Author: paulcollister

Well here we go again, I’m back on the boat and blogging. However the harbour I’m in doesn’t have wifi at the moment, which is a pain. I’m using my phone, and trying to limit my use, I have about 100Mb / day, but have used 300 in my first 2 days here. We shall just have to take it easy. I actually like the idea of limiting my internet time, and perhaps I can do some proper reading now.

So I left the UK on Tuesday morning, my brother Simon kindly drove me to the airport at Manchester where I flew direct to Toronto. I flew Air Transat, which is a bit of an Easyjet operation, basic, but just fine for an 8 hour trip. I managed to sleep a little. Once at Toronto I had to kill 4 hours before we headed off to Vancouver. Because Toronto was my port of entry, I had to haul my bags through customs/immigration, but I was very pleased how organised the whole thing was, I was interrogated by a customs computer terminal, and when it took my picture to compare with the passport, the camera snaked around to get itself at just the right height to inspect me, a little unnerving, this is how the robots are going to get us I expect, we think we are in control, but they already now where we are and soon they will control all the locks!

I was later stopped by a human who asked me why I had told the computer I had booze to declare, being a non drinker I was surprised, and said I must have pressed the wrong button, she happily waved me on and I found a nice desk with power/usb and free wifi from where I could do a little work.

I worked flat out for most of the time I was in the UK, and I managed to save enough to allow me to cruise for a few more years without worrying too much about the cost. I still have a few more bits of work to finish, but I can do that from the boat at a more leisurely pace.  I’m expecting to spend the next few years heading south then across the pacific to New Zealand, so I will almost certainly be selling my flat back home, or maybe renting it out. The income from that should cover my costs while I’m sailing.

Soon enough we were boarding the flight to Vancouver. It left at 19:30 and arrived just before 10pm, with the 8 hour time difference it meant we landed at 6AM UK time, I slept for most of the 5 hour flight, but the jet lag was now getting to me. A quick trip to the hotel, and I was in bed asleep.

Wednesday morning I slept in as late as I could, then headed off to explore this part of town, I was out by the airport in-between Oakfield and Richmond, quite a leafy suburb, and the cherry blossom was full on, I only thought to take a picture after I had passed the best displays.

I visited the Oakfield , or was it Oakridge? Shopping mall, had a good play on the new MacBook Air, but can’t justify buying one yet, this five year old model I’m using now is still working great, despite being dropped a few times. I’d love to have an excuse to upgrade, mainly for the Retina display, but I just can’t justify it. While in the mall, I bought some basic supplies for dinner ( bread/butter/parma ham/cheese) from Safeway. I also bought a pre-paid virgin mobile SIM card, 3gb/month for $45 CAD/Month, which is about £25/month. 

At 4pm I called for a cab from the hotel to get to Vancouver South airport terminal, this is the smaller terminal on the edge of the river that caters for small planes and float planes, the cab took forever to turn up, with me starting to worry I might be late for checkin, but as usual I was early and ended up waiting for an hour before we boarded the small plane. As I boarded the pilot was at the outside at the stairs, and saw me looking at my boarding pass, he assumed correctly I was looking for a seat number, and explained I could sit anywhere, but then pointed to his seat at the front and said, except there 😉

As we flew out it was striking to see the colour change in the water, you can see in the image it looks like land, but it’s just a change of colour in the water caused by the underlying terrain/seabed. I have sailed through such changes, once just before reaching Singapore , and it’s quite worrying.

Later we flew over many of the places we sailed around last year, I love trying to spot the places from their shape.

I saw Nanaimo and Dodd narrows which I remembered well, I could also see false narrows, which from above looks like a safer route, but is deceptively shallow. Hence the name I expect.

We flew past Hornby Island which was rammed with boats in tribune bay when we visited it last year, you can just make out the long straight beach. 

Finally we flew past Malcolm Island, I could just make out the harbour but we were too far away to make out any boats.

This picture was meant to show the runway dead ahead, I had a ‘pilots eye’ view as we came into land, I must say it reminded me of the early versions of Microsoft’s flight simulator, but scarier. You get to see a lot more forest harvesting from a plane, but it seems to be managed very well here, and most of this is second growth anyway, and will be very responsibly re-planted I understand.

A taxi was waiting for me at the airport and 30 minutes later a very interesting  Berber Algerian driver dropped me off at Port McNeill where I had to kill 90 minutes before the ferry arrived. I saw a very very sad Tayana 40 in the marina, there was another large yacht (42ft+) there with a goosewing boom setup, very interesting, the mast had no shrouds at the side at all, but what might have been a running backstay. I must find out more.

30 minutes on a very pleasant ferry ride saw me stepping ashore in Sointula, I was hoping I might get a lift to the boat from a passing car, but no luck, it was now late, very dark, and all the cars were tucked away for the night, so I dragged my bags the 2kms to the harbour. As I turned the corner I could make out the mast of Sister Midnight, always a good sign!

Once I was down at the boat I could see Jim had done a good job looking after her, she looked just as I left her last October. 

I was soon onboard and pleased to see she was dry and quite clean. There was a  general film of light mildew over a lot of the surfaces, but I soon had my bags on board, the fridge up and running and the eberspacher heater running. Sea cocks were opened and I could now use the sink and the head. I unpacked the bedding, made a bed and went to sleep happy.

I had sent an new windlas out to the boat from the UK and Jim had taken delivery and left it on the boat for me.

Thursday morning, it was raining all day, but I wasn’t bothered, a trip to the office to let them know I was here, enlightened me to the fact that their wifi system for the harbour was down and might be so for several weeks, I’m glad I bought the virgin contract, but will need to find more wifi for the bigger downloads. I spent the day getting the boat habitable, I washed down all the surfaces in the V berth and along the starboard side of the main cabin. I removed the covers off the boat to let some light in and reflated the rather sad looking dinghy. I cleaned the galley surfaces and later in the day walked down to the co-op to get more food in. Finally I dragged the bikes out of the quarter berth, put the sails out on deck to make space and retired to cook a lovely dinner before typing this blog. 

Paul Collister

Finally the time came to leave the laid back island of Sointula for home. It’s a shame as the weather had just picked up and sunshine was planned for the next few weeks. As you can see below the autumnal  colours were just coming into play and I would have loved to spend another month there.

We stowed everything away on the boat, the bikes where the last items to go below, wrapped up in bags I made from the old staysail and we made our way to the airport in Port Hardy.

Jim, who is looking after our boat for the next 6 months kindly drove us and our bags to the ferry port where we caught a boat over to Port McNeill on Vancouver island. From there we took a small 16 seater plane down to Vancouver Airport (south).

It wasn’t easy to catch a plane home the same day due to ferry/plane schedules so we opted to have a night/morning in Vancouver City and check it out. Below is the Gas man, apparently called this because of his long epilogues, I wonder if this has a connection with the Irish term ‘A gas man’ This is the steam powered clock in the city’s Gas district on the waterfront. And these guys must make most Canadians groan in the way I do whenever an American film on the UK has the obligatory red bus/ telephone box and beat bobby. There’s no shortages of tourist gift stores in this area, much like every city we have ever visited. However a lot of the gifts were high quality and if I was richer, everyone might have got Vancouver branded clothing for christmas.So we had a pleasant dinner in a grand railway station building at the Waterfront station then headed off to the airport where we got a budget flight home on Air Transat. The 9 hour flight went quite quickly and we were soon back in dreary Manchester on the train home to Liverpool.

