-------- Original Message --------
Subject: update #1
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 21:41:32 -0700
From: Mary Campbell
Hello all, just a quick update on our progress so far ...
We cast off in Olympia on May 29 at 0145 just in time to catch the ebb. Our trip so far has been uneventful, boating wise. We always try to go with the flow of tides and wind, and on this trip we are committed to using the engine as little as possible. That means that we wait for the tide to change to determine when we weigh anchor, and we let the prevailing wind be a factor in our choice of anchor spots. We had a couple of days in Port Townsend to figure out what we forgot to bring, all of which we can buy in PT, and what we should have left behind, which we mailed back with the help of UPS. We also had a lovely layover in Victoria, where we left the boat in a slip in front of the Empress Hotel while we stayed with friends just outside of Victoria. And then two days of real downwind sailing ... 15 knot winds and both junk sails winged out, surfing down the waves ... a taste of the tradewind sailing that the boat is built for. Still a long way to Glacier Bay ... but we are getting into the rhythm ...
Mary,
Sirena, the boat formerly known as Sea Witch
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: update
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:03:11 -0700
From: Mary Campbell
The passage to Juneau continues! It seems to always take us a week or two to shakedown the boat and shake out the kinks in our own communication, but we feel like we are officially underway now. The unfinished projects we took with us are now completed, everything has finally found its logical stowing place, and we have taken care of the inevitable equipment malfunctions that only seem to surface when you are away from home and the tools. We’ve put away the American currency and are hoarding loonies and twonies for showers and laundry. We invested in new deep cycle batteries in Nanaimo, and I do mean INVEST, and our electrical system now feels very powerful, pun fully intended. If anyone out there can explain to us how an off the shelf inverter that is direct wired to the battery could cause a voltage drop of 3-4 volts on a fully charged house bank when the inverter is TURNED OFF, please enlighten us! I personally think the reason this happened is because we mailed our book on 12V systems back to Olympia from PT, but fortunately we did not remind the boat gremlins that we still had our copy of Nigel Calder as backup.
We had a very puzzling engine hiccup yesterday. Our little Sabb, installed new last March, is a true workhorse and seems to go forever on a sip of gas. But yesterday, 4 miles from Campbell River, as we motored into a stiff NE wind and 6-8 foot seas, it suddenly coughed and shuddered to an abrupt stop. We KNEW we had fuel, which we confirmed dipping the tank, so I tried to keep us jogging in place with the foresail, which we had left up as a stabilizer, while Dick troubleshot. After confirming that the throttle WAS still connected, and bleeding the line at the injectors, we turned the key and VOILA, once again, she thrummed along without a hitch. Boat gremlins.
We had some lovely sailing from Nanaimo to Comox, thanks to some unseasonal SE winds, but we expect that we will be doing a lot more motoring, at least with the current though, from here through the Broughtons. We won’t be stopping in the Discovery Islands, a place we loved last year, as we are wanting to hustle up to the places we are less likely to visit again, like Alaska and the Queen Charlottes. But we do plan to spend a few days revisting some places we liked in the Broughtons.
The weather is turning. Here in Campbell River it is sunny but COLD, and our trusty Webasto heater is getting turned on every evening as we retreat to the cabin for dinner and a movie. Yes, we have a whole SLEW of DVDs, 4 seasons of The Wire, and all of BBCs The Office to watch. We hear that a Pacific High is due tomorrow. I hope so! If we see any good weather up here, we will try to send it on your way!
Mary
Sirena
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: update
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:13:46 -0700
From: Mary Campbell
Now more than 3 weeks into the trip ,we continue to make steady progress up the coast. The weather has not been as summery as one would like, but on the other hand it could be a LOT worse. We are experiencing a good deal of heavy misting but only a few days so far of outright RAIN. So that is good.
