Sunday, August 30, 2009
Baggywrinkles Blog has moved!!!!
Click here for the news of the Aurora's 2009 cruise from Port Townsend. Washington to Glacier Bay, Alaska.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
BC Coastal Itinerary - Summer 2008
We're back trying to adjust to life "on the hard" after a fabulous summer. Here's where Skipper Jack and First Mate Baggywrinkles took Aurora. Or rather Aurora took us.July 16 Port Hadlock at home dock.
July 17 Port Townsend at dock.
July 18 Friday Harbor at dock.
July 19 Sucia Island at anchor.
July 21 Vancouver at dock.
July 24 Pender Harbor at anchor.
July 26 Grace Harbour at anchor.
July 28 Laura Cove at anchor.
July 30 Gorge Harbour at anchor.
August 1 Shoal Bay at dock.
August 3 Port Neville at anchor
August 5 Lagoon Cove at dock.
August 7 Kawtsi Bay at anchor.
August 8 Port Neville at anchor.
August 9 Shoal Bay at anchor.
August 10 Gorge Harbour at anchor.
August 12 Comox at dock.
August 14 Nanoose Bay at anchor.
August 15 Thetis Island at anchor.
August 16 Prevost Island at anchor.
August 17 S. Pender Island on buoy.
August 19 Victoria - Oak Bay at dock
August 22 Port Hadlock at home dock.
Our experience is so infused with awe and wonderment. that I suppose I'll keep adding to this account. Please do not hesitate to comment, ask questions, tell us where we're confused, or point out lousy spelling and grammar. As we are still getting insights and finding out things, there will most likely be changes to postings entitled Lessons Learned, Wild Creatures and Cruising through BC History.
Lessons Learned
Cruising is all about problem solving, decision making and fine tuning. Here are some lessons learned and other things we need to remember. We'll keep adding to this list.
1. Cruising is work. Sailing is sport rather than recreation. Therein lies the satisfaction. You use your mind and your muscles to move your home, which in turn carries you and all your stuff. It's very different from camping, where you carry stuff and have to find or create shelter as you go along.
2. Cruising the BC coast means getting yourself into the midst of one of the world great remaining wildernesses. It also means finding yourself in the midst of two of the world's great cities: Vancouver and Victoria.
3. North of Desolation Sound is really wild. Where once the area was inhabited with loggers, fishermen and miners and their camps were served by steamship lines, today it has largely returned to Nature. Old timber camps and fishing villages - some of them floating structures - function as "marinas" but with very limited services.
4. We need to learn to crab and fish. Groceries were hard to come by so rice and beans served us well. Other key staples were canned peas, corn, pears, pineapple, tuna, and sardines and dried apricots, ginger, raisin and nuts. Live foods like celery and carrots travel well: next time we'll take lots. And before departure we'll seed a planter of lettuce and strap it on deck between the galley and aft cabin hatches, where the lettuce will not be mowed down by the sails. The inspiration for this came from a big yacht from San Francisco.
5. We need to learn diesel maintenance. We motored much more than we thought we would. Partly it was summer weather, partly narrow channels and rapids, partly the wind patterns. Margo Wood says the idea boat for going north to Alaska is a trawler. But for the trip back south, a sailboat is best. So far we've concentrated on learning sailing, which is the essential skill in the strong winds of Port Townsend and Juan de Fuca. But the Inside Passage calls for self reliance in other skills. Fortunately Portland Community College has a very strong Diesel Services Technology program, with DS 9112 in Small Marine Diesel.
6. We note with appreciation bordering on awe five British Columbians who shared their mechanical skills or advice. All are natural teachers. In Vancouver we've noted Bob and Rick of Wright Mariner at 604.682.3788. At Lagoon Cove on Minstrel Island, it's Bob; reach him on VHF 66A when you're nearby. On South Pender Island, where cell phones sometime work, there's Ross at 250-629.6988. And Mike in Sidney spent valuable time teaching us trouble shooting. Fortunately, there was no trouble and we didn't go anywhere near Sidney. Mike refused our offer to pay but for the next perplexed mariner he'll be there at 604.818.4357.
7. Things that are hard get easier. Sometimes you suddenly find an easier way to do something. For example I was able to stop swearing at the anchor after I figured out how to bring it in without jamming the chain. You run the windlass while counting off ten seconds; then you go below to the V berth to flake the chain in the locker, which is very good exercise, like doing deep lunges. We also learned that the teak panel in the aft cabin comes off to make changing the oil filter easier. We no longer have to lie on the bed and reach down into an impossible space with the filter wrench at an impossible angle.
1. Cruising is work. Sailing is sport rather than recreation. Therein lies the satisfaction. You use your mind and your muscles to move your home, which in turn carries you and all your stuff. It's very different from camping, where you carry stuff and have to find or create shelter as you go along.
2. Cruising the BC coast means getting yourself into the midst of one of the world great remaining wildernesses. It also means finding yourself in the midst of two of the world's great cities: Vancouver and Victoria.