It was nice to be home, but I returned from my one year absence to no telephone/internet, no hot water or heating and a too high percentage of rugs and clothes destroyed by moths.
Communications systems should be back online on Monday when I get fibre installed, the heating engineer should have sourced a new water pump by Tuesday, and I start the Great Moth Recovery program tomorrow.

I still have a view of the water (River Dee/Irish Sea) from my living room, but already miss the scenes from British Columbia.

Kathy may post a final blog, but I don’t think much will happen boatwise/blog now for 6 months.
When I return to work on the boat in April, I will be preparing it for a summer, which I think will mostly be in north BC, maybe even as far north a Juneau in Alaska, then before it gets too cold we will whiz south towards Mexico as previously planned.

Thanks for following our travels and all the positive comments and support we have had.

Paul Collister

 

Sunset last night

Starter Motor Problems

If you’re not likely to get excited by Starter motors or Rust, you can skip this post altogether as it’s really dull

A couple of times in the last week the starter motor failed to start the engine. The Starter motor whirred away very fast, but wasn’t connecting to the engine, so the engine couldn’t start.

The bible on such matters, Nigel Calder’s maintenance book suggested tapping it with a hammer, I had already tried this without any luck, but he wisely suggested to do it while the starter was turning. This worked on two occasions, but today it had no effect.

Being anchored in a very quiet deserted calm bay, with no phone signal, no harbours within 20 miles we were basically stuffed, the only option being to put out a pan pan on the VHF and hope one of the passing boats 15 miles away in the Johnstone Strait would hear. I could just make out the weather forecast on the VHF and they were predicting a gale for later in the day so I had hoped to be at our next port before then.

So it was that I started the task of extracting the starter motor from the engine. Mr Calder had explained the principle of the spiral grove that the cog runs along so that centrifugal force causes it to engage, and that I probably just needed to clean that up and all would be ok.

I took a photo of the wiring, so I could put it all back together, removed the connections, and unbolted the three bolts holding it in. Of course it wouldn’t come out, I tapped it with the hammer, tried to rotate it, but all to no avail. Back to Mr Calders book, and sure enough he says if it won’t come out, give it a ‘smart tap with a hammer to free it’. Obviously I must have been doing ‘dumb taps’. So I returned with the hammer and gave it the smartest tap I could muster and sure enough it moved a little and I could easily yank it out. At this point I could see a trail of dried saltwater/rust all the way from the salt water cooling pump down to area around the starter. I had not been able to see this from other angles, but assumed it was related to the small leak I had spotted on the front of the pump the other day. Minor, but I planned to fix this when I do the engine service next week.

Next my favourite part, stripping it down. I love taking mechanical things apart, but usually this is only when they are disposable, as I can rarely put them back together properly. This time I was careful to mark what went where and to take pictures where there might be doubt / memory loss later.

Looking at the motor it was clear what the book said about rust being the problem. The engaging mechanism, I think this might be called the Bendix, was quite rusty, as was the whole area that sat under the engines big cog (Flywheel?). Mr Calder explains that sea water in the bilge under the engine can splash up and the flywheel can squirt it all around and in particular into the starter motor. More on this later.

I was able to take it all apart quite easily, clean it up, and with a combination of WD40, oil then grease, have the cogs that had initially seemed almost seized, to be whizzing around now with no problem.

It only took 3 attempts to reassemble, just because bolts can all look the same doesn’t actually mean they are!

I was feeling quite confident the job was done, next I had to fit the starter back into the engine, lots of jiggling and it eventually was back bolted to the engine, now the big problem was what to do with the wires. Looking at the photo didn’t help, it didn’t cover the area I needed. There where two studs coming out of the back of the starter that didn’t seem to have wires connected to them, yet I had removed the nuts off them so they must have connections, oh dear. Lots of staring at them, reading manuals and checking in the bible didn’t enlighten me, so I connected the wires I was sure about, i.e. the big red ones that go to the solenoid, and tried the starter.

Voila, the engine spun into life, I shut it down, and then I realised there was a sound of trickling water, as if the tap had been left on, Kathy could hear it as well from the other end of the cabin. Looking into the engine, water was trickling from under the water pump and down the side of the engine. So now I knew the cause of the starter motor rust problem, and felt happier, but what was wrong with the pump?

The Water Pump.
This guy pumps sea water around the heat exchanger which cools the fresh water pumped around the engine, and he was leaking a lot.

I decided to leave it until we reached another port where I could get to help if needed, I figured it had been leaking for a few days, the engine was staying cool, so we could continue.
Once we arrived in Alert Bay, with wifi and shops/ferry to a big town, I had a go at repairing the pump. As always there’s always one fastener that won’t budge, and it was a big bolt that had previously had its head rounded off. It took me an hour to get this out, then I found I didn’t have a spare so had to fabricate one from some studding.

The pump cleaned up ok, but it took a while to find the correct pump in the workshop manual as there are two different types used depending on age.Further inspection revealed that I didn’t have any spares, even though I couldn’t see any wear on the rubber o-ring that was in there, and the diagram didn’t show any other seals. I filled the chamber with water and nothing dripped out. I wondered if perhaps the pipes feeding/taking water to the pump were leaking at the join and the water being squirted to the back of the pump. Unlikely, but it was my only hope for a quick repair.
Before refitting the pump I tried to clear up the areas the salty sea had been spraying. Cleaning the hose that feeds water into the transmission oil cooler saw water squirting out, closer inspection revealed a hole in the cooler, caused I expect by the leak above.

For now I have put some tape over the hole, I’m going to have to replace the cooler at some point soon.
Once it was cleaned and re-assembled I started her up. Usually it takes a while to prime, but this time the water was flowing rapidly out to the exhaust, however it was still running out of the back of the pump as well.

I’m going to have to take the next trip to Sointula, our final destination this year, carefully. When I return in April next year I shall bring a new pump and cooler.
I may need to start thinking about a new engine, but that’s a pricey game I don’t want just yet.

Alert Bay is a fascinating place with a great First Nation Cultural centre, More on that in another post. The town is old and the harbours have some very interesting boats, and a lot of very sad neglected ones too.

Paul Collister

After our trip to Princess Louisa Inlet we returned to Egmont, this time to the public wharf where I messed up the mooring, I had assumed that as the tide was flooding I would be pushed away from the boat we were rafting to, so got really close, as it turned out the tide was running the other way, so my bow was pushed onto the boats quarter, and my stern was soon pushed onto the boat behind him. How embarrassing, I thought I was getting better at this. However the tide wasn’t strong and we pushed off, the fenders prevented any damage, but as always some part of my boat wanted to leave me for the other boat, and in this case it was the barbeque that was trying to merge with some steelwork on the other boat. A good push and we were all sorted. The reason the current was the opposite to what I expected was due to it reversing direction near the shore, I should have considered this especially given the name of the marina next door ‘BackEddy Marina’.
The other thing I have learnt here is that often the top of the water, sometimes a foot or more deep can be freshwater that doesnt mix with the saltwater below, and this can cause confusion in currents. Logs can also float on the saltwater and be a foot or more under the surface, but this boat has such a large and deep underwater surface, that it really can grip the currents there that you often don’t see on the surface.

We decided to spend an extra day and visit the Sechelt/Skookumchuck rapids, which were going to be running at 14 knots, if I couldn’t motor through one, at least I could watch it.
It was a great one hour walk through a forest to get there.

