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.
Monday the 28th ended up being very rainy the entire day. We stayed inside, napped, read books in the cockpit with the rain pattering on the canvas, and made good food, including another loaf of bread and some dessert/breakfast focaccia (really like a cinnamon roll focaccia, sorry-not-sorry Italy). Being able to stay cozy and comfortable in such conditions really makes Kestrel a perfect boat for this region.
With the weather looking promising for the afternoon, in the late morning of Saturday the 26th we pulled anchor to head past Rose Harbour to SG̱ang Gwaay. We saw more humpback whales on the way, luckily none quite as close as the previous day. The areas to the east of and west of the Houston Stewart Channel, the body of water separating the southern end of Moresby Island and Kunghit Island, were full of humpbacks feeding each day we passed through. I’d only ever seen a few humpback whales in the wild (some up in Alaska, the one near Hakai Institute) and suddenly we’re seeing at least five to seven individuals per day!
Late Monday morning (July 21st) had us motoring in no wind and calm seas south and then east 12 nautical miles to Collision Bay. With s/v Senja heading to the nearby Ikeda Cove, we thought we’d probably see them again in Rose Harbour later in the week if not sooner. Inside Collision Bay we anchored tucked up in the north end of the inner bay behind the unnamed tree-covered islet that is connected to the rest of the island during low tide (52° 17.0074′ N, 131° 09.0173′ W).
Collision Bay gave us another chance to just sit in one place for several days, and we spent our time mostly cooking, baking, and reading, with a brief trip to land one day. You might wonder why I don’t talk about going to land more, but it’s simply because here we usually don’t. We can pick across rocky beaches and poke our heads into the dense forests in some places, but with the steep hills and thick greenery it would be difficult to go far; it’s difficult enough getting a hundred feet into the forest from the beach.
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Around noon on Monday, we took Kestrel the mile across the channel to the eastern “anchorage” for G̱andll K’in Gwaay.yaay (Hotspring Island), between it and the restricted ground of House Island. While the depths are reasonably shallow, it isn’t very protected, and despite solid holding, we had small rollers coming through the gap between the islands from the northeast the entire time. The time slot we’d been given by the Watchmen was for 2pm, so we made lunch and relaxed before taking our dinghy Shrike to shore and walking the short hike to the Watchmen’s cabin built near the hot springs.
With three hot springs, all three a gradation of different temperatures, you’ve got options. After a (not cold!) shower we were given all the time we wanted, though we did need to keep in mind the tides, because while we’d set Shrike’s anchor high up the beach we’d landed on, we didn’t want to risk anything with the large incoming tide. The hot springs were wonderful, with both of us spending most of our time in the least hot one. I spent a fair bit of time in the one in the middle of the scale, though it was too hot for my partner to want to spend more than a minute in, and the hottest one was too hot for me to even keep my feet in for more than a few seconds. After the past few months of travel, heating and loosening up my muscles was a bit relief. The view was just as good.
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