3. North of Desolation Sound is really wild. Where once the area was inhabited with loggers, fishermen and miners and their camps were served by steamship lines, today it has largely returned to Nature. Old timber camps and fishing villages - some of them floating structures - function as "marinas" but with very limited services.
4. We need to learn to crab and fish. Groceries were hard to come by so rice and beans served us well. Other key staples were canned peas, corn, pears, pineapple, tuna, and sardines and dried apricots, ginger, raisin and nuts. Live foods like celery and carrots travel well: next time we'll take lots. And before departure we'll seed a planter of lettuce and strap it on deck between the galley and aft cabin hatches, where the lettuce will not be mowed down by the sails. The inspiration for this came from a big yacht from San Francisco.5. We need to learn diesel maintenance. We motored much more than we thought we would. Partly it was summer weather, partly narrow channels and rapids, partly the wind patterns. Margo Wood says the idea boat for going north to Alaska is a trawler. But for the trip back south, a sailboat is best. So far we've concentrated on learning sailing, which is the essential skill in the strong winds of Port Townsend and Juan de Fuca. But the Inside Passage calls for self reliance in other skills. Fortunately Portland Community College has a very strong Diesel Services Technology program, with DS 9112 in Small Marine Diesel.
6. We note with appreciation bordering on awe five British Columbians who shared their mechanical skills or advice. All are natural teachers. In Vancouver we've noted Bob and Rick of Wright Mariner at 604.682.3788. At Lagoon Cove on Minstrel Island, it's Bob; reach him on VHF 66A when you're nearby. On South Pender Island, where cell phones sometime work, there's Ross at 250-629.6988. And Mike in Sidney spent valuable time teaching us trouble shooting. Fortunately, there was no trouble and we didn't go anywhere near Sidney. Mike refused our offer to pay but for the next perplexed mariner he'll be there at 604.818.4357.
7. Things that are hard get easier. Sometimes you suddenly find an easier way to do something. For example I was able to stop swearing at the anchor after I figured out how to bring it in without jamming the chain. You run the windlass while counting off ten seconds; then you go below to the V berth to flake the chain in the locker, which is very good exercise, like doing deep lunges. We also learned that the teak panel in the aft cabin comes off to make changing the oil filter easier. We no longer have to lie on the bed and reach down into an impossible space with the filter wrench at an impossible angle.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Navigation Notes
As you head north toward the Broughtons, where you are far inland from the main channels and the "Inland Passage" to Alaska, the aids to navigation become fewer and farther between. However, key points of danger that cannot be easily be read on a chart - for example in the five sets of rapids - are clearly marked with buoys and on shore towers. For the rapids, we read as many sources as we could. Guides written by sailors as apposed to power boaters are important here, since the timing of the slack is so much more difficult in a slow boat. Anne Vipond and William Kelley in Best Anchorages of the Inside Passage include a guest essay by the leader of the first Canadian Hydrographic Survey team to develop instruments which could accurately assess the rapids at different times of the tide cycle. Their navigation tips are helpful as are those of Margo Wood in Charlie's Charts. The exception is her suggestion to northbound travelers to wait for slack Whirlpool Rapids in a bay at the NW end of Chancellor Channel; We couldn't find place to anchor there but the cove immediately south of the rapids was perfect, for low water slack at least.
The northbound trip through the rapids is considerably more difficult to time in a slow boat than the southbound. When passing the Dent-Gillard-Yaculta trio, keep in mind that you can change your mind between Gillard and Dent and wait our a tide cycle or two in Big Bay. And even ten minutes off slack can be a challenge if you are fighting a drift filled ebb or flood.
While we loved Comox, crossing the bar was counter intuitive. Heading south in one of our are-we-there yet modes, we saw the distinctive bluffs of Cape Lazo and stayed a bit too close to shore. Soon we were heading east looking for two east cardinal buoys which are waaaaaaaay out in the Strait.
They are quite distant one from the other and they don't even look alike; the base of one one is tall, orange and open and the other block, short and squat. Once we found them in our binoculars we could make southerly progress. Then we had to negotiate the bar. Margo Wood says follow the the ranges. Waggonner says use a 222ยบ heading but remember to correct for magnetic. Vipond and Kelly were the most helpful because their directions included reference to the two new red buoys (firmly on starboard this time) which were not on our map. Thetis Island was easier the second time, but still it's very shallow rounding into Telegraph Bay. If there is anything that must absolutely be left to "local knowledge" it is The Cut between Thetis and the First Nations Reservation on Kuper. It was hard enough to do in dinghy, yet we watched a 35 foot sailboat head in a high tide.
The term "local knowledge only" actually appears on charts (for an alternate entrance to Victoria's Oak Bay, for example). That means don't do it. At the same time, the whole concept of local knowledge is cool. But how do you identify it? Smack in the middle of the entrance to Laura Cove in Desolation Sound National Park there is a submerged rock. But three sailboats, two power boats and a bunch of kayaks were rafted nearby - obviously on a pre-planned multi-family vacation of folks who'd been here. As we crept in, I called out my query and immediately a teenaged girl sprang to one of the bows and pointed to the nefarious place. But short of meeting an old salty fisherman on the dock and then following him out, assuming of course he has the same six feet of draft you do, it's impossible to take advantage of "local knowledge". And it's quite chilling to be taken for local knowledge just because Aurora's bright work is peeling off and her crew looks comfortingly scruffy.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Canadian Aids to Navigation & Charts
We're still figuring out Canada's system of buoys and navigational aids, which seem at once very smart and very dumb.