The rapids were impressive, and a few fast motor boats were racing back and forth through them, I guess it can get boring around here.

From Egmont we headed northwest to Lund, the only place with a decent grocery store and fuel supply before we headed into Desolation sound.

Like most places we visited, being in the shoulder season it was quiet and we had a whole pontoon to ourselves. For some reason I don’t understand, there was a Scottish Ceilidh planned for that night in the pub, you can see the musicians with their bagpipes below. We opted for a lovely restaurant the other side of the cove and sadly missed the bagpipes 😉

We stayed an extra night here as well as it was so peaceful and relaxing, but soon enough we were on our way to Prideaux Haven in the area known as Desolation Sound. This is considered to be one of the most beautiful areas in the whole of the inside passage, certainly it looked lovely, but I think we had already been spoiled by princess Louisa inlet. 

We anchored in a deserted spot at the end of the bay, whith a couple of yachts off in the distance.

The next day we headed over to Pendrell Sound, this is supposed to be one of the warmest waters around. Partly as it isn’t flooded by the pacific waters every day, also as it’s a dead end, but has a shore, the water heats up more. I needed warm water as I planned to dive on the boat and clean the prop and bow thruster, the prop is not working 100% and the bow thruster hardly works at all. I did dive, and I don’t know who said the waters were warm, presumably an eskimo, as it was freezing. I couldn’t find my wetsuit which didn’t help. The prop didn’t look too bad, but was too deep for me to work on in the cold, so I focussed on cleaning the bow thruster prop with a bent teaspoon which allowed me to get around the back of the prop blades where all the growth was. That worked out well and I have a lot more thrust from it now.
The hotter and very clear water is great for oysters and besides the oyster farms lining the coast here, there were zillions of shells covering the shoreline rocks.

I was worried about slicing the dinghy on them when we went ashore, but it wasn’t a problem 

We dinghied around the head of the inlet amazed at how deep and clear the water was. The cliffs are very fiord like and go down to the water quite steeply and continue down just as steep.

The next day we headed off to Teakerne Arm, Captain Vancouver spent two weeks anchored here recuperating from the horrendous time he was having in Desolation Sound, he gave it that name more because of his mental state at the time, we thought it was a fantastic place, but it was sunny for us, he was there in storms, and couldn’t find anywhere to anchor, eventually getting into Teakerne Arm. My main reason for for visiting this Arm was simply because if he spent so long here, it can’t have been that bad. As it turned out it was a great spot with wonderful waterfalls at the head.Anchoring was fun, three boat lengths from the shore it is 60m deep, two boat lengths off it’s 20m. so we dropped the hook in 30m and reversed until the anchor gripped the side of the near vertical wall below us. We ran a stern tie ashore, tightened up on the chain and the anchor seemed happy. 

We had towed the dinghy for the first time since Malaysia, and headed off to explore a trail that leads to a large lake up above  that feeds the waterfalls, it was a good climb and at the top of the waterfalls we spotted this winch, used, I presume, for pulling logs from the lake over the top of the waterfall and down to below to be rafted up in log booms.

In a small cove beside the waterfall we spotted a house that seemed to be in trouble.The following morning we pushed on to Blind Channel, this was slightly challenging as we had to pass through three sets of rapids, Yaculta, Gillard & Dent, each about 2 miles apart. We were going against a flood tide, so to make the first rapid at slack water meant we would be 30 minutes late for the last rapid. So we aimed to get to the first on the end of the ebb, and race through arriving at the middle rapids just before slack and the final and most dangerous rapids at Dent at slack water. I spent an hour working out tides and passage planning, we ended up having to leave at 07:30 and we arrived just 15 minutes early at 11:38, we dawdled for 10 minutes then went for it. Everything went well right up until the last set of rapids, Dent, featuring the scarily named ‘Devils Hole whirlpool’, which the pilot says “Those who have looked into the Devils hole won’t ever want to revisit it”. Just as we approached I saw a tug emerging but couldn’t yet see its tow. The tugs rarely are pointing, or even travelling in the same direction as their tow, and require a very wide berth. I had to steer to starboard a lot to miss him and that put our course directly over ‘Devils Hole’, looking through the binoculars I couldn’t see any holes in the water so we pushed on, I was soon able to scoot around the back of the tow and hugged the coast, just missing the hole, which just looked like flat water to me. Yet again, my timing worked out well, except for the fact we had another 2 hours of sailing to go, and when I looked on the chart 2 hours later, I saw Greene Point rapids coming up in a few minutes. I hadn’t even realised they were there. Kathy took the helm, slowed us down, while I scanned the pilot books and found out they can be quite dangerous on spring tides, and we were bang on the highest tides and arriving at maximum flood, the worst time. I couldn’t quite understand what all the fuss was about as we approached and decided we should give it a whirl anyway, we turned into the turbulent waters and headed for the resort we could see in the distance. Everything worked out well, besides one bit of a shove and a splash of waves on the boat we were through. It was only later that I worked out the chart was wrong and the rapids were over to our starboard side as we turned to port, missing the worst of it.

Arriving at Blind Channel was easy enough, despite a strong current from the rapids running through the pontoons, the manager here helped us with our lines and we were soon tied up and basking in the lovely hot sunshine. The resort is family run and you can see they have put a lot of love and effort into making it a gorgeous relaxing place. The restaurant was shut as we are well and truly off season now. One other yacht was stranded here waiting for a water pump to be shipped, but besides them we had the place to ourselves.

A walk along the beach revealed this old winch, again used for logging. A trip through the forest led to a 600 year old cedar tree. I sent a postcard to an old friend from here, and the very next day the postman turned up in their plane to collect the mail and deliver new mail. We really are in the middle of nowhere here, It’s a big island, but has no electric, water or telephone. Electricity comes from a generator and a water powered turbine that makes use of the strong currents here. Water from a brook. Amazingly the internet is very good, but I think that is via satellite. I had wondered how you tie up a plane to a dock?It seems a round turn and one half hitch is all that’s needed!

We saw a few creatures on the way here and around the marina. I dropped them into a little video below.

Tomorrow we head of towards Siontula, taking in a few more towns and anchorages on the way.

Paul Collister

Tuesday the 11th of September saw us leave Port Townsend for Canada. We crossed the Straits of Juan de Fuca and headed into the safety of the San Juan Islands. These are a group of islands close to the Canadian border, they belong to America, but could have easily have been Canadian if the circumstances had been slightly different. I believe the USA thought of them as a very strategic place to control the waters around the straits and the routes north towards Alaska.
We anchored in Parks Bay, a lovely secluded spot and very secure from wind and waves, however there is nowhere to go ashore, as in so many places around here, the land bordering the water has been bought up and built on. I think there may be a right to access below the high water mark, but that would just allow you to walk up to the “PRIVATE- GO AWAY” signs you see along the way. To be fair, both Canada and the USA have an amazing amount of very well kept public marine parks in this area.

From Parks bay we left the San Juan islands and motored over to the Canadian coast on Vancouver Island to the town of Sidney. Here we could clear into the country. We had checked on the restrictions again for what food is allowed in and what is restricted, potatoes being the main problem. Kathy always travels with a few handy spuds, so these had to be consumed. We ate a lot of potatoes that morning. Kathy was also a little over on the wine quota so she put a good effort into that issue the previous night. As it turned out, we arrived, called customs on the dock phone and was asked a few questions and then told we were cleared in and to enjoy our stay. No visits, no searches, Job done. (Just realised I’m repeating a bit of the last post)

I loved this boat, looked like it had sailed through a time vortex into this century from some distant past.

