Motor Vessel Ghost

Thursday morning has me waking up in the hands of bandits. Little furry four legged bandits wearing masks. I’m counting a dozen raccoons pillaging the beach this morning

I left Anacortes yesterday at 9am. The water was calm but sometimes nearly foggy. A sort of thick spooky haze though I had visibility of nearly six miles. Not bad. I found myself fighting the current and burning unplanned fuel through the morning as I wound my way through Thatcher pass, past Upright head then squirting into San Juan Channel through Wasp Passage. The thick haze continued across the open expanse of Boundary Pass where my timing of commercial traffic was perfect as a freighter just rounded Turn point out of view as I crossed. There is good network coverage at the South end of Boundary so I used shipfinder on my iPhone to look for any upcoming AIS targets out of sight and found none, radar confirmed the same so away I went.

I was able to clear Canadian customs in Bedwell without fanfare. I bet I was not tied up at the docks for more than 15 minutes before being on my way again. While the currents eased up the trip wound up at around 7.5 hours.

Conover cove is a pretty tight and shallow spot. Jollymon, Enough time, and Go Dot were at the dock. I took the last stern tie to the west and anchored up. Steve Monrad was nice enough to come out in the rain and run out my stern line for me. That was fantastic. I thoroughly sounded 10 foot of depth around my anchorage before getting secured. I looked up tide for chemainus and found we would only be losing 4 feet of water. Later dock talk suggested the real number was 7 feet, leaving her keel in the mud. I sunk a lead line before going to bed and found I actually had 12 feet under my keel and those two extra feet matter. This morning I lead line about 5 feet. Wondering what is going on with tides and currents pro which shipped with Nobeltec I investigated further this morning. I found two different tide stations for chemainus, one agreed with other nearby stations the other was clearly wrong. Both shared the same lag/long. The moral of this story is to check more than one station as clearly mistakes in the information are possible.

We are spending the labor day weekend on the boat in her slip at Anchor Cove marina.  On Sunday we had lunch at the Wheelhouse and then took the dogs up to the viewpoint at Cap Sante.  Lots of boats going in/out of Cap Sante marina and a great view point.  The dogs love trekking over the rocks.

We made the run from Hunter to Cornet Bay with clean water.  Spent the night on the floating park docks.  We picked up some nice crab, but lost one of our pots to either the raging current or a ragin theif, not positive which but another pot in the current came through just fine.

We arrived in sunshine, but later that afternoon the fog came creeping into the bay through Deception and within just a few minutes we went from sunshine to dense fog.  A decent sized double masted sailboat came into the bay, which was also named Ghost.  She seemed to me the spitting image of the boat from the movie Captain Ron.  Later investigation on my part revealed that she in fact was a Formosa 51, which is the boat that was used in the movie.  Very classy and they chose a great name for her.  I did not get a chance to talk to them as they were at the “other” floating dock.  I did find their website here:  http://www.ghostsailors.com/

It’s hard to find a good reason to depart Garrison bay, but off we go!  Jollymon has to return to work, so Cliff and I continued on our way looking for our next stop.  We wound up in Hunter bay, one of Jollymon’s favorite’s.  We put the hook down with plenty of room around us, but the wind here in Julyuary is coming up again.

Best thing I did was to install an anchor alarm app on the iphone.  Best nights rest I’ve had during a breeze on the boat.  Best anchor alarm I’ve found, on the iphone or on a gps too.  Highly recommended.

As busy as Reid Harbor was, we made a short trip over to Garrison bay and found a much quieter setting.  This is what peace is all about.

Having cleared customs without incident at Roche Harbor, we decided to try out Reid harbor.  Usually one of my favorite places in the islands.  I’ve never seen so many boats in Reid Harbor before.  We ended up putting down the anchor only about a quarter of the way into the bay, the entire rest of the anchorage was packed.  It looked like a small city at night.

We saw smoke coming from the other side of the hill and it was not long before I heard on of our Tolly friends who is a retired fire chief calling on the radio for assistance from the local authorities.  There was quite the blaze over near Prevost harbor on the other side of the island.

Jollymon decided to stop by and raft up for the night.  We took the dingy’s out later that afternoon for a circumnavigation around Stuart by dingy.  Probably one of the best dingy rides of the season.  We saw all sorts of wildlife, the remnants of the fire being knocked down by the local fire crews and later I had a pod of fast moving orca whales surface within about arms reach before dissappearing again.  Too fast to get a picture of them.

Departing Ladysmith around 10:30 we ran just under 5 hours down to Tod Inlet.  I want to get back on our anchor, which has not been getting as much use lately as I had planned due to all the windy weather we have been having.

Arriving in Tod, I picked out a nice spot and we quickly had the hook down, along with a stern line.  A quick dingy trip and I discovered that we were not alone.

 We ended up spending two nights in Tod Inlet and once again I have to say that I love the place.  We took the dingy and had dinner over in Brentwood bay, where the rest of our friends went and stayed for another night.  We decided to move ahead and decided to cross back over to Roche and clear customs.

Ladysmith is a great little town, though it is a bit of a walk up the street to get there.  We had lunch at the bakery and picked up some meat pies at the butcher shop.

Having spent an absolutely perfectly quiet night in Smugglers bay, we departed at 8:30 for our crossing back over the Straight of Georgia.  This could be a very long post, but I’ll summarize as follows since it is almost the same as our prior crossing except we had the weather on our stern this time:

• Absolutely no wind in the morning at Smugglers, and yet it was blowing in the Straight.  I still don’t know a thing about weather this very strange season.
• Check out our track, you can see it from the prior straight of Georgia post, except this time its the one on the right.  About two thirds down the track suddenly turns due south.  That my friends was a short bio break where we ran with the waves long enough to make a couple sandwiches before returning to our self abuse.

Otherwise, it was a repeat of the conditions we had previously.  Halibut bank reported 6 foot seas.  It does not look like much through the window, but I assure you that in person it looked a bit more ominous!

We spent the night in Silva bay.  We had planned to anchor but the bay was absolutely chock full of anchored vessels, most of them either derelict or without anyone on board.  Makes you wonder and the marina was not cheap.