Their cardinal buoys are simply brilliant. They consist of two large black cones atop a pedestal. The arrangement of the cones tells you which side it is safe to pass on. Of course from a great distance, the cones look like triangles. But, unlike a flat sign, they convey the same message from any point that you view them.
But Until you learn these messages by heart they scare the living daylights out of you. (Come to think of it they are only daylight markers so navigating them at night is simply unthinkable.)
Here is a short primer to be committed to heart by the wise mariner or any fan of elegant symbology. If the two cones point upward, it is a "north cardinal buoy" and passage is only safe on the north side. If the two cones point downward, you need to stay south of the buoy. If the top cone points up and the bottom points down, the message is pass to the east of the buoy. If the top cone points down and the bottom cone points up, safe passage is only to the west; two triangles with their points touching look more like a "W" than an "E" right? Well, you get the idea that this is pretty consequential.
Most aids to navigation are white pillars on land, rather than buoys. The top part of the pillar may be red, green or white, They look like miniature light houses. They seem to date back a few years but now most have solar charged lights.
Of course, there are also buoys shaped like our buoys in the US: green flat-topped "cans" and red pointy "nuns". Usually, at least often enough to be dangerous. So when we we entered Nanoose Bay straight into the setting sun, we took the cone shaped buoy to be a red. When we were right on top of it, we saw it was green.
Even worse, "red right return" into port is not consistent at all. Not just the usual big port little port stuff we have to work out down here (Is this set up for a boat going north to Port Townsend or south to Seattle?). No, it's more of mess in Canada. Entering the rock studded Baynes Channel leading into Victoria's notorious Oak Bay Marina forces you to leave green buoys on starboard!
We managed to get some Canadian mariners arguing whether "red right return" applies at all. The conversation ended when one of them pointed out that in New Zealand, it's green right return.
Nigel Calder is not helpful here apart from pointing out that the colors used in Region B are the opposite of those used in Region A, which includes the US.
Nor was Calder helpful on ranges; he doesn't say a single thing about ranges! We discovered this as we waited for slack to get though the very narrow but straight Chatham Channel. Fortunately, Canadian ranges are exactly like those with which we're familiar on the Columbia River. You line up the black stripes on the red range markers at one end and head for the aligned black stripes on the range markers at the other. You just need to pirouette from bow to stern with your binocs while keeping a steady hand on the tiller.
Unlike the US authorities (which seem more interested in Homeland Security than the safety of mariners) Canadian Coast Guard requires that mariners have paper charts on board. As I learned from Nigel Calder, paper charts are essential and any electronic navigation systems should be seen as supplementary. The requirement is also an excellent source of revenue for the Canadian Hydrographic Service; so many ordinary navigators using them might be an impetus to accuracy, readability and frequent updating.
That said we found our share of discrepancies. There were rocks at the south entrance of Laura Cove that remain above water at high spring tide but which show only as drying rocks. And two of the three buoys you need to cross the Comox Bar were not on our chart at all. Next year we'll get on the Internet and arm ourselves with updates before departure.
Their cardinal buoys are simply brilliant. They consist of two large black cones atop a pedestal. The arrangement of the cones tells you which side it is safe to pass on. Of course from a great distance, the cones look like triangles. But, unlike a flat sign, they convey the same message from any point that you view them. But Until you learn these messages by heart they scare the living daylights out of you. (Come to think of it they are only daylight markers so navigating them at night is simply unthinkable.)
Here is a short primer to be committed to heart by the wise mariner or any fan of elegant symbology. If the two cones point upward, it is a "north cardinal buoy" and passage is only safe on the north side. If the two cones point downward, you need to stay south of the buoy. If the top cone points up and the bottom points down, the message is pass to the east of the buoy. If the top cone points down and the bottom cone points up, safe passage is only to the west; two triangles with their points touching look more like a "W" than an "E" right? Well, you get the idea that this is pretty consequential.
Most aids to navigation are white pillars on land, rather than buoys. The top part of the pillar may be red, green or white, They look like miniature light houses. They seem to date back a few years but now most have solar charged lights. 
Of course, there are also buoys shaped like our buoys in the US: green flat-topped "cans" and red pointy "nuns". Usually, at least often enough to be dangerous. So when we we entered Nanoose Bay straight into the setting sun, we took the cone shaped buoy to be a red. When we were right on top of it, we saw it was green. Even worse, "red right return" into port is not consistent at all. Not just the usual big port little port stuff we have to work out down here (Is this set up for a boat going north to Port Townsend or south to Seattle?). No, it's more of mess in Canada. Entering the rock studded Baynes Channel leading into Victoria's notorious Oak Bay Marina forces you to leave green buoys on starboard!