We’ve decided we want to hustle through the BC coast to save more time for Alaska, and so we don’t plan to dive too deeply into the many fiords, sounds and inlets that indent the coastline. After a while, one does start to look rather a lot like the other! We find ourselves being drawn to the more scenic anchorages, those that are tucked behind a cluster of islets, or that have interesting entrances that require some careful navigation. Those of you who have been here know what I mean. We left Fury Cove two days ago, a small anchorage near the north entrance of Rivers Inlet, tucked behind a sandy spit of beach that shone like a beacon as we approached. We opted not to go up the inlet to Dawsons Landing, the one famous for fishing NOT for Katie Holmes, so that we could take advantage of a steady northwest wind to beat our way up Fitz Hugh Sound to Joe’s Cove in Fish Egg Inlet. From Joe’s Cove we had an AWESOME day of sailing the next day, mostly on a reach up Fitzhugh Sound, doing 4.5 knots all day up to Codville Lagoon. It was even clear and SUNNY! I even got to take off my fleece for a couple of hours. And we even attracted the attention of a passing trawler that stopped to photograph Sirena in full canvas.
Of course the weather does limit the scenic views, but when the sun comes out, I am once again struck by the SCALE of this coast ... and the number of hours we can be on the water on a major shipping channel and see not a soul. When we do pull into town, the people are always helpful and I get a chance to practice my Canadian; I study slavishly for hours while on watch. We actually passed for natives in Sullivan Bay the other day, so I must have the accent pretty close! Thanks to Heather, who taught me how to say Canayjian!
The only reason to go up to Dawson’s Landing would have been to reprovision, but we are finding that we are a bit early for the season yet, and there are few fresh foods to be had this early when we do pull in ... today in Shearwater we could buy half and half but no ice! We don’t have a regrigerator on board, so we do need to put in somewhere every 4-5 days to get ice and hopefully snag the last stalk of celery or onion. We think that will change in a week or two. In the meantime, we are eating very well, using the onions, sweet pototoes and other long lasting veggies we store in the root cellar, aka bilge. On board I have every kind of rice: red, white, brown, wild, sticky, arborio and dried legume: red, black, white, green, pink and yellow. And a spice selection and that would make the Dutch East Indies look tame. With an onion, a can of tomatoes or some coconut milk, and my pressure cooker, I can keep meals interesting: curry and ginger one day, cilli powder with salsa another, jambalaya on a third. Just by varying the herbs and spices, we travel thousands of miles gastronomically! Kind of a fun challenge to see what I can come up with with the remaining sweet potato and green pepper. At the rate we are going, I am sure we will have plenty of food to last our entire trip, with the exception of fresh veggies and fruit.
So I am writing this from a bar/restaurant in Shearwater, a tiny resort that caters to fishermen and boaters, with a full-service haulout and a very nice mechanic who told us that the outboard had a blown head gasket. I have my little kayak, so I can still explore with that, but the lack of a motor is crimping Dick’s fishing style, such as it is! He gave us the name of a place in Vancouver that will express post a part to us in Prince Rupert, so cross your fingers for us.
Now we head for Fiordland and points north ...
Mary, Sirena
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Fwd: update
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 23:07:12 -0700
From: Mary Campbell
Hello friends and family
I am sending this from Ketchikan, where we have just finished checking in to Customs.
This is a bit of a milestone for us, as it means that we have now traversed what are reputed to be the worst crossings of open water, i.e. water with a direct opening to the Pacific. For us, though, we are finding that aspect of the trip to be much less challenging than the weather, which continues to be less than summery to say the least. Our faces and arms are tanned from constant exposure to UV, but I have given up any hope of using my swimsuit. We did have a couple of spectacular and hot days when we actually needed to put up the sunshade, but we are maintaining hope that the pendulum will swing back and the skies will clear.