They like to keep their boats out of the rain here in SidneyAfter two days in Sidney, a town with a lot of book shops, we had to leave as the marina was booked up for a regata, we had gone there to have a break and enjoy Kathy’s birthday, we had hoped to find a good Indian restaurant, but the only one there had closed down. So we had to move along the coast to Van Isle marina which was also quite a posh affair, but a few miles out of the main town. It did have a lot of marinas and boat repair yards, I wandered around and found two chandleries, one with a load of Sikaflex (Marine Sealant) at a silly low price, I had to buy two tubes, even though I don’t think I can use them before their ‘use by date’

That night we celebrated Kathy’s birthday in the plush restaurant overlooking the marina.

The next morning we left early and headed out to Pirates cove marine park which I had hoped to be a bit deserted as it’s a very small area and quite shallow. when we arrived it was chocca, we motored around pondering what to do, passing between the anchored boats so close that we had a few conversations with those sitting enjoying the peaceful surroundings from their cockpits. Eventually I decided we should try out the new rope I had bought specifically for this scenario where we need a stern tie. This setup can be achieved in several ways, but we decided to drop our anchor, get it to set, then reverse over to the shore and tie the boats stern to a metal chain and ring thoughtfully provided by the park. Some people do it the other way around, but I can see problem with ropes getting tangled up that way. The big problem was getting the anchor to set, there was so little room to manoeuvre, and a boat lay just in front of us and another already stern tied on our side that we could only get about ten metres of chain out in 5 metres of water with about 2 metres for us to reverse and test the anchors set. We did this but I was not convinced how well we had set. Thankfully our neighbour jumped in his dinghy and motored over and took our line ashore, passed it through the ring and returned it to us, saving me the bother of lowering our dinghy. here you can see how close to the shore we got, at low water the next morning we were about ten foot from the shore, with about 40ft in front to the anchor, yet we held, even with a good breeze in the night.

The main reason for going to Pirates cove was that it was just an hour from Dodd Narrows, as I mentioned before, a quite scary pass where the currents run fast and dangerous. we needed to pass through around 9am so this was a great spot to leave from. As it turned out, there was no drama, passing through at slack water makes life very easy.

From there we scooted north west to Boho Bay on Lasqueti Island. A beautiful picturesque spot. very calm and shallow so I was able to anchor in 5 metres of water between a rock face and a big rock with a fish farm thing just off to the side.

Early the next morning we were on the move again, Lasqueti is about half way across the Strait of Georgia and we needed to get right over to the North eastern side in order to visit Desolation sound and the other back channels that we had heard so much about. Around this time I asked Kathy to check out if there was anywhere she really wanted to see, or could find any ‘must see’ places on the net, she quickly came up with the idea to visit Prince Louisa Inlet, a small inlet of outstanding beauty with a giant waterfall at the head called Chatterbox Falls. Looking at the chart, this was an easy diversion from here, so we headed north and cut through the Agamemnon channel up to Jervis Inlet which lead to our inlet.
Going up  Agamemnon meant we had to pass under two sets of overhead high voltage power cables, the chart said 35 metres clearance, now I need 14 metres so there’s no problem, unless I’m getting confused and I need 35 and they were 14, and what about the height of the tide. I knew there was no issue, yet I still checked my numbers and then double checked, it was only the next day that I read you should leave at least 5 metres gap as the voltage can jump that far from the cables to your mast. The idea of the mast hitting 100,000 + volt cables doesn’t bear thinking about.  As we passed under the cables they just seemed to get lower and lower, I really don’t think I could ever do the intercoastal waterway up the eastern side of the USA as so many of the bridges there are just a little bigger than my mast and I think I would freak at each one. However we passed through and looking back felt a bit silly as for some reason now they seemed to be about a mile up in the sky. Around here we passed another sailing boat who was making about 1 knot under sail, there was next to no wind. I admired him for not rushing and burning fuel like us. He was sitting in his boat saying to himself “Sister Midnight, I know that name…??”

Turning to starboard at the top of Agamemnon we made to the government wharf at Egmont, thinking it would be the cheapest option. I took the time to check the pilot books about entering the bay and was shocked to find it right next to the Sechelt rapids or Skookumchuck Narrows, a very serious stretch of water as I will explain later. I checked my tables and saw that the current would be flowing at ten knots through the rapids and wondered how bad the current would be at the wharf. Sideways currents can be a pain when docking. We were passing a small marina / resort in Backeddy with fuel just before the wharf, so pulled over to fill up, while there they told me they were in the ‘shoulder season’ now and rates dropped, so we tied up there for the night and walked down to Egmont which had a shop, and the smallest post office in Canada. On a side note I have noticed a tendency for many countries to have multiple instances of the smallest whatever all over the country, I have visited the smallest house in England while in Cornwall and also in the lake district, I’m sure there are other contenders too. While we were at Egmont checking out the wharf we had intended to visit, we saw a yacht arriving, in fact the one we passed under the pylons. I watched to see how he would cope with the pontoons being full and nowhere to raft on the public visitor side. He wandered around a bit then rafted to a fishing boat in the private area. We went to the shop and waited for it to open to get some supplies. kathy sat outside on the bench which seems to be a bit on the ‘well made’ side.We headed down to the pontoons to see how it all worked when we met the sailor heading up to the shop, I stopped and asked him if he was the skipper on the yacht that just arrived, he said yes and we chatted, I told him we had passed him under the pylons and he told us he  was down from Sointula and I explained that we were heading up there. At this point he realised why he thought he knew Sister Midnight, he asked my full name, then introduced himself as Jim the guy I had been emailing with over the last few months as he was going to be looking after our boat while we returned to the UK. he had just sailed down here for a few days exploring. Quite a coincidence. We bumped into him later in the grocery store, but that was less of a coincidence as the grocery store was the only shop for 5 miles and there was nothing else to do 🙂

Walking around the dock we saw a lot of very sad neglected boats.

We walked back to Backeddy and had a lovely meal in the resort restaurant.

When we arrived it was lovely and sunny but in the morning the fog had descended and I worried if we would be ably to make the 35 miles up to Princess Louisa Inlet, but a local arrived in a small skiff and he told me the fog was only around the marina and was caused by the colder water you get around the rapids. We set off and sure enough the fog was very isolated around the marina, the pic below is looking  back to the marina from about a mile away.

We now headed north up Jervis Inlet, a long 35 mile fiord like passage that ends in a small bay. Captain Vancouver had traversed this route in the late 18th Century looking for the north west passage to the Atlantic. He was disappointed yet again, but he also missed the inlet to the Prince Louisa Inlet which as you can see below is not very wide. The entrance leads to the Malibu rapids, again not recommended at full flood. We arrived at slack water and passed through into an even more striking fiord like passage. 

 

Hard to believe this fills and empties through that little opening

At the head of this inlet is the famous chatterbox Falls, in June the sheer mountainside vertical walls all along the inlet are flowing with waterfalls We found space on a public dock maintained by the park authorities. I’m not used to having to moor next to planes but I just treated it like a boat and all went wellThe small float plane had just arrived with a bride and groom and photographer for some wedding shots in front of the waterfall, after those shots they pranced around on the pontoon for ages before shooting off in the plane. Watching the plane go round and round in circles to gain enough height to clear the mountains made me realise just how high these granite walls reached. The next day a big motor launch $4.5Million dollars worth, arrived and I helped the skipper by taking his stern lines, we chatted and he had seen my “Liverpool” reg on the hull and explained his guests on the boat were two ladies from the UK, so later we were surprised when two giggly northern women turned up, banging on our hull and insisting we join them for drinks on the mega yacht, one of them was from Preston, the other frm Nottingham. We had a nice time chatting with them and a few other guests on the boat,  a very luxurious affair, I noted the kitchen was way better than my own, and I’m talking about the one in my house!