We managed to get some Canadian mariners arguing whether "red right return" applies at all. The conversation ended when one of them pointed out that in New Zealand, it's green right return.
Nigel Calder is not helpful here apart from pointing out that the colors used in Region B are the opposite of those used in Region A, which includes the US.
Nor was Calder helpful on ranges; he doesn't say a single thing about ranges! We discovered this as we waited for slack to get though the very narrow but straight Chatham Channel. Fortunately, Canadian ranges are exactly like those with which we're familiar on the Columbia River. You line up the black stripes on the red range markers at one end and head for the aligned black stripes on the range markers at the other. You just need to pirouette from bow to stern with your binocs while keeping a steady hand on the tiller.
Unlike the US authorities (which seem more interested in Homeland Security than the safety of mariners) Canadian Coast Guard requires that mariners have paper charts on board. As I learned from Nigel Calder, paper charts are essential and any electronic navigation systems should be seen as supplementary. The requirement is also an excellent source of revenue for the Canadian Hydrographic Service; so many ordinary navigators using them might be an impetus to accuracy, readability and frequent updating.
That said we found our share of discrepancies. There were rocks at the south entrance of Laura Cove that remain above water at high spring tide but which show only as drying rocks. And two of the three buoys you need to cross the Comox Bar were not on our chart at all. Next year we'll get on the Internet and arm ourselves with updates before departure.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Wild Creatures - For my Dad
This post is dedicated to my Dad. He taught me to notice wild things, to go back to the same places to look for them again and to look for the same sort of things in similar environments. He's still trying to get me to slow down so I don't miss so much; Aurora must be his accomplice in this.
Here's a picture of Dad in March 2007 when he went sailing with us out of Port Hadlock Aurora's the boat at the farthest right, with the port side view of Indian Island. Maybe this will persuade him to join us for part of of next year's cruise.
I don't know if any experience of the natural world can be "the best" but the most unforgettable was finding ourselves among a huge group of Pacific white-sided dolphins. As soon as we rounded Minstrel Island to enter Knight Channel from Chatham Channel, there they were, splashing all around us in tremendous erratic waves. They would swim up to Aurora in pairs, doing a couple of tricks for us before joining the rambunctious chaos of their kin. Everywhere dolphins were arcing out of the water, every which way, like the waves of confused seas. We figured that we saw about fifty of them.
Later we learned from the Kelleys' Best Anchorages of the Inside Passage that Pacific white-sided dolphins move in groups of 115 on average. During the mating season, these seven and eight foot creatures are particularly impressive acrobats. They really make waves.
We did only a short stretch of Knight Inlet at the end of a long day, but here is what the Kelleys say about it: The longest inlet on the British Columbia coast, Knight Inlet (named by Lieut. Broughton) cleaves its way for nearly 70 miles into the Coast Mountains. No wider than one-and-a- half miles, the inlet winds past snow clad summits and numerous waterfalls before reaching the glacier fed rivers at its head. There the massive peak of Mount Waddington rises more than 13,000 feet.
Several days later in Tribune Channel to the north, a smaller group dolphins made a big deal of racing alongside of us to cross our bow before swimming up the wild Bond Channel.
Then one warm afternoon, we were motoring very slowly down Wellbore Channel waiting for slack at Whirlpool Rapids. I was reading on deck and Jack was daydreaming in the cockpit when strange sounding blows and snorts got our attention. We stood up and looked down very near the boat at what I believe was a Dall's Porpoise, After finally getting our attention, the lone animal performed for us, jumping clear out of the water four times on starboard, then crossing the bow and doing the same on port, then swimming around again to compete the sequence on starboard. Each dive left a perfect whirlpool about a meter in diameter. Jack quipped, "he clearly did that on porpoise."
Here in the Gulf Islands we're back to the ordinary harbor porpoises, which arc in an out of the water steadily, without antics. When a pair was crossing our path on the way here, we stopped for them and they did not resurface until they were at some distance.
So far our closest encounters with orcas - or "killer whales" - remain those in the wildlife rich southern reaches of Puget Sound. On this trip we saw a pod only when the light was just right, following a rainfall under the vast sky. We watched several females swimming north from Nogales Channel across Cordero and into Frederick Arm, surfacing predictably at 15 to 20 second intervals.
In the category of if-we-hadn't-seen it-with-our-own-eyes-we-wouldn't-believe-it, we can report on harbor seals. They are ubiquitous, swimming nearby and staring at us with their big eyes over whiskers before dipping modestly back into the sea. But there's a habitat change between the northern waters and those of the Gulf Islands.
Great groups of Harbor Seals languish on the gently sloping rocky shores of the Gulf and San Juan Islands. You don't always see them immediately but you predict where they should be, pick up the binoculars and there they are. They look like huge slugs. Or maybe maggots, if they are grey and wiggle on rocks black with the receding tide. They are so plentiful that you don't bother to get close; there will always be more. Nor should you get close and babies are nurtured in these great haul outs. (Once when we failed to notice a haul-out and got too close with the boat and several of the biggest seals made a racket, dove in the water and chased us away!)
