the north end of Vancouver Island, past Cape Caution, to the north coast and the Inside Passage, in a tiny cove labeled as Walker Cove on the Canadian charts.
There’s not much room in Walker Cove, and the entrance is even skinnier than the one we’d gone through to get into Gorge Harbour, but it is protected, peaceful, and right next to Gordon Channel, our path out of Queen Charlotte Strait to go north past Cape Caution. It’s also amazing in its raw beauty, and we were alone there.
Continue readingPort McNeill, provisioning, and getting ready to head north
From Alert Bay we had a very nice downwind sail 6nm over to Port McNeill, where we needed to top off our provisions, our diesel, and propane. We ended up staying at the North Island Marina, which is more of a fuel dock with a marina attached to it than the other way around: in the afternoons they stretch the super-long diesel fill hoses down the docks to fuel up docked boats so they don’t need to go over to the actual fuel dock, and they filled our propane tanks for us as well. Further south than this (including Campbell River!) I couldn’t find any place to get propane refilled, only exchanged, and since we’ve got 10lb tanks rather than the more standard 20lb tanks, exchanges won’t work for us. I’d banked on refills being the more common thing as we got further north into more remote areas, and that assumption turned out to be correct.
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