day 48 (8/05)

Today, mom and I woke up after a very good night's sleep in the inner basin of Chance Cove, a blessing after the turmoil of the day before, and by 7:30am we were underway. The ebbing tide, which had fought us on the way in, sucked us right out and shot us through the narrows of McArthur pass into the open waters of the Southern Kenai Peninsula, where contrary to the weather reports on the radio and texted to the inReach by dad, it was flat calm, with no more than a glassy swell from the south, all shrouded in heavy fog. Not wanting to waste this luck, I decided to head southwest, straight for Gore Point, and out into the open water instead of tucking in behind Nuka island and taking the Nuka passage west then south. This route cut off at least five nautical miles, and turned out to be a wise decision, because when the wind did come, it blew 20 knots right down the mouth of the rocky Nuka passage, which we would have had a rough time beating out of if we had tried to take the more sheltered passage.
As it was, we ended up flying dead before a 20 knot breeze and some reasonably sized seas, though thankfully much more regular than yesterdays. We flew past the ominous Gore, point, a serpentine claw of jagged rock jutting out to tear at the waves, making over 5 knots of boatspeed under a full main and the ever-present #2 jib. As it was only 12:30 as we rounded the point, and our destination of Sunday Harbor was tucked just a mile behind it, I decided to press on the the next good anchorage, Qikutulig(Q) Bay, 15 nautical miles farther west. We were of the entrance in two hours, where I dropped the #2 and jibed around to reach passed the menacing sentinel reefs into the calm waters of the bay, Darwind shooting through the gap like a well-aimed arrow. Q bay is for the most part open, aside from the sheltering reefs, and there was quite a lot of wind until we were well up into the very head, where I anchored among a small archipelago of rocky islets, each with one or two scraggly spruce overhanging the water.
This bay was an amazing place, not only as an anchorage, of which it was superb specimen, and the setting was jawdropping, but the most surreal thing was that this was the first real anchorage of my trip on Northern Passage, and it seemed fitting that it was to be the last before the completion of this voyage. I remembered exploring the islets and caves in the dinghy back when I was twelve, and looking around now I realized how far I had come to drop anchor in this bay, with a name I still can't pronounce, once again, this time having earned every mile as skipper of my own boat.