Farther north, however, steep mountains fall vertically into the sea. So while we saw seals everywhere we didn't see any hauled out. Then one day when I was in the galley fixing lunch, Jack shouted to me to come up on deck. He hadn't believed his eyes, until it was just on our beam, but there was a harbor seal riding calmly past on a large log in the company of three seagulls!
Since we'd never heard of such a thing, we chalked it up to a charming fluke. But two days later, a particularly nasty looking piece of drift turned out to be another seal riding on another log!
The weirdest marine creature we saw was an Elasmosar, 80 million years dead. The Countney Museum has the bones - found on the banks of the nearby Puntledge River - and also a superb reproduction of this 40-foot long creature with a short heavy body, four limbs and an elongated neck. The museum's paleontological collection is amazing and hardly dusty: every day the museum offers tours of their active excavations. This is a must the next time we stop at Comox.
There's no Internet here so I can't give links but I do have on board a favorite book The North West Coast: A Natural History. In this copiously documented work (published by the Timber Press in my own Portland neighborhood) author Stewart Schultz begins his chapter on marine mammals and seabirds like this: As we walk the beaches and bluffs, it is difficult to envision how, some 3 billion years ago, the cold grey oceans provided the first great arena of life. But it was here, in the deluged, volcanic childhood of the earth, where searing energy from volcanic heat and lightening by chance struck the proper combination of methane, ammonia, and water vapor in the primeval atmosphere, producing the first organic molecules. Seventeen of the 19 phyla of animals on earth evolved, and still thrive, in the sea. Over the last 0.5 billion years, some of these abandoned the ocean and colonized land, where new selective forces catapulted them into new, advanced evolutionary trajectories, leaving their primitive ancestors in the sea. Later a few of these land creatures re-entered the ocean, whose stable temperatures, buoyancy, and high productivity nurtured and gently reshaped their form and function over the ages.
The return of mammals to the sea took place on at least five distinct occasions. The ancestors of our Orca, Dall's porpoise, and Pacific white sided dolphin returned to the sea about 65 million years ago. Those of the seals headed back 35 million later while the forebears of the sea otters we've never seen and the mischievous romps of river otters on the docks of Aurora's homeport did not return to the water until 5 million years ago.
As for the birds, they readapted to the water about the same time as the ancestors of the whales. But we're lousy at birds, hoping that Stewart or another of our bird-watching friends will come and help us out. We have lots of time to make sense of the diving ducks and the dabbling ducks who winter around Port Townsend. We've given up on the gulls; they're are so many kinds plus the hybrids. And identifying birds is far less fun than just wondering about them.
For the record, we looked for Rhinoceros Auklets and found them exactly where they should have been - in the agitated rapids of Juan de Fuca as we entered Cattle Pass on our way north to Friday Harbor. We saw them nowhere else, as their habitat is so particular.
As for loons, the national bird of Canada, they joined us frequently between the 48th and 50th parallel but seemed to disappear more to the north, perhaps because of the high peaks separating their fresh water lakes from our ocean channels.
Here in BC swallows seem act like shore birds, probably because they like people and the natural habitat of British Columbians is the shore. At Shoal Bay the barn swallows were tame, letting the boat-dwelling homesteaders take care of their young on the docks until they were able to fly. At Lagoon Cove, there were no barn swallows at all but great numbers of cliff swallows darting about. They must hate the fog, because when it rolled in, a bunch of them hung out quietly on Aurora's life lines.
There doesn't seem to be a great variety of birds, nor small land mammals. The bald eagle who merrily merry-go-rounded down the Yaculta Rapids on the drifting log until he caught sight of the ring necked plover may be the problem. Suddenly there are way too many of these powerful hunters.
Among the interesting ordinary creatures we see everywhere is the ochre sea star, misnamed because it also comes in fuschia, purple and orange.
After helping a crab fisherman empty his trap, I marveled at the underside of a many-armed sunflower starfish. 
And every morning on shore and on the boat we have our tenacious, talented spiders. But we notice them especially when the dew drops show off their handiwork.
My greatest disappointment was not seeing bears, though we didn't really go looking for them. Both black bear and grizzlies live in the Broughtons. There is no more common sight in cruising waters than dog-owners taking their pets to shore in dingies. So everywhere you go in the north you are reminded that dogs are bear bait, usually with a story to back up the contention.
The folks at Shoal Bay say there are no bears on West Thurlow Island, but they've seen a lot of wolf tracks this year and a corresponding decline in the number of deer.
Cougars live along the northern inlets as well. Desolation Sound: A History has stories of entire herds of sheep and goats being slaughtered and old photos of rifle-totting settlers after they've taken revenge on nine-foot cats.
Finally, a brilliantly striped garter snake at Shoal Bay. A small creature, either disappearing or simply over looked, but one this seafaring apartment dweller has not seen since leaving her Dad's garden.
