Month: June 2025

Spider Anchorage and north to Bella Bella

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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

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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.

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Port McNeill, provisioning, and getting ready to head north

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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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Alert Bay

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The first of the First Nations communities we anchored at, Alert Bay, has lots of totem poles both old and new, indigenous art, and a lovely museum, the U’mista Cultural Centre. With a focus on preserving the history and culture of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, there was a collection of the creation stories, art, textiles, and even a large collection (no photos allowed) of Potlatch dance masks.

While Alert Bay was between the 50s-70s a booming fishing and marine industry town with, apparently, more than enough liquor, gambling, and other vices to go around, these days it’s a quiet community with ferry service to Port McNeill and lots of indigenous art.

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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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