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.
It turned out to be an uneventful day, and we made it to our anchorage for the first night, Charles Bay in Blind Channel, by late afternoon. There were five other boats in the anchorage when we arrived, two motor yachts and three sailboats. Two of the sailboats were European, one from France and the other from The Netherlands. We had finally made it to a place where it was mostly just other cruisers!
I stopped by both boats the next morning to say hi; they were also the only two remaining in the anchorage when we got up. The French boat was just getting ready to leave but was friendly and we talked for a few minutes; they’d been cruising for five years, having left from their home on the Atlantic coast of France. The Dutch boat had been cruising for twenty years now, including a big circle around the Pacific, and had now been cruising BC’s coast for the past seven, calling it the best cruising grounds in the world. We ended up having a very nice conversation and exchanged contact information; we were urged to take our time during our journey. You can’t see everything, so make the most of where you can go, to paraphrase what was said.
We left the anchorage at about 11:40am to make our way through Greene Point Rapids, again using the last bit of current to push us through. It was very calm, with the only confused water area happening just as we exited the rapids to the north into the narrow channel between West Thurlow Island and the BC mainland. We made pretty good progress and rejoined Johnstone Strait to travel through Current Passage, since the timing on going north through Whirlpool Rapids wasn’t going to work out.
Current Passage has its name for a reason. While it’s recommended above Race Passage on the south side of Helmcken Island, there are still strong currents moving through, and at one point while above an underwater shelf where the water surges up, we were barely making any progress at all. Once through, however, the currents died down steadily, and we were able to drop anchor in Port Neville at 6:30pm, celebrating the passage with beers and a salmon dinner from the freezer.
Speaking of salmon, we haven’t had any luck catching any since Campbell River, but part of the issue is we’re just moving too fast for salmon trolling. When we’ve got some time to chill and take our time, we can slow down and try more, but getting through Johnstone Strait quickly is a priority while the weather is calm and we’re not fighting high winds on top of the currents.
On Sunday morning we pulled anchor at 8:30am and started our journey through the remainder of Johnstone Strait, heading to Alert Bay, a small first nations community. With an ebb current with us the entire time and next to no wind, it made for a calm, uneventful journey. I tried fishing again for a while, but noon was probably not the right time, and I had no bites while we slowed down for an hour with lures in the water. The right times are morning and evening, so we’ll need to try again another day.