Later that evening we all went over to the hut on the shore, set-up for people to have barbeques, the ship’s crew built a great bonfire, using lots of petrol on the wet wood they found.  Today we left Princess Louisa Inlet early to pass the rapids at slack water, this time at low tide, making the channel even narrower. On the way out we saw some new waterfalls that had been dry on the way in.

This time we went back to Egmont Public wharf, and tied up to the same fishing boat that Jim had tied up to when he was there. One reason he had gone there was to take the 5 km hike to the rapids from the wharf, he had timed it to see the rapids flowing at 12 knots, we are going to do the same tomorrow, but the rapids will be running at 14 knots and the wind will be up so it should be impressive. Many lives have been lost in these rapids, just a few years ago the local search and rescue volunteers, an organisation like the RNLI did some exercises in the rapids and lost two of their crew when the boat capsized and the two women were trapped underneath. More details are here .

Oh I nearly forgot, I celebrated my 60th birthday in the Inlet to the sound of chatterbox Falls, with some lovely presents from Kathy.

Paul Collister

 

I was sad to be leaving Seattle, I was getting used to the ‘in your face’ friendliness of the locals, or Seattelites as they are known, and had been bowled over by how helpful and friendly some of the people we met had genuinely been. It seemed like the whole of the sailing community there worked well together, with shops happily recommending competitor shops to me when they were out of stock. But having spent all my money on bits and bobs for the boat, it was time to move on. We had planned to get to the Wooden Boat Festival for Friday, but the mainsail repair delayed us so we would miss the first day.
Friday morning saw us heading north to Port Townsend, there was no wind, but we had good currents pushing us along and made good progress. The biggest drag was another submarine was heading out, the coastguard escort came and told me I had to clear the exclusion zone, and escorted me towards the beach, in almost the opposite direction to where we were heading, we were already a couple of miles from the subs CPA (Closest point of approach) but that wasn’t enough.  We took 8 hours to cover the 37 NM, arriving at 4pm, once we checked in we headed down to the festival as I read that bands were performing until late each night and we were pleased to find the gates open and free after 5pm, so we wandered around the stalls, mostly closing, bought some french fries and watched the bands performing on the music stage.  There were about six different stages setup for demonstrations and talks each day with maybe a hundred different talks all in all. Over the next two days I attended a talk on sharpening tools, this came from a guy who said he will sharpen his chisel maybe every ten minutes during a serious bit of boat building! I was thinking it was more of an annual thing. I also watched an impressive lady talk about varnishing tips, she had been varnishing for 31 years in Port Townsend, and really knew her stuff. I missed talks from Nigel Calder, a god in the boat maintenance world, and Brion Toss, a master rigger, both of these guys books have been on my bookshelf for many years. What was a bit worrying was that Brion was hobbling around in a plaster cast on his arm and leg, making me wonder if something had gone wrong while he was up a mast?

The festival consisted of scores of wooden boats, mostly quite old, demonstrations on the stages, a boat building competition, where 4 teams competed over the three days to build boats from scratch, launch and race them, live music, sea shanties, trips on the water on classic yachts/ tall ships and loads of other activities for kids. All in all it was a great festival, and I wished I had got there a day earlier and got to the festival earlier each day. In the harbour that held the festival there is an adjacent school of boatbuilding where demonstrations of woodworking were going on.

Some pictures from the festival are below.

“La Boheme is one in a series of William Atkin designed double-enders. This one is the Eric. Modeled after Norwegian rescue boats at the turn of the century, the Eric is said to be “the best boat for the worst weather”. La Boheme’s keel was laid in 1926. She was completed and launched in 1938 out of Victoria, BC and has plied the waters of the North West ever since. Constructed of Port Orford cedar on oak frames, La Boheme is stout, sea-kindly and extremely comfortable as cruiser.”

Boheme comes from the same Norwegian heritage as our own baba / tashiba boats, except those plank lines are for real.

 

One for Taffy.

 

 

Back at the boat we took advantage of a giant safeway store opposite the marina to stock up with everything we need for the next few weeks as we will be mostly at anchor on our way back to Malcolm Island.

It’s actually called the boat haven, but I think of it as boat heaven, it’s a decent walk from the haven to town and the other marina of Port Hudson where the festival is staged, but the Haven has everything a boat owner could desire, there are loads of workshops, I counted four travel lifts, a west Marine, a really good cheap hardware store that has a good range of stainless fittings. Shops, cafes, a fish stall and loads of classic and odd ball boats in every direction give the place a very nautical feel. It’s also has a huge area of hard standingBoats like this one above are scattered around the yard, this is an old classic cruise ship. One morning I looked up after hearing some swishing of the water next to us to see this yacht (below) passing by. A fairly common sight here. I think I will bring the boat back here next year to do any big jobs like the mast refurb I’m thinking of.

Kathy got herself into trouble again and I had to go downtown and bail her out. 

Actually it’s one of these cells under the old courtroom, now a museum, where Jack London spent the night once en-route to the Klondike.

Port Townsend was once, in the 1880s bigger than Seattle, and was scheduled for great things, but the panic/depression of 1893 put paid to that and the town went into decline. But not before several countries had built their imposing embassies here, and several very grand buildings were erected on the main roads.
Above one of these buildings we found an old cinema where we watched ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ The cinema was great, you could take a meal in, drink your wine from a glass glass and sit on a very comfortable sofa. The film was also fun as it was set in Singapore and Malaysia, so we recognised many of the locations.

Port Townsend is a lovely place, it seems when woodstock ended, a lot of people left for here to carry on the party, the general vibe is that of a laid back town, full of artists, lovely coffee bars, lots of art and craft shops, and of course this sits well with so many skilled boat workers, carpenters, steel workers etc. They even have a famous ‘forge’ here where you can get any rare kind of boat fitting cast. I could quite easily spend a year or two here.

Sadly we had to leave and start our trek north to Siontula, the days are getting shorter and colder, there’s less sunshine these last few days and I worry we will hit bad weather along the way. So I want to push on.

Today (Wed) we arrived in Sidney, Canada, a large town near Victoria on Vancouver Island. Check-in to Canada was as simple as saying hello , boat name, and no to ten questions, all on the phone, then we were in.

We are here until Saturday when we head over to Desolation Sound and explore the eastern side of the inside passage. We mostly stayed on the Vancouver Island side on the way down here. We will celebrate Kathy’s birthday here in Sidney, hopefully finding a nice restaurant, my birthday follows a few days later, but I’m more than happy with a cheese butty at anchor in desolation sound.

Paul Collister

 

Having almost fully recovered from my infection, we have decided to head north to Port Townsend for the wooden boat festival; It’s a lot more than just wooden boats. From there we head north to Malcolm Island in Canada where we will stash the boat for the winter. We will be flying home on the 15th October.

We have made the most of seattle over the last few days, I hired a car so I could get around all the shops and other stores and we used it to get out of town too.

