Day 24

After yesterday’s late start and fun day, Jason and I woke up at 5:00am, after a good night’s sleep. However, due to Jason’s excessive height, I had spent the night in the V-berth for the first time, and though it was a bit smaller than my settee berth, I did appreciate that it was a bit darker. In fact, I was so unused to being in a room at all darker than outside, I had to do a double take when my alarm went off, as I thought I must have set it an hour early. Anyhow, we slipped the dock lines an hour before schedule at 7:00am because we had set our alarms too early and were already awake and ready to go. Our destination at that time was Meyer’s Chuck, where the chart advertised sticky buns available at the dock in the mornings.

As soon as we were outside of Clover Passage and into the more open waters of Behm Canal and Clarence Strait, it became apparent that our beautiful following wind of yesterday had deserted us along with the sun, to be replaced with this 15-knot headwind and overcast sky. At least the wind was strong enough to sail into, so we were spared the revulsion of motoring into a messy chop, but we ended up just barley missing our heading, and as a result had to take a tack across Clarence Strait and perpendicular to our course, only to have the wind die away to absolutely nothing by the time we were well into the middle of the strait.

Once the engine was on and pushing us long at a steady four knots through the water, we handed the sails and settled into some of the most uneventful hours of the entire trip. With the autopilot working like a charm after a brief period in the morning when the connection was bad, and as the clouds gradually thinned out until it was actually sunny, Jason and I spent five hours intermittently, napping, reading or snacking, sprawling on deck with some cushions I had brought out to dry.

In that entire time there were only three occasions when I actually had to do anything at all: First when a tug and barge passed us soon after we had dropped the sails, and I slightly altered course to give him a wide berth; then later a large motoryacht passed us headed south, and I actually had to go all the way below to hail the on the VHF, but didn’t even have to alter course as he saw us and considerately went around; he final activity during this time was when we decided around noon or 1:00pm to keep going past Meyer’s Chuck (though the thought of fresh sticky buns called for us like the sirens song of Odysseus) and rounded Lemesurier Point, after which we had an uninterrupted 3 hours before the wind picked up once more.

Well into Ernest Sound, and only about 15nm from our destination, the wind picked up to 10 knots from the west, which was what the forecast had predicted for the entire day (nice job, NOAA, just a bit late), so we raised the sails and were able to have some nice sailing for a few hours in the day at least. The really great part of the day, though came at the very end, actually as we were rounding the point into our revised destination of Santa Anna Inlet, in the form of a pair of Dahl’s Porpoise who rode our bow for about half and hour, most of which I spent on my belly hanging over the bow with my Gopro on a stick, but even so, it was pretty amazing to watch them play, shooting across the bow, diving deep and powering up past us to ride the pressure wave, these intelligent creatures are, in my opinion, some of the most amazing in the animal kingdom. (And I think Douglas Adams got it right when he said, “on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.”  -The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy P. 133)

Eventually, however, the porpoises got bored of their little game, and shot off to the north, while we turned into the long, narrow, and dramatic Santa Anna Inlet, going all the way to the head, where we anchored in 9 fathoms over a muddy bottom with good holding. I had been very apprehensive about this anchoring, as we hadn’t anchored in anything much over 5 fathoms so far, and that with the experience of mom and/or dad to double-check the set and distances. However, my fears wee unfounded, and when I felt the anchor bite in and hold right where I had wanted it, with plenty of room an all sides, and no rocks or shelves to worry about, and after having Jason reversing the engine until I was confident that the anchor was set just right, I let out 200 feet of scope and started to pump up the dinghy.

The reason I was so eager to get ashore was that Jason and I had planned to play around with his drone some more in this very cool spot, but there wasn’t any way that Jason could feasibly take off or land from the boat, due to al of the rigging. Once we had landed the dinghy near some old rusted out boilers, we launched, and if anything, this flight was even more impressive than the yesterday’s.

We started out by taking some shots of the boat, and I was greatly impressed by some of the built-in programs on the drone. For instance, there was one that did an automatic loop around any given point, (the boat) with an adjustable radius, speed and altitude. After doing a couple of loops and a fly-by(also pre-programmed) en we took the drone “exploring”. Here I was impressed with the range and versatility of the drone, as Jason followed a river estuary up to a lake, going so far away that we couldn’t even see it, before bringing it back without even tripping the automatic safety homing that kicks in when the drone flies out of range of the control.

After messing around with the drone for about an hour, it started to run out of batter so we brought it back and did some exploring on foot. At first we were just checking out the boilers on the beach near were we had landed, when we noticed more stuff further into the woods, and after investigating that we followed a picturesque little creek up the mossy hillside where we crossed over to a larger creek and waterfall, and finally looped back to the boat along the beach. We concluded the day with a hearty spaghetti dinner, and went to sleep swinging to the first anchor that I had set without any kind of supervision in a bay all to ourselves, except for one fisherman who came in and anchored up inside of us around 8 or 9:00pm.