On Thursday morning we motored back over to Keeweenah Bay, with a potential weather window for sailing down to Vancouver Island having shown up for the next day. Again, we saw more humpbacks nearly the whole time, from out front of Rose Harbour all the way to the outside of Keeweenah Bay!
In preparing for our upcoming passage, we baked and cooked, ensuring we’d have easy-to-heat meals and snacks for the whole day-and-a-half it was expected to take.
With a good-looking weather window for making the passage down to Vancouver Island, and the days after that looking no good at all, we pulled anchor at 10am on Friday, August 1st, and headed out into the Hecate Strait, pointing down into the Pacific Ocean towards the west coast of Vancouver Island, with the destination of Quatsino Sound.
As our first offshore, overnight passage, we had a bit of apprehension going in, but it was largely uneventful, though a bit rolly at our point of sail. Downwind, with mostly only 5-7 knots apparent nearly directly behind us and big offshore waves, we motorsailed with low RPMs all day and into the night to maintain a reasonable speed. Not until nearly the end of my partner’s 11pm-3am night shift was she able to turn the engine off, and through most of my night/morning shift of 3am-7am we continued solely under sail.
As our first offshore sail, this was a pretty chill experience. There were no problems, no big weather (not enough wind!), and we were able to stick to our watch schedules, though deep sleep while off shift never really came. We ate our way through the snacks we’d carefully saved from being eaten while we were in the Gwaii Haanas, saved for just this occasion, and ate the curry and rice for dinner that we’d made and carefully packed away the day before.
I’ll admit it was a bit disappointing how much of the crossing we had to motorsail, and in hindsight we probably could have done a little bit more slow sailing without the motor on and just arrived a few hours later, but it was a decision made as much out of comfort as speed: without the extra few knots from the engine the ride was much more rolly and uncomfortable, with the genoa flapping and losing shape with the rolls windward.
In the early evening August 1st, we saw some (two or three, we think) fin whales (or maybe Sei whales) surfacing in the distance, and then on the morning of the 2nd some humpbacks, including one repeatedly slapping the water with its flippers about ten times.
A mostly uneventful 28½ hours later and we were tying up at the dock at the Outpost at Winter Harbour.