I’m quite warming to Seattle, it’s slightly whacky, and you see everything from the very poor to the very rich walking around in most areas. I would gladly stay put here for another 6 months if it wasn’t for the high cost of keeping a boat here, and the general cost of things. A decent loaf is usually $4-$5.

Halloween has started here, I did like the range of pumpkin on offer at safeway, Morrisons could learn a thing or two here. 

One of the highlights was finally finding a place to get my LPG Cooking gas cylinders re-certified and then filled. I took them to Amerigas down in Kent, 30 mins drive south of the centre. They sent me on to Pacific, anoth 15 mins south where I was told it would take two days for the engineer to test them. When I explained I was leaving in 2 days, early, the engineer came out to say he would test them there and then. Result, but one of the tanks failed the leak test inside the valve, totally safe but he replaced the valve and refilled both tanks. Brilliant, we now have 40lb of propane, that should provide all our cooking needs for over a year.

I also bought a new dual tank switch / regulator and new pigtails for the tanks, so once I fit them we will have a pretty safe setup. However with all the fitting and removing the old gas pipe off the cylinder, it became quite weak. During the evening 2 nights ago, the gas pipe burst releasing a stack of propane gas at very high pressure. Kathy and I jumped out of our skins as a huge roar came from the cockpit. I quickly managed to turn off the cylinder and made sure the gasses had all vented away. Later I tested it by lighting a match in the cockpit, I don’t like doing this as it’s not a fair test, in as much as you know the only outcome you could ever possibly see is the good one. Fortunately the boat design allows gas to escape in the locker and be sent safely on its way.

Today I collected the repaired mainsail from the sail loft. They did a pretty good job patching it up, you can see the latest fitting below. It takes me a couple of hours to get the mainsail on, the full length  battens, which are the 5 long bits of plastic rod, running horizontally across the sail are fitted in a fancy case held together by 4 nuts/bolts. I have adjusted the batten tensions in a hope to make the sail work better.

A few days ago we went to the big West Marine, and now we checked out Fisheries Supply, these are supposed to be less arty farty about stuff, they come from a commercial background rather than leisure. However I couldn’t really see much difference between the two, other than Fisheries is a bit cheaper. It was still like an Aladdin’s cave for me. I spent far too much there.

Later on I was to discover Seattle Marine and Fisheries Company, clevery shortened to Seamar. Now these are more like the real thing, I got the usual “Hi there, see anything I could help you with” type greeting, but did I suspect an underlying tone of “You look like a yachtie/Timewaster who wants to buy 3 1/2 foot of rope”, but that might just be my apprehension of walking into any type of professional setup I don’t belong in. Especially ocean hardened fishermen. It didn’t help that he knew nothing about the underlying construction of his three strand nylon, requests to know if it was three or four part, balanced rope just provoked a look of surprise.
Anyway, it looked the business and the price was 23c / foot, in West or Fisheries this was about $1/foot. So we went off to another warehouse, where they keep the rope, and I was going to get a half drum of 300ft, but suddenly came over all macho and decided to take the full 600ft (200m) drum. I was starting to feel like a real fisherman now. Hopefully I have enough anchor rode now for anywhere I want to stop in the world. Below you can see the anchor rode, a massive drum of polyprop and a smaller drum of 3/16th” wire for the new guard rails. I also bought tons of tins of chemicals, from paint stripper/acetone/thinners through to no-seize paste , locking glues, polyester resins/ varnishes, gloss and matt, engine oil/gearbox oil, cutting oil. I have two extra winch handle holders to make life easier in the cockpit and at the mast.

 

After all the shopping we needed a break so we drove out to Snoqualmie Falls. The fall is a lot bigger than it looks, and provides some power to Seattle from the underground turbines.

A little further along we wandered a country trail down to one of the river beds that feeds the falls.

A bit further on we went to the train museum. Kathy has the pictures of that. Just along from the museum we realised we were in Twin Peaks country land, so we drove out to the back road where David lynch turned up one day and planted the sign below. They took some pictures, pulled the sign and drove off. Much later the city of Snoqualmie put up a replica sign, but it has since been stolen.

So in an effort to immerse ourselves in seattle culture, we have been to , Walmart, Walgreave,Safeway,Target,Fred Meyer but not McDonalds or Starbucks. We have travelled the light railway, done the monorail and taken many uber rides.

The view from the west end of the marina looking west

And a little later the view looking east from our berth.

Paul Collister

Yesterday saw me back in hospital, It’s called ER here, A&E back home. But no sign of George Clooney or Hugh Laurie anywhere.

I’m often seeing stuff on Quora about the differences between US and UK Healthcare so I now had a chance to check it out myself. I might even be able to answer one of those Quora questions.

The problems started after a long bike ride a few days earlier, I thought I must have been sitting uncomfortably, as I had quite a pain later in my groin region. Perhaps that’s all the detail that I need to give, other than there was some considerable swelling.

The swelling continued and the pain increased over the weekend, so a search on google revealed many possible causes, most of them quite serious. Bruising didn’t seem likely.

So we headed on down to an urgent care place, these are like ER but for non life threatening issues, they are also supposed to be a lot cheaper than ER, so for just $125 they should be able to give me an opinion and maybe some treatment. Unfortunately, when I explained the problem they said they couldn’t do anything for me and I should head to ER immediately, which was a bit worrying.
They also said they wouldn’t charge me, which was nice.

So Kathy and I jumped into a cab and headed to ER in Ballard for a very efficient check in process, I do have medical insurance, but I had only just taken it out, and I selected a high excess. This was going to be an expensive day. The check-in process took about 5 minutes, in the UK it’s about the same. Next came triage, which in my opinion should be a fairly prompt process, in the UK this normally happens within an hour, here in Seattle it was right away.

I was taken to lovely examination room, where they took my vitals, hooked me up to some monitors then scheduled a specialist to visit. He came about 30 minutes later and ordered an ultrasound scan, In the UK we might well be in the 3 -6 hour period by now. They also took blood and urine samples.

The ultrasound revealed no serious issues, just inflammation, most probably caused by an infection. The actual diagnosis was Epididymitis, and the treatment was to be a course of antibiotics, rest and loads of painkillers.

After a few hours of being at ER I was discharged with a list of drugs I had to go and buy. However I was now feeling more ill than when we arrived, so a quick uber back to the boat and I went straight to sleep, while Kathy went off in search of the medication.

Buying medicine is a bit different here; in the UK any prescribed drugs will cost the same amount, so 10 antibiotic pills will cost about $10 total, here you have to shop around, we had a discount card from the insurers and their recommended retailers, of which safeway was the closest. Kathy popped out to get the medicine and came back, waiting for the right moment to tell me the pills cost $185!! A bit of googling showed safeway are the most expensive place around here. The pharmacy said the insurer won’t pay for antibiotics, or perhaps I need to make a claim. Still another lesson learned.

I won’t be surprised if the cost of the ER visit is in the region of $1000 (in 2013 the average ER visit in WA costed $1200), the bulk of which I will have to pay.

So to compare systems, well I can’t really on such a flimsy illness, but I’m  sure that the outcome of either an ER or A&E visit would have been the same for me, a course of antibiotics. A&E back home would have had me sitting for a few hours in a noisy room, possibly with crying babies, noisy toddlers and the odd drunk falling off his chair. whereas here I waited for 5 minutes in a very flash foyer / reception area, before being whisked off to a private room. Nurses and Doctors here seemed very professional and caring, just like back home, which is what you would expect. However they didn’t seem as rushed here, in fact that was the main difference I think, here they had plenty of room, and seemed quite laid back. All in all I think I prefer the UK setup, I think the wage deductions for National Insurance (Health care) are way lower than the cost of medical insurance, and even with insurance here, the deductibles and co-pay charges can soon add up. Still one visit and a few weeks in the country doesn’t really qualify me as an expert.

