Cruising in a Boat Definition:  Fixing Your Boat in Exotic Places…

We left Pender Harbor after a relaxing multi-day visit and stopped just 7 miles away, up the Agamemnon Channel. There’s this tiny little pocket bay, Green Bay, where we dropped anchor.  There is enough room for a boat or two to anchor… a few more if they use an anchor and a stern tie arrangement.  The anchorage is protected from most winds.  There are a few cabins, a rocky reef to be careful about, and a nice waterfall to provide white noise. After the bustle of Pender it was secluded and quiet.

Just after we arrived, a small motor boat came into the anchorage and tied off to what looked like a community dock. There were at least 4 NO TRESSPASSING signs on the dock, gangway and on a small building at the top of the dock.  The boat had a white lapstrake hull, an enclosed pilot house and small cabin.  The captain emerged from the cabin into the cockpit and gave us an assessing stare.  No smile. No wave.  I waved and he offered up a half sort of wave that looked more like he was halfheartedly slapping at a mosquito.  Perhaps he was.  He appeared to be a bit North of 70 years old and had long scraggly white hair held in bondage with a ball cap.  The rest of his kit was a weathered flannel shirt and jeans. He was wearing an old life jacket. He stood in the cockpit of his boat facing the dock and placed his hands on the bull railing before he tied up to it. He was bent over slightly and appeared to be praying.  His eyes were closed.  He was motionless.  He was either praying thanks for making it back from wherever he’d been in his little boat, or making an attempt to stifle his anger for having someone anchored in “his” little bay.

The boats name was Proud Mary…  I’m thinking… Viet Nam vet… but that’s just a story my feeble mind came up with.  John Fogerty would have approved of the boat name… I wanted to call out a welcoming noise or two, but kept silent.  The bay is small and we were anchored in the middle, probably 160 feet from his dock. Close enough to be considered an intruder. A border collie jumped out of the boat onto the dock. A training float dangling from it’s maw.

The dock was old and rather decrepit. Probably a relic of an old logging operation.

To the North, through the trees behind the dock were a few old cabins.

The “Islander” started unloading his boat. He placed about 6 plastic boxes on the dock. They were about the size of book boxes. They appeared to be heavy. Probably caned and dry good supplies. He and his dog walked up the ramp. He retrieved a dolly from the building behind the dock, and occasionally threw the float for his border collie to fetch. The Islander trundled his boxes up to the little cabin, put away the dolly, shut the door and walked into the woods to the left of the dock, his dog prancing at his heels, herding him. Border collies… We’ve had border collies, and even learned how to herd sheep with them. Marvelous dogs if you have the room for them to burn off a bit of energy… and understand their innate need to herd.

We had a nice dinner, a glass or two of wine and retired to the cockpit. Off to bed…   During the night I woke up at a slight, grinding sound. It was the anchor chain dragging over a rock, a common enough thing. It was close to midnight.  I usually wake up at least once at night while anchored and check my two anchor alarms to see if we’ve drifted outside of the circle defined by the length of the anchor chain that has been deployed.  All was fine. The tide was going out and the boat had swung to keep aligned with the slight current. I was awake, so I thought I’d get up and do a “safety check”.

I went out onto the back deck.  The boat was where it should have been.  No worries there. I heard a rustling sort of noise.  The water around the boat was moving, and it wasn’t the current.  I  looked down at the water and could see myriads of little fish, probably herring, flitting through the highly phosphorescent water. It was an amazing sight.  Our little bay was on fire. I shone a flashlight into the water and was rewarded by thousands of pairs of tiny little bright white lights reflecting the light of the flashlight right back at me.  Fish eyes looking up at me. I moved the light and thousands of fish jumped at the same time away from the light.  Whoosh! I turned off the light, and went back into the boat and woke Les up so she could see the event.  She was not impressed about being woken up at midnight, but all was forgiven when she saw the fish. We watched them dancing through the water. The phosphorescence was amazing. We’d both seen phosphorescence in the sew before… but nothing like this. After a while we went down below and back to bed.

In the morning we made coffee and raised the anchor.  We traveled up the Agamemnon Channel, then Jervis Inlet, and finally made our way through the infamous Malibu Rapids… into the Princess Louisa Inlet.  We timed our entry through the rapids within 5 minutes of low slack and had no problem negotiating the two dog leg changes of direction to get inside.

Many have described the Inlet… by claiming there are no words to do so.  On my last blog post I made a feeble attempt with some pictures and a bit of verse that I hope captured some of the emotional reactions of being there. 

We hiked a bit, paddled our kayaks and stand up paddle boards.  We went for longish, slow dinghy rides,   Listened to bird call, whiffling  in the trees, and the lapping of wavelets on the hard granite shoreline.  The noise of innumerable waterfalls provided an auditory soundtrack to the spectacular views.