I think that the most challenging aspect of cruising up here is predicting the total current due to tide and other influences. In Puget Sound, the times of high and low tides are well known and it is easy to plan a trip around them. But up here, the numerous islands, spaced at irregular intervals from each other, interrupt the flow of the tides, often splitting the incoming flood, so that it meets in the middle of the channel on the opposite side of the island. This means we have to figure out where the convergence is likely to be, and plan to arrive at that point at the right time, so that we enter the channel with the flood and leave the other end on the ebb. Where the islands are close to one another, this can also create narrows through which the tide can run at, relatively, high velocities, higher than we might be able to overpower with our engine if we are going against it, and enough to create rips and whirlpools that we need to respect even if we are going through with the current. So, we spend a fair amount of time each day reviewing our course, comparing it with tide tables, and figuring out how far we can expect to get in a day. On top of that, the massive amounts of water that are falling ON US, and that have fallen on the bordering hills for the last 6 months, are all running OFF those mountains to join the salt water, which creates an effective ebb. Sometimes it helps us, more often it is against us, sometimes with surprisingly high impact on our speed. More than once we have scratched our heads, wondering why we are going so much faster or so much slower than we had predicted.
Our progress is also affected by weather. We’ve both found that powering into the wind and rain with the engine is physically and psychically exhausting. So we hole up at anchor for a day or two to let something blow over rather than getting there. If we don’t, we’ll end up staying an extra day at our destination just to rest up from the experience, so there is no net gain. On the other hand, when it is dry and we are moving steadily forward, we’ve sometimes just kept on going past our planned anchorage. One good part about the unseasonably late summer is that we are still experiencing a lot more southerly winds than we would normally have at this time of year, which is good for us heading north. We just left Foggy Bay this morning, where two other boats that were there when we arrived were still there two days later, and planning to be there for a few more because they were heading south. We waved our sympathies to them as we left. We’ve been in their boots and slickers! We’ve had a couple of days where we managed to make 45-48 miles, but 30-35 is much more realistic. After all, we need to have some time to shop, buy fuel, and explore where we are by kayak, dinghy or foot.
We had a lovely stop at Prince Rupert, a town of less than 20,000 people, and the third largest ice-free port in the world, we learned. They are experiencing a great boom with the Asian import trade, and planning for many more container ships to call here as they can cut 2 days off the transit to the southern US by offloading here and loading onto trains rather than coming into port further south on the Pacific Coast. They also see their share of cruise ships, which tower over the town even though the town is built on a slope down to the water.
We played tourist, visiting an old cannery, where we learned a LOT about the real boom time of salmon fishing on this coast ... and how far OSHA regulations and political correctness has changed the way we approach workforce planning. Life was much different in the old canneries, where natives, Chinese, Japanese, and white workers all had a role. Whites were in charge of the boats and the cannery, native women packed the cans, Japanese repaired the nets, and only Chinese did the butchering. In fact, the mechanical fish butchering machine was named the Iron Chink, and was marketed as such, brochures, bronze label and all.
In Prince Rupert, we picked up a new head gasket mailed to us from Vancouver, so we got the outboard back in service. This was a great boost to our mobility, since it allows us to visit some spots that we cannot enter in the large boat, set our crab and prawn traps in the deeper water, and get out fishing. We had a close call yesterday exploring the upper reaches of an inlet that had numerous twists and turns. We had a map with us and seemed to be following it closely, and everything seemed to be going just as we expecting, entering the inlet on the last of the flood. We noticed the current picking up suddenly, and rounded a bend to see white water ahead ... YIKES! we spun the dinghy around and gave it full power and sat there immobile against the current for several LONG LONG seconds until we gradually began to creep upstream. A close call, but one that convinced us that we need to bring a compass and GPS with us on every such foray! We are in awe of Vancouver who charted and visited so much of this coast with NO charts or maps.
Once back to the boat, having kissed its deck, Dick went out fishing and came back with our first rockfish of the trip: dinner. So the outboard has redeeemed itself in my estimation and is in a love upswing on my love-hate relationship with 2 cycle engines. I’m a Luddite when it comes to boats and motors; much prefer exploring by kayak, and was thrilled to find a little kayak for Dick in Prince Rupert so we can go out together. Our crab pot has also been getting a workout, and we have decided to learn to fish for salmon on this trip.