That was yesterday, and I’m already feeling better today, hopefully we can get out again soon. Nurse Kathy has been doing a wonderful job as I haven’t been able to move around much. We had plans to do loads of stuff here, and may stay a bit longer to make up for lost time. Seattle seems like a great place, and for the last few days the smoke has lifted and it’s been lovely and sunny. BTW I thought smoke was a technical term for a light fog, it was on the marine forecasts a lot, but it turns out to be actual smoke from fires. It seems like there are lots of large fires burning on Vancouver Island. One newspaper in Seattle last week reported air quality to be so bad it was equivalent to smoking 5 cigarettes a day. Looks like we were very lucky to have seen as much of the island as we did. In fact I hear most of the western coast is suffering from big forest fires.

Before I got ill I took a trip down to West Marine, which is a short walk from the marina, they have such a great range of marine products, so far it’s the best chandlery I have ever been in, aisle after aisle of everything you could ever need for the boat, in fact I bought quite a few things that weren’t on my ‘to buy’ list. I was enrolled into the West Marine discount club, and was told they will match any price I can get from anywhere else (except eBay), which seems like a good deal. I have also ordered tons of stuff online to be sent here and I’m just pondering if I should buy a load of sunbrella, a fabric used to make boat covers/canopies etc as it’s hard to get in Asia.
I need to visit Fisheries next, as that’s supposed to be a great chandlery and more down to earth than West Marine.

Elliott Bay Marina below with Downtown Seatlle in the distance

Paul Collister

Monday morning
We left Port Ludlow in a most relaxing manner, not an early start, but with a little wind blowing us onto the dock I thought it was a good time for Kathy to try springing us off using the prop walk. This is the way many big boats often get away from the dock when space or wind is making it difficult. Basically if you are port side too, as we were, you put the wheel hard to port, full ahead with the throttle and basically try to run over the finger, but before the boat makes any real headway, the stern has swung out, and you slam it into reverse, wheel amidships and back you go. It works a treat when you have the room for the bowsprit to swing over the finger, and not take out the mooring pile.

Once away we were out into the foggy waters of Puget Sound. Many other yachts and motor boats appeared and were all heading roughly the same way. We crossed through the Traffic Separation Scheme at one of the roundabouts and just a few hours out of Port Ludlow we were hanging out the fenders for Shilshole Marina, Ballard, Seattle. I hoped when we arrived, to find a shop with a lady selling shells, so I could point her out to Kathy and remark that “She Sells Sea Shells in a Shilshole Shop”, but we didn’t find one 🙁

Shilshole Marina is on the northern shores of Seattle City, on the edge of a district called Ballard. It’s a huge marina, hundreds of berths with some interesting boatsand is next to the entrance to Lake Union and Lake Washington, which you access via the Washington Ship Canal after passing up the Ballard Locks. 

We easily tied up, checked in for two nights then set off to get provisions from the local Safeway. My local supermarket in the UK was a Safeway until they went bust and Morrisons took over, so I was keen to see if this Safeway did the 6 brown rolls for a pound offer. Again I was disappointed, however they did have a stunning array of Artisan bread, but I’m past paying $4 for a loaf. On the way to the grocery store (as they call it here) we stopped by the Ballard locks, there’s a good chance we might be going through them soon, and watched some boats pass into the lake side, it all looked pretty straightforward. We also watched the salmon in the salmon steps making their way home. A special underground viewing spot has been built to allow you to watch the salmon trying to get back to their birthplace. You can also see outside the locks, many salmon waiting to enter the passage with the steps. This is a man made version of the rocky rivers and waterfalls they would normally be tackling, all built by the US Army when the canal was first created.

My first job was to get SIM cards for us and get some data connectivity. Seattle doesn’t seem too hot on giving away free internet, and most of the marinas don’t have it, but in Shilshole you can subscribe to a fancy service. However for $45 with AT&T we each got a month of free calls/text and 6gb of data, which isn’t bad, a lot better than Canada, but nothing like Malaysia where 1gb of 4g costs 50 cent.  We now have AT&T US numbers and are up and running on the net.

We popped into a bar on the way back and Kathy enjoyed her glass of wine while I spent an hour trying to get my SIM card to work. (It looks like they like the stout here)

I’m taking my time to get used to the American gregariousness, one one level, I’m sure the checkout staff at Safeway don’t give a monkeys about whether I have a good day or not, and I guess when you have said it/ heard it a million times, it probably loses its meaning anyway, on the other hand we meet some very friendly helpful people, who genuinely do seem to want me to have a nice day. Being a normally reserved Englishman, it’s a little confusing. A smile is usually sufficient 😉 Things are pricey here in Seattle, as they were in Canada, I could just be getting too miserly, if I divide the cost of everything by 2 then everything seems fine, but that plan has a long term flaw. Also we are coming from a few years in SE Asia where $3 gets you a very nice dinner.  It’s great to have a good choice of quality produce here, also I love the sights and sounds, big trains, pulling never ending cars (They call train trucks cars here). The whistle of the locos and the sounds of the police cars make me think of Casey Jones and Hill Street Blues!

Yesterday we headed downtown, we took in the Elliot Bay marina on the way as they had an offer for longer term visitors I wanted to check out. The city have made great bike trails here, but sadly for us the Seattle port Authority made a new cruise terminal dock on top of the trail, at least that what it looks like on google maps, so we had quite a detour to get to the marina.However once there we signed up for 2 weeks berthing. We cycled onto the space needle area, as we planned to spend a few hours in the Pop Music Museum there, however when we arrived it was getting late and I was surprised to see the admission fee was nearly $30 each, and I don’t even like grunge. $30 buys a lot of shackles! So we decided that Kathy would come back later in the week and spend the whole day there to get her moneys worth while I took my $30 down to the docks to see what I could find (In the chandleries).

One thing I hadn’t really appreciated about Seattle was the amount of hills around, for some reason I had always thought of it as a coastal town on a strip of coast in the NW of America, but looking at a map it’s a complete mess of mainland, islands, islands that are actually connected to mainland by spits, canals and lakes.Once again I find myself in a place where I think I need a year or more to fully get to know the geography and a bit of the culture.

After the Museum recce we headed back hoping to take in one of the other big supermarkets here. It was going to be a ‘Fred Meyer’ or ‘Trader Joe’, both great names I thought. We followed the shoreline of Lake Union on the way back.Then over to Ballard across the Ship Canal. There is no shortage of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks and in tents on grass verges here.

We ended up at a gigantic Fred Meyer, that was like a B&Q and Tesco in one. Good prices too, so stocked up we headed back to the boat.

This morning (Wednesday) we slept in, and at 11:30 slipped our berth in Shilshole and motored the 4.9NM West then South East to Elliot Bay Marina where we are checked in for 14 days. It’s lovely here, very peaceful,  It’s about 25 minutes to cycle into the centre of Seattle from here, so I expect to be doing a bit of that, also it’s close to Ballard where there are stacks of marine companies that can help me get some of the boat jobs completed.

Plenty of boats sending out AIS signals here.