We appropriated as much as we could stand of the grandeur, relaxation, and inspiration that the Inlet provides.  Finally… it was time to leave. We lifted the SUPs into their racks on each side of the boat.  We lifted Les’s kayak with the crane and placed it into its rack on the top flybridge deck.  While lifting my heavier and longer kayak onto the top deck… the crane started making an odd noise and stopped dead in its tracks.  It wouldn’t go down. It wouldn’t go up.  It was no longer a crane… just a bit of odd looking metal that was reduced to just being able to make a weird noise. My kayak was stranded, hanging in midair about 5 feet off the deck.  Sheesh!  We tied it in place so it could not swing about and damage anything or itself.  We went down and opened the cupboard that housed the cranes pump. I pressed the button to make the line reel out and lower the kayak, and Les shrieked at me to “STOP THE PUMP”!!!  Hydraulic fluid was dripping out of the ceiling where the hydraulic line chase was located.  I grabbed a 5 gallon bucket from the engine room and placed it under the worst part of the flowing oil, “ran” back and grabbed oil pads to place around the bucket.  The crane had a blown hose.  No way to fix that in a remote location like the Inlet.

We went back up to the top deck and figured out how to get the kayak down without hurting anything or us, and put it in its rack.  The dinghy was trapped down in the water.  It would have to stay there.  There is no way to lift a 500 pound dinghy up to the flybridge deck without the crane.  We’d have to tow it until we could get the crane back into a functional state.  It was time to leave the Inlet.  We had already decided that it was time to go, but the crane failure finalized our waffling decision.  We are very fortunate that the failure happened while we were lifting a 60 pound kayak.  If it had been the 500 pound dinghy It would have been much harder and more dangerous to “drop” it the additional 5 feet to get it into its rack.  We do have a rope come along and several 4 part rope tackles… but a 500 pound pendulum moving about with each boat wake… MALAS HIERBOS!!

We fired up Ginney, Fred and George (small genset, Port and Starboard engines) released the mooring buoy line, made our way back down the Inlet, and transited the Malibu Rapids towing the dink. It was easier going out than in, and the dinghy put on her best behavior. She is so far beyond “I think I can”. We continued down the Jervis Inlet, the Agamemnon Channel, and anchored back at Green Bay for a quiet night.  In the morning we left “our little bay” with the intention of going back to Pender Harbor to find a marine technician. But as soon as we got cell signal, the first time in 5 days, we discovered that there was little wind or chop forcast for the Strait of Georgia. Good passage weather. The Strait is nothing to trifle with and a good two day weather window is not something to waste. We changed our plan to stop in Pender Harbor and made our way back to Nanaimo.  We stopped at the Nanaimo Yacht Club dock for 2 hours until we could safely transit Dodd Narrows, made our way through the Narrows to and continued on to Sibell Bay which is close to Ladysmith. Seattle Yacht Club has an outstation there. There were a few “bouncer” boats anchored about, but plenty of room for Great Northern.

In the morning we left Sibell Bay and made our way down Stuart Channel, through the Sansum Narrows, Shute Passage, Colburn Passage, Swartz Bay, John Passage and finally into a slip at the Van Isle Marina… surrounded by million dollar yachts. Phew!  Paupers in paradise, eh? Hmmm… maye we should wash the boat… We were back in civilization and at a location where marine technicians could fix the crane. It’s 21:15 (9:15 PM) on 6/1/23. The sun has just gone down, but Pacific Northwest dusk will be with us for another 45 minutes. I’m sipping a nice Canadian Cabernet from a cut glass wine goblet that was Les’s grandmother Cleo’s… I’m reflecting on that, and on the past few days of our cruising. It is June and we’ve already had some delightful, and some not so delightful experiences. We’ve visited the San Juans: Shaw, San Juan, Sucia, Orcas, Stuart islands in the US. And… in Canada: Sidney, Nanaimo, Pender Harbor, Green Bay, Princess Louisa Inlet, Sibell Bay and now Van Isle Marina in Sidney. A really nice kid named Austin will finalize the crane repair in the morning. And then… onward… to:

Fixing our boat in exotic places…

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[I’d love to hear your comments about my blogs. More of this / less of that, definitions… like what is a “bouncer” (boat bum… sort of. I realize that “bum” is pejorative, but a garbage man is not necessarily a sanitary engineer, eh?). Suggestions for more stories, mechanical manipulations, navigation and other places Les and I have been and have not written about? Anything constructive… would be much appreciated. I know you are out there. My statistics page shows that people from the US, China, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Mexico and New Zealand occasionally check in to see whats going on with Great Northern and its crew…]

Safe voyages to you all…

…Blair