Port Neville wasn’t really a port, there was a pier with room for a couple of boats, there was a store, but it was long closed down.
However leaving Port Neville we headed into morning fog and took some amazing pictures.
The inter-island ferry
We dinghied ashore and were going for a walk when we were warned about bears that had just been spotted close to the pier, so we kept our walk brief before we dinghied back to our anchorage. We left early the next morning to arrive at the race passage in time for slack water. However I now realise I applied the secondary port time difference for tide height to the slack water time, instead of the slack water time difference, so I got slack water wrong by an hour or so. It didn’t matter, we had 0.5 knots against us through the passage and really couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.
We continued to the end of Johnstone passage, still not seeing a gillnetter, and turned south into Discovery Passage. A few miles further south and we turned to port and into Kanish Bay, where at the very end there is a small channel, about 40 meters wide that leads to a little hidden gem of a pool.
We spent the night here, and this must have been our most peaceful night in many months.
I even managed to get the Kayak out
The next day we had to pass through one of the most dangerous passes in Canada, the Seymour Narrows
This short stretch of water has claimed many lives over the years, at worst the current can run to over 15 knots, with surges of a couple more knots added by the rips, it’s very dangerous if you don’t get your timing right, which is what I spent an hour checking last night. I now understand the government books on tides and currents better. It turned out we had to be there around 13:22, that is just before the start of the narrows and we could go through at slack water. At full flood the current would be around 8 knots, and the current comes on quick after slack, it doesn’t follow the 1/12ths rule at all. The 12ths rule is a way of working out the height/speed of tide where you can approximate a sine wave, which is normally how tides move. The other big thing about this pass is that besides being quite narrow for the amount of water that has to get through it, it also had a rock, ‘Ripple rock’, in the middle which ships were constantly being driven onto by the whirlpools it created. Many attempts to destroy this rock had been made, but all failed, many with the loss of lives when their barges were ripped away from mooring lines by the fierce currents. In the end, in 1958, a tunnel was dug under the pass, and then up into the rock and explosives detonated. It’s claimed to be the largest bomb/explosion other than the atom bombs ever. Read more about it here
So it was with some trepidation we headed off to the Seymour Narrows, I was a little bit worried as we left our lovely secluded inlet, and turned into the main channel to see we were alongside a tug and tow, he was obviously heading for slack water too, Pleased that my calculations were probably confirmed, but worried that the tow might be all over the show, as it was I couldn’t keep up with him anyway, and he would pass through the narrows 30 minutes early, silly man I thought, he can’t have done his homework!
There are 4 big trucks top left, and a motor cruiser on the top near the stern, some tow.
We did however run into a few gillnetters as we hit the main strait, but they were easy to avoid, our Asian experience with fishermen has set us up for life in that area.
So we all headed down to the narrows and I was very disappointed to find nothing happened, Nada, a little wobble in course at one point, not even as bad as Race passage the day before. What an anticlimax. we went through, with about 2 knots extra current, and out of boredom, I headed over to the top of Ripple rock just to be able to say I motored over it, but even then there was no real current, the odd whirlpool, but anything bigger than a leaf was safe. Oh well, at least I must have got the timing right.
It got harder later as we picked up a headwind of 15 knots and had some current against us so we were crawling along to our destination at Campbell river town, which is where we are now. A small town, but the biggest supermarket we have seen since leaving Malaysia,huge, with so much variety, Kathy is spending tomorrow there 😉
It’s a big marina here, and quite an expensive area, I think the houses on the riverfront are all very expensive luxury pads. I read that hollywood stars would often take vacations here, so I put on my less oily pants for our stroll tonight.
We are having a day off here tomorrow before we push on south towards the San Juan Islands to check into America.
Paul Collister.