 

Paul Collister

 

We left Nanaimo at a decent time, around 10:00 to make the 90 minute passage to Dodd Narrows. At full flood the currents here are over 10 knots and this is considered one of the most treacherous passes in the region.

Slack water was around midday and we actually arrived an hour early.  I watched a yacht go through using my binoculars, it looked a little bumpy but I figured we could make it. We had the ebb tide with us giving us about 4 knots of push, and by going now it was less likely we would meet any boats heading in the opposite direction. It has a bend in it so you cant see the exit. There were a lot of other yachts and power boats hanging around for slack water. We put out a ‘Securitie’ announcement on channel 16 for any concerned vessels to contact us before we entered the narrows then headed in. I would soon see how difficult it could get, there where whirlpools all around us and standing waves in places, but right in the middle it looked calm. This didn’t stop the water from yanking the boat off course several times and I had to be quick with the steering to get us back on course. It only took about 5 minutes in all to get through then we were into boring calm waters again. We proceeded south towards America, next stop Prevost Island and a little bay called Annette bay. This was another lovely wooded calm spot, but quite popular with other boaters. There was a floating holiday home in the bay which was tied to a mooring buoyLater in the day the tide turned and we got to see a different aspect of the house. For the people sitting on the deck in their loungers it must be great for the view to be changing all the time.It was a very peaceful evening there and early the next day we were up and off to Sidney spit, a small nature reserve just of Sidney, Vancouver Is. 

There was a small jetty and mooring buoys. The chart and guides show anchoring locations around the buoys so to save a few pounds we dropped the anchor, first time failed and I recovered the anchor completely covered in Kelp, we motored to the other side of the mooring buoys and tried again, this time it set but then under a good pull from our engine the hook jumped out and I recovered the anchor to find an old rope wrapped around it.  By now I was thinking we were going to struggle and boats were arriving fast with only a couple of free mooring buoys left, so I motored over to one, Kathy took the helm and expertly brought us alongside one buoy which I hooped a rope through and that was it, job done, retire to a diet coke for me and a Pinot Grigio for Kathy.

We stayed for two nights here, the first night we walked the length of the spit along a shingle beach, the next day we walked the forest trails around the island.

Next we headed off to Port Friday which is in the USA on the Island of San Juan. This was a little stressful as we knew we had to go through the US Customs and Border Protection officials to be allowed in. We had already got our mandatory visas in London last year, and had phoned ahead to inform them of our arrival, but having heard of some problems people have had at airports when they are in anyway ‘different’ from your regular joe, and stories of passwords being demanded so they can search your phones, facebook accounts etc, we wondered how this would go. Another worry was to do with what food we could bring in. We still have a few dozen tins of tuna, beans, custard etc, some cheese and soy products. The website is quite vague and refers you to other departments that suggest you contact them if you’re not sure. For example most animal products are banned, but that doesnt cover cheese or chicken, but does cover beef.
As it turned out the worry was all for nothing, the biggest problem we had was getting alongside on the customs dock. When we arrived it was full with two huge superyachts, once they moved a queue of returning american power boats jostled to get in, we waited for them to clear, but we had to be careful as the water off the dock was also the airstrip for the float planes, which seemed to be taking off and arriving every 5 minutes.
Once ashore the CBP lady explained the procedure to me, I had to fill in a form, much like you do on a plane, she inspected the boat by standing on the dock and looking at it. She asked if we had any goods to declare, I said cheese, she said “CHEESE IS OK” and we were done,  She was probably the most no nonsense lady I have ever met, I had thought about being jovial, but decided against that. We got 9 month visas and given a cruising permit to make our lives easier when travelling around.

Port of Friday Harbour is a massive place, with a great range of vessels berthed here

We spent one night here and left at 5:50 AM the next day for Port Ludlow. We had to leave early as the forecast was for stronger winds in the afternoon and adverse currents, as it turned out the currents were bad enough and the weather forecast was wrong again. Still we got to Port Ludlow in 9 hours.On the way we saw many luxury houses set back in the trees along the coast. They looked wonderful and I mused on the fact that I might have had one if I had been born in Seattle. I was writing software for a word processor, much like Microsoft Word , back in the 80’s. Had I been in Seattle, I might have been on the Microsoft team writing Word, and by now be head of word processor hyphenation and line wrapping, or some other wonderful title. My small allotment of company stock might have bought me one of these waterfront mansions, and as I said to Kathy that I might also be on my third young blonde leggy wife by now too. She pointed out that if that was the case, I probably would be broke and have lost the house by then!

But back to reality and a sharp lookout had to be kept, these are busy shipping lanes, but fortunately they were quite quiet for us, however we could hear naval activity on Ch16 and the local VTS (local traffic management) channel, I couldn’t figure it out until I saw a submarine and escort vessels approaching us. We were planning to cross the traffic separation lane soon and they would be in my way, so I crossed early,  basically at a right angle to their path, which won’t have looked good to them. They weren’t transmitting AIS so I couldn’t work out how close we would get, but we were over the separation zone long before they got anywhere near, so I was a bit disappointed that a high speed coast guard rib was dispatched to tell me to watch out as there was a submarine passing by, Duh, and that I would be ok if I kept my course, which I thought was fairly obvious. Talking to a local later in the day I heard this is very normal, and in fact they will buzz any yacht in the vicinity and chase them ‘into the hedges’ as the guy explained.Arriving into Port Ludlow saw the wind drop to zero, and the sun come out, the fog left and it became a glorious day. Port Ludlow is a small community town, with a few shops, a marina which is part of a Golf course resort, and a few holiday homes and ‘condos’. 

This was our last deadline, the Bob Perry Rendezvous, we have no more deadlines other than a desire to fly home mid October. The Perry rendezvous happens every year and is a getting together of all boats and/or owners that were designed by Robert Perry. These are Tayanas, Babas, Pandas, Tashibas, some Hans Christians, Passport Yachts, and a gang of others. Boats mostly arrived on Friday and we spent Friday night walking the docks and meeting the owners, swapping tales and checking out the differences in our boats. I met some lovely people here. Saturday Bob had organised talks by two people, a professional boat delivery skipper, and a Rigger from Port Townsend Rigging. That was fun, later we had a big potluck dinner in the pavilion here, followed by a performance from the ‘Perry Rendezvous All Star Band’ which was six guys in the form of Crosby/stills/nash&young/Eagles/Stones with Bob Perry himself playing Bass guitar.  They were pretty good I must say, not my kind of music, I was born just a little too late for that, but Kathy loved it. Bob is on the far left of the pictures.

I got chatting to one of the guys sitting on our table during the meal, he was very friendly and keen to offer me tips on moorage. He, like many there was a friend of Bob’s and he also had a boat, but not a Perry one. But he also had a truck, which was quite a beast. I was keen to see his boat, which turned out to be just as impressive, and had me thinking of what kind of boat I would like next. Something small, fast and maneuverable, but mostly, something that looks great.Finally I’m in a cold place, at night here with clear skies the temperature drops. The waters here are quite cold and consequently the sea breezes are very chilling, so at long last, after many years I was able to put my Irish sweater into service. It’s doing a great job, thanks to Tim and Asta who bought it for me as a present, some time ago. Tomorrow (Monday morning), we leave around 8am for Seattle propper, we are booked into Shilsole Marina, just north of Ballard, once there we will have to find somewhere affordable to stay for the next four weeks as the daily rates are too much for us. Thankfully the people at the rendezvous have been really helpful with tips and suggestions, and a few have offered to meet up with us in town and show us around.

Paul Collister.