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.
In terms of provisioning, it was mostly more perishables such as yogurt, eggs, and fresh veggies, as well as lots of additional snack foods, dark chocolate, and some more Indian simmer sauces (like butter chicken), plus additional chicken breasts and pork to replace what we’d used in the past month. We should (hopefully) be pretty set for the next few months at this point, just topping up our perishables at the few places available to reprovision. With a lunch at Devil’s Bath Brewing and dinner at Gus’s Pub we were content and set to be off grid for a while.
While we have a float plan for the next week that we’ve shared with our wonderful shore support crew, I’ll detail where we end up going in the post after this one since unexpected things can happen, but today as I write this we’ve just left Port McNeill and are heading to an anchorage to stage up for tomorrow’s nice-looking weather window for going north past Cape Caution. All the motorboats left the marina early this morning to catch their weather window (nearly dead calm out there) while most of the sailboats stayed to leave during the day today or early tomorrow morning, since we’re looking for wind to sail on and Thursday looks like it’s got the perfect wind for getting north from Bolivar Passage.
As long as the weather holds close to the predictions, we should be anchored in Pruth Bay near the Hakai Institute by this weekend (hopefully Friday afternoon), and hopefully in Bella Bella/Shearwater by Friday the 27th.