By Friday morning (the 18th) the weather had calmed down nearly completely, and we spent several hours motoring out and around Sg̱aay Kun Gwaay.yaay (Burnaby Island) to set anchor for a few days in Bag Harbour (52° 20.838′ N, 131° 21.857′ W), just south of Ḵ’iid Xyangs Ḵ’iidaay (Burnaby Narrows). Technically we probably could have saved several hours if we’d timed it right to go through the Narrows at high tide, but given the narrowness and length of the narrows and the size of our boat, going around was the safer bet.

Bag Harbour was the first place we got extended viewing periods of taan, the endemic Haida Gwaii black bear, including twice where I did float-bys on the dinghy, heading upwind of the bear while staying a healthy distance away, then letting the wind and currents carry me past the bear. It was well aware of my presence, looking up any time I shifted around in the dinghy, but was otherwise unconcerned and went about its business of lifting up rocks along the shore and looking for food. At one point when there was very little wind I could even hear the bear crunching down on shellfish and the clank of the large rocks it lifted up looking for them. Taan are larger than mainland black bears, with larger jaws for crunching down on shellfish foraged from the shoreline at low tide.

On Saturday afternoon, s/v Senja joined us in the anchorage, folks I’d been in contact with via SeaPeople for about a month already but hadn’t met aside from passing them outside Sandspit on our way to the Gwaii Haanas as they went to Daajing Giids to resupply. I brought them a big chunk of the bread I’d baked that evening, the next day they brought us some ciders and we coordinated a time to take our dinghies to the narrows during the next low slack tide, with the plan to drink the ciders on a small rock islet in the middle of the narrows.

Speaking of bread, I didn’t just make bread, I divided a second loaf up into two smaller loaves, and instead of making focaccia this time, I made it into cast iron pizza, including my own made-from scratch pizza sauce. I’d never done it before, but I’ve got plenty of experience making the bread, and we ended up enjoying really good thick-crust pizza on both Saturday and Monday evenings. We continue to enjoy really good food, even while we’ve begun to run out of things like onions, and fresh greens are a week in the past already. But we’ve got large stocks of frozen, canned, and dried foods still, with more than enough to continue creating delicious and varied dinners.

I saw something “strange” while in Bag Harbour: a passenger airliner, far overhead, with jet contrails trailing in the clear blue sky. Probably heading to Alaska, or maybe Japan, from Vancouver or Seattle. Not strange exactly, but it made me realize it was the first I’d noticed in about a month or so. We’re really far out here.