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.

Bella Bella

On Wednesday we pulled anchor and motored north towards Bella Bella, going slowly at first as we trolled unsuccessfully for salmon. We went through the Sans Peur Passage, between the McNaughton Group of islands and Hunter Island, occasionally stopping to do a bit of bottom fishing. This, finally, was successful, with my partner catching a decent-sized quillback rockfish, which she fileted, vacuum packed, and froze, while I continued to navigate us through the calm channels towards Bella Bella.

We dropped anchor in front of Bella Bella in about 65 feet of water with about 225 feet of chain out, just north of the fuel dock where there is a dinghy dock. Bella Bella is a quiet little First Nations town, with a reasonably stocked grocery store and liquor store, but the closest thing to a restaurant is the cafe behind the grocery store that makes various small meals in addition to serving coffee and tea.

We’ll get our laundry done in nearby Shearwater in the next few days and depart this weekend, getting in position over the next week to do our crossing to Haida Gwaii.

Cooking on Kestrel

I’ve been very happy with how well we’ve been eating while in these remote places. Our cooking skills (and knife skills!) continue to improve daily, and most every dinner is something we’re quite happy with. We’ve been making a fair number of stews and pastas, we grill things (like burgers), have been doing creative marinades for meat we cook, and have been using various Indian style simmering sauces (butter chicken, korma, tikka masala, etc.) along with veggies, meat (usually chicken), and rice. We’ve both also been starting to do more baking; I really like to make bread from Ken Forkish’s excellent Flour Water Salt Yeast, and my partner made some mixed-berry muffins the evening before we left Spider Anchorage that we enjoyed in the morning before we pulled anchor.

What do you think?