Here's a picture of Dad in March 2007 when he went sailing with us out of Port Hadlock Aurora's the boat at the farthest right, with the port side view of Indian Island. Maybe this will persuade him to join us for part of of next year's cruise.I don't know if any experience of the natural world can be "the best" but the most unforgettable was finding ourselves among a huge group of Pacific white-sided dolphins. As soon as we rounded Minstrel Island to enter Knight Channel from Chatham Channel, there they were, splashing all around us in tremendous erratic waves. They would swim up to Aurora in pairs, doing a couple of tricks for us before joining the rambunctious chaos of their kin. Everywhere dolphins were arcing out of the water, every which way, like the waves of confused seas. We figured that we saw about fifty of them.
Later we learned from the Kelleys' Best Anchorages of the Inside Passage that Pacific white-sided dolphins move in groups of 115 on average. During the mating season, these seven and eight foot creatures are particularly impressive acrobats. They really make waves.
We did only a short stretch of Knight Inlet at the end of a long day, but here is what the Kelleys say about it: The longest inlet on the British Columbia coast, Knight Inlet (named by Lieut. Broughton) cleaves its way for nearly 70 miles into the Coast Mountains. No wider than one-and-a- half miles, the inlet winds past snow clad summits and numerous waterfalls before reaching the glacier fed rivers at its head. There the massive peak of Mount Waddington rises more than 13,000 feet.
Several days later in Tribune Channel to the north, a smaller group dolphins made a big deal of racing alongside of us to cross our bow before swimming up the wild Bond Channel.
Then one warm afternoon, we were motoring very slowly down Wellbore Channel waiting for slack at Whirlpool Rapids. I was reading on deck and Jack was daydreaming in the cockpit when strange sounding blows and snorts got our attention. We stood up and looked down very near the boat at what I believe was a Dall's Porpoise, After finally getting our attention, the lone animal performed for us, jumping clear out of the water four times on starboard, then crossing the bow and doing the same on port, then swimming around again to compete the sequence on starboard. Each dive left a perfect whirlpool about a meter in diameter. Jack quipped, "he clearly did that on porpoise."
Here in the Gulf Islands we're back to the ordinary harbor porpoises, which arc in an out of the water steadily, without antics. When a pair was crossing our path on the way here, we stopped for them and they did not resurface until they were at some distance.
So far our closest encounters with orcas - or "killer whales" - remain those in the wildlife rich southern reaches of Puget Sound. On this trip we saw a pod only when the light was just right, following a rainfall under the vast sky. We watched several females swimming north from Nogales Channel across Cordero and into Frederick Arm, surfacing predictably at 15 to 20 second intervals.
In the category of if-we-hadn't-seen it-with-our-own-eyes-we-wouldn't-believe-it, we can report on harbor seals. They are ubiquitous, swimming nearby and staring at us with their big eyes over whiskers before dipping modestly back into the sea. But there's a habitat change between the northern waters and those of the Gulf Islands.
Great groups of Harbor Seals languish on the gently sloping rocky shores of the Gulf and San Juan Islands. You don't always see them immediately but you predict where they should be, pick up the binoculars and there they are. They look like huge slugs. Or maybe maggots, if they are grey and wiggle on rocks black with the receding tide. They are so plentiful that you don't bother to get close; there will always be more. Nor should you get close and babies are nurtured in these great haul outs. (Once when we failed to notice a haul-out and got too close with the boat and several of the biggest seals made a racket, dove in the water and chased us away!)
Farther north, however, steep mountains fall vertically into the sea. So while we saw seals everywhere we didn't see any hauled out. Then one day when I was in the galley fixing lunch, Jack shouted to me to come up on deck. He hadn't believed his eyes, until it was just on our beam, but there was a harbor seal riding calmly past on a large log in the company of three seagulls!
Since we'd never heard of such a thing, we chalked it up to a charming fluke. But two days later, a particularly nasty looking piece of drift turned out to be another seal riding on another log!
The weirdest marine creature we saw was an Elasmosar, 80 million years dead. The Countney Museum has the bones - found on the banks of the nearby Puntledge River - and also a superb reproduction of this 40-foot long creature with a short heavy body, four limbs and an elongated neck. The museum's paleontological collection is amazing and hardly dusty: every day the museum offers tours of their active excavations. This is a must the next time we stop at Comox.
There's no Internet here so I can't give links but I do have on board a favorite book The North West Coast: A Natural History. In this copiously documented work (published by the Timber Press in my own Portland neighborhood) author Stewart Schultz begins his chapter on marine mammals and seabirds like this: As we walk the beaches and bluffs, it is difficult to envision how, some 3 billion years ago, the cold grey oceans provided the first great arena of life. But it was here, in the deluged, volcanic childhood of the earth, where searing energy from volcanic heat and lightening by chance struck the proper combination of methane, ammonia, and water vapor in the primeval atmosphere, producing the first organic molecules. Seventeen of the 19 phyla of animals on earth evolved, and still thrive, in the sea. Over the last 0.5 billion years, some of these abandoned the ocean and colonized land, where new selective forces catapulted them into new, advanced evolutionary trajectories, leaving their primitive ancestors in the sea. Later a few of these land creatures re-entered the ocean, whose stable temperatures, buoyancy, and high productivity nurtured and gently reshaped their form and function over the ages.