Speaking of marine life, we’ve had a couple of whale sightings already. A large humpback cruised slowly through our anchorage off Gilford Island a few weeks ago, passing less than 100 feet from us as he grazed for dinner. And we were escorted around Cape Caution by a couple of Orcas, one of whom made a point of sounding to our beam many times before we had to turn right and part company. Seal and sea otters, as well as pacific white sided dolphins are also frequent sights. In Prince Rupert, a pair of eagles had set up their nursery just at the head of the Government dock and were training their young to fish from the harbor wall. It’s hard to believe how big those birds are until you see one that close.
Mary, Sirena
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Another update
Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2008 19:32:15 -0800
From: Mary Campbell
Hello all
Well, we have crossed a major milestone on the trip, having now gone as far north as we had planned to go. Dick’s sister Lois joined us in Glacier Bay from Philadelphia for a week, and we dropped her off today after a week in the wilderness.
Glacier Bay lived up to its reputation for grandeur and scale, although as we compared notes last night, there were surprises, pleasant and otherwise, for all three of us. The area is immense, about the size of Puget Sound, and we covered a LOT of it, visiting Reid, Lamplugh, Johns Hopkins, Margerie and Grand Pacific glaciers. We were there when Johns Hopkins calved an enormous berg, creating a wave that rivalled a cruise ship wake for the rolling it gave us. We tossed the kayaks into the water for some quiet paddling in an island cluster, and kept a constant watch for wildlife. We spotted a Grizzly, brown bear, up on a cliff. How he managed to get and stay there was a mystery, but he was snuffling in the bushes and those claws must have come in handy. We also spotted a mother moose and calf a few times, a black bear ambling down the beach, and dozens of sea otters. The sea otters are truly the cutest mammals I have ever seen, esp. watching them play and eat and vocalize as we paddled into their living space. The bad part about them is that they eat the Dungeness, so where we see them, we never catch crab. But we did manage to trap some prawns on our first night out; otherwise, we found the Bay much less productive of seafood than anywhere else we have been. Even the whales only seem to stay in the southern part.
Fortunately, Lois managed to squeeze a nice little high pressure system into her carry on, and so we enjoyed dry and relatively clear weather for her visit. The night before her arrival, as we sat at anchor outside Gustavus, we were treated to a lovely sunset where the high peaks north of Glacier Bay were drenched in ethereal light and shades of pink and gold. Really sublime. But for the most part, this country is almost unphotographable, just too GRAND to capture even in an 8 by 10.
Our good weather stretched into a nice day of sailing today after we dropped Lois off, and we will be leaving the boat here in Hoonah when we fly back to Olympia for Dick’s son’s wedding. It will be a short trip as we will be back here on the 10th to begin bringing the boat back south. We are still not decided about our route OR destination. We had hoped to come down the outside and visit the Queen Charlottes, but he have heard that there is no Canadian customs office there anymore; we are not anxious to have to come back in to Prince Rupert to check in to customs. So we may decide to simply sail down the outside of BC to Barkeley Sound and make an offshore passage of it. We are anxious to get into some warmer climes.
The boat continues to function well. We appreciate the 250 feet of chain we carry, and the engine never disappoints. The autopilot controller gave up the ghost a few days ago, however, and we are hoping to get a new controller for it when we come home. Hand steering is no fun once you’ve experienced the alternative ... and we were happy to have Lois to share the driving! We continue to find new and better ways to rig things, and have developed a really simple routine for hoisting the outboard from deck to dinghy. I think we can safely say that the boat is ready for anything, and we feel very confident in it and in our gear.
We hope you are all enjoying your summer. We are looking forward to seeing family and friends at the wedding or perhaps around town on one of our two days in Olympia!
Mary, Sirena
From: Mary Campbell
Date: August 18, 2008 6:36:45 PM GMT-08:00
Subject: update
Back again for another update – after a quick trip south for Dick’s son’s wedding.