The return of mammals to the sea took place on at least five distinct occasions. The ancestors of our Orca, Dall's porpoise, and Pacific white sided dolphin returned to the sea about 65 million years ago. Those of the seals headed back 35 million later while the forebears of the sea otters we've never seen and the mischievous romps of river otters on the docks of Aurora's homeport did not return to the water until 5 million years ago.
As for the birds, they readapted to the water about the same time as the ancestors of the whales. But we're lousy at birds, hoping that Stewart or another of our bird-watching friends will come and help us out. We have lots of time to make sense of the diving ducks and the dabbling ducks who winter around Port Townsend. We've given up on the gulls; they're are so many kinds plus the hybrids. And identifying birds is far less fun than just wondering about them.
For the record, we looked for Rhinoceros Auklets and found them exactly where they should have been - in the agitated rapids of Juan de Fuca as we entered Cattle Pass on our way north to Friday Harbor. We saw them nowhere else, as their habitat is so particular.
As for loons, the national bird of Canada, they joined us frequently between the 48th and 50th parallel but seemed to disappear more to the north, perhaps because of the high peaks separating their fresh water lakes from our ocean channels.
Here in BC swallows seem act like shore birds, probably because they like people and the natural habitat of British Columbians is the shore. At Shoal Bay the barn swallows were tame, letting the boat-dwelling homesteaders take care of their young on the docks until they were able to fly. At Lagoon Cove, there were no barn swallows at all but great numbers of cliff swallows darting about. They must hate the fog, because when it rolled in, a bunch of them hung out quietly on Aurora's life lines.
There doesn't seem to be a great variety of birds, nor small land mammals. The bald eagle who merrily merry-go-rounded down the Yaculta Rapids on the drifting log until he caught sight of the ring necked plover may be the problem. Suddenly there are way too many of these powerful hunters.
Among the interesting ordinary creatures we see everywhere is the ochre sea star, misnamed because it also comes in fuschia, purple and orange.
After helping a crab fisherman empty his trap, I marveled at the underside of a many-armed sunflower starfish. 
And every morning on shore and on the boat we have our tenacious, talented spiders. But we notice them especially when the dew drops show off their handiwork.
My greatest disappointment was not seeing bears, though we didn't really go looking for them. Both black bear and grizzlies live in the Broughtons. There is no more common sight in cruising waters than dog-owners taking their pets to shore in dingies. So everywhere you go in the north you are reminded that dogs are bear bait, usually with a story to back up the contention.
The folks at Shoal Bay say there are no bears on West Thurlow Island, but they've seen a lot of wolf tracks this year and a corresponding decline in the number of deer.
Cougars live along the northern inlets as well. Desolation Sound: A History has stories of entire herds of sheep and goats being slaughtered and old photos of rifle-totting settlers after they've taken revenge on nine-foot cats.
Finally, a brilliantly striped garter snake at Shoal Bay. A small creature, either disappearing or simply over looked, but one this seafaring apartment dweller has not seen since leaving her Dad's garden.
Friday, August 15, 2008
British Columbians and the meaning of cruising
Our visit to the museum in Courtenay left me hungry for more local history so when we got off the bus in Comox, we stopped at the bookstore. Waggoner's mentions Blue Heron Books so I entered with high expectations, which were suitably rewarded.
The proprietor, a woman in her fifties, ushered me to the appropriate section and started introducing her tomes one by one. Explorations into First Nations culture. Accounts by George Vancouver and crew members (with names like James Johnstone, Peter Puget and Joseph Whidbey). Nature studies. A thick academic history of British Columbia. Dairies of homesteading immigrants. A new biography of Muriel Wylie Blanchet, author of the Canadian classic The Curve of Time.
Before settling on Heather Harbord's 2007 Desolation Sound: A History, I'd asked a few questions; soon nearby browsers had joined in, making comments about their favorite islands in the great wilderness across Georgia Strait from Comox. In the course of this conversation, the owner mentioned that she'd never been to Desolation Sound! Quite extraordinary for a middle class business owner in a town with a harbor jam packed with well used boats, many are just big enough to make the crossing on a fair day and would probably welcome extra hands. Then she added, "I have to learn to sail first."
Here it was again! That fathomlessly deep passion for cruising the people of British Columbia know in a way none of the rest of us can. Without cruising, they would be quite ignorant of their history, both of the lives of the native tribes and the exploits of early settlers. They would have no wilderness access to experience the creatures that live in their seas and on their land.
And cruising means do it yourself in a small boat. To take a "cruise" along the "Inside Passage" in an ocean liner is an utter oxymoron! First of all, a cruise implies moving without a fixed route or destination. Second, the "Inside Passage" is really the outer, most western of the routes to Alaska; it is only "inside" in the sense that it does not go into the open ocean around Vancouver Island.