Not sure if I had mentioned that our autopilot flaked out on us just before we got to Glacier Bay. Fortunately Dick’s sister Lois had joined us for the trip through Glacier Bay, so we put her to work on the wheel from time to time. But we did contact the maker and had them express a new controlled to Tacoma so we could get it when we were down there. Well, they forgot to check the express box so the autopilot got to Tacoma the day after we arrived back in Hoonah, so we had to wait in Hoonah for a couple days while Dick’s sister forwarded it.
No sooner was that installed than the adapter for the PC that holds our electronic chart plotter conked out, meaning that the PC was useless. Fortunately, I was able to find a MAC chart plotter on the web for just $60, so I downloaded that onto my Mac, along with all the free NOAA charts I would need to plot courses through the very intricate islands ahead, your federal tax dollars at work.
So Sirena sat at the dock in Hoonah for a couple of extra days waiting for the autopilot. I was really ready go by the 14th! But it worked out because that day must have been the day for the humpback whale convention outside of Hoonah, and my camera was working overtime.
There was several large pods right around the point where they are known to feed, blowing and tail flipping. And there was a single whale over by Gustavus who worked his way across Icy Strait breeching, rolling and slapping the water with his fin, making lots of vocal noises as well. It was incredible. I sat and watched with camera poised as he got closer and closer but never managed to get a full body out of air shot, the digital camera delay is just too long. I did catch some landings and fin slaps.
After about two hours watching, it was time to get going, but the show was not over. There were more pods all down the strait and sometimes some dicey surprises when a whale would just heave out of the water about 100 yards away. You could hear them vocalizing as well, and at one point, I caught a whiff of something that smelled like I had forgotten to take out the garbage, – except there wasn’t any to take out, so I figured it must have been whale blow.
And then, at the entrance to Elfin Cove, I could not turn down when I wanted because two more whales were guarding the way, a beautiful sleek perfect pair swimming in tandem.
Elfin Cove is a neat place; almost like a movie set for ramshackle charm crammed with buildings all stuck on the rocks chock-a-block. You should have seen me maneuvering the boat in Elfin Cove – I don’t think I have EVER navigated the boat anywhere that was that tight
This area is quite beautiful, almost alpine. And not so cold for some reason, maybe the proximity to the ocean. The shore is rocky and very densely vegetated. It has a very personal rich feel, with the snowy mountains just visible in patches through the mist rising behind them. Reminds me a little of Japan, which is just across the way.
From Elfin Cove, the smooth water route heads down Lisianski Inlet and Lisianski Strait out to the Gulf of Alaska. The day was hot and sunny and I was in shirtsleeves threading my way through an intricate passage with all sails up. It was VERY pretty, and Sirena’s little anchorage was charming: waterfall, backdrop of snow-covered mountains. Quite lovely.
From there it was a 2 mile dinghy run down the coast, past surf breaking on craggy rocks, to the White Sulphur Hot Springs, a rustic cabin over some HOT natural springs. And not another soul there to enjoy the view, so no need to bother with swimsuits! I wanted to stay and watch the sunset, but did not want to do that dinghy ride back in the dark.
The route from there to Sitka is a mix of outside, on the Gulf of Alaska, and inside passage, where the route is sheltered the wind and swell. I don’t know if I have ever seen anything as pretty as Surveyor Passage, even though, or maybe especially because, it was misting lightly. As the boat threaded its way among craggy islets, new vistas constantly revealed themselves, with velvet green sharp pointed hills behind them, overseen by craggy blue mountains with lacy snow-tops.
Sitka is truly a charming little city, so different from all the other cities, towns, burgs and hamlets we have visited. Cosmopolitan and charming, with all kinds of great restaurants – much like Victoria only a LOT smaller. The streets have sidewalks and storm drains and groomed yards, and I am now in the library, which is open daily until 9, sitting by the window looking out at the waterfront with mountains rising behind a lovely Russian mansion. It has a marina that rivals Bellingham’s, and is definitely NOT a T-shirt town. Cruise ships are a sidelight to this place, not a mainstay. And my mouth is watering at the prospect of some pieroschki at a little Russian place the postmistress told me about.
Mary, Sirena