Cruising in British Columbia by ordinary people - recreational cruising, if you will - is about a century old. Captain George Vancouver wrote about every nook and cranny later cruisers would visit. Since his mission was to find the Northwest Passage, that's what he had to do. He got along relatively well with Captain Dionisio Galiano of the Spanish fleet, which was also exploring these coasts in 1792. The crews of both expeditions had fairly good relations with the Indians, too, trading bits of metal for fish, fowl and game. Had they bothered to ask the natives if any in the maze of channels led deep into the mainland, they might have had the answer on the Northwest Passage. But Vancouver's legacy is the superb mapping of every passage, channel, arm and inlet.
Vancouver's charts allowed the British to exploit the coast for timber, minerals and marine life. At the end of the 19th century, the first settlers followed the loggers, fishermen, miners, and trappers. They included loners running from old lives or bad debts, Scandinavian immigrant families and even intellectual idealists, Thoreau-types but unlike Thoreau, unable to sneak back home for Sunday dinner. Living in nearly total isolation, they developed the fishing, hunting and logging skills needed to survive.
According to author Harbord, the first cruisers up the BC Coast were Amy and Francis Barrow, who set out every summer shortly after they were married in Vancouver in 1906. I'm eager to read their journals, though those before 1926 were lost in a fire.
Muriel Wylie Blanchet is the cruiser who inspires everyone who has come after her. After she was widowed - her banker husband presumed drowned when his rowboat was found not far their coastal home - Capi Blanchet cruised with her five children in the 24-foot Caprice. For fifteen summers they rented out their house on Vancouver Island for much needed income and explored desolation Sound and the coves and channels to the north. The Curve of Time is Blanchet's account of the native people and settlers they visited, about their encounters with wildlife, the zen of marine engine maintenance and her own journey through life.
The proprietor, a woman in her fifties, ushered me to the appropriate section and started introducing her tomes one by one. Explorations into First Nations culture. Accounts by George Vancouver and crew members (with names like James Johnstone, Peter Puget and Joseph Whidbey). Nature studies. A thick academic history of British Columbia. Dairies of homesteading immigrants. A new biography of Muriel Wylie Blanchet, author of the Canadian classic The Curve of Time.
Before settling on Heather Harbord's 2007 Desolation Sound: A History, I'd asked a few questions; soon nearby browsers had joined in, making comments about their favorite islands in the great wilderness across Georgia Strait from Comox. In the course of this conversation, the owner mentioned that she'd never been to Desolation Sound! Quite extraordinary for a middle class business owner in a town with a harbor jam packed with well used boats, many are just big enough to make the crossing on a fair day and would probably welcome extra hands. Then she added, "I have to learn to sail first."
Here it was again! That fathomlessly deep passion for cruising the people of British Columbia know in a way none of the rest of us can. Without cruising, they would be quite ignorant of their history, both of the lives of the native tribes and the exploits of early settlers. They would have no wilderness access to experience the creatures that live in their seas and on their land.
And cruising means do it yourself in a small boat. To take a "cruise" along the "Inside Passage" in an ocean liner is an utter oxymoron! First of all, a cruise implies moving without a fixed route or destination. Second, the "Inside Passage" is really the outer, most western of the routes to Alaska; it is only "inside" in the sense that it does not go into the open ocean around Vancouver Island.
Cruising in British Columbia by ordinary people - recreational cruising, if you will - is about a century old. Captain George Vancouver wrote about every nook and cranny later cruisers would visit. Since his mission was to find the Northwest Passage, that's what he had to do. He got along relatively well with Captain Dionisio Galiano of the Spanish fleet, which was also exploring these coasts in 1792. The crews of both expeditions had fairly good relations with the Indians, too, trading bits of metal for fish, fowl and game. Had they bothered to ask the natives if any in the maze of channels led deep into the mainland, they might have had the answer on the Northwest Passage. But Vancouver's legacy is the superb mapping of every passage, channel, arm and inlet. Vancouver's charts allowed the British to exploit the coast for timber, minerals and marine life. At the end of the 19th century, the first settlers followed the loggers, fishermen, miners, and trappers. They included loners running from old lives or bad debts, Scandinavian immigrant families and even intellectual idealists, Thoreau-types but unlike Thoreau, unable to sneak back home for Sunday dinner. Living in nearly total isolation, they developed the fishing, hunting and logging skills needed to survive.
According to author Harbord, the first cruisers up the BC Coast were Amy and Francis Barrow, who set out every summer shortly after they were married in Vancouver in 1906. I'm eager to read their journals, though those before 1926 were lost in a fire.
Muriel Wylie Blanchet is the cruiser who inspires everyone who has come after her. After she was widowed - her banker husband presumed drowned when his rowboat was found not far their coastal home - Capi Blanchet cruised with her five children in the 24-foot Caprice. For fifteen summers they rented out their house on Vancouver Island for much needed income and explored desolation Sound and the coves and channels to the north. The Curve of Time is Blanchet's account of the native people and settlers they visited, about their encounters with wildlife, the zen of marine engine maintenance and her own journey through life.
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