Vancouver-Neah Bay, the last fo the Inside Passage

Vancouver:

            The second major destination of the trip, after Sitka was Vancouver, which symbolically represented the end of the inside passage for me, even though there remained a couple of hundred actual miles to go before the Pacific Ocean. As if to highlight this transition, I happened to arrive in Vancouver during a hot flash with temperatures in the high 70-80’s for a whole week! The water was also unbelievably warm, and I started every day with a dive off the dodger and a quick swim around the boat. Mainly I rested that week, reveling in the warmth after a seemingly endless ordeal of rain and cold in northern BC, and enjoying the change of pace and delicious cuisine of the big city.

            Even more fun was that I got to hang out with my good friend Brooke, who is going to Simon and Fraser University in Vancouver, and we were able to spend a weekend going for a day sail and visiting the aquarium. These interactions were especially beneficial to my mental state, as this was the first time in a month I was able to talk to someone my own age about normal things, not only about boats and sailing!

            As fun as all that was, after a week I was starting to feel strange being in one place for so long, and the concrete jungle was starting to wear down on my nerves; however beautiful Vancouver is, its still a city and can never compare to the pristine wilderness I had just spent a month completely immersed in. So I pulled up the anchor and left, headed towards the Gulf islands then Victoria, and as soon as the anchor was up and we were moving – even though there was no wind and it was a full day of motoring – it felt so good to be underway. That night, I dropped the hook in a tiny cove on an uninhabited island, where I immediately went ashore and disappeared into the thick, old growth woods for several hours. When I got back to the boat I made a huge pot of spaghetti and fell into the best sleep I had had for a long time.

anchored off downtown Vancouver

Victoria:

            Waking up the next morning, I had the anchor on deck when I realized that one of the boats I shared the anchorage with was having trouble getting their anchor up, and the skipper of the third boat was trying to help. As it was only a short run over to victoria, I decided to go see if I could help, so I threw a few fenders over the side and rafted up to the boat in trouble. It turned out that they had anchored a bit too close to the mooring block of the small dinghy dock in the cove and had gotten the chain immovably wrapped around it. My first thought, with abnormally warm Vancouver in mind, was to jump in and free the anchor, but after failing to find a mask and snorkel, feeling the chilly morning air, and the even chillier water, I concurred with the two skippers (who had been looking at me like I was crazy from the moment I suggested jumping in the water) and instead merely lent my hand at using some bolt cutters to sever the chain and abandon the anchor.

            As soon as the anchor was free, I cut loose and continued on towards victoria, only to be nearly stopped dead by a brisk headwind and strong countercurrent in boundary pass, but at least today I was sailing again instead of motoring. Eventually I arrived at Cadboro bay on the outskirts of Victoria and dropped the hook that evening just before sunset.

            The next day I got in contact with Noah, another friend from school, and he showed me around the University of Victoria campus and we made arrangements for him and his friend to come for a short sail the next day. Unfortunately there was absolutely no wind that day, but we still had some fun ghosting around the bay in the zephyrs. After that I spent a few more lazy days in at anchor, took a bus in to the beautiful victorian downtown, and walked the docks at the yacht club, where I happened to meet none other than Jeanne Socrates, who had just a week before completed a solo nonstop circumnavigation of the globe at the age of 78, making her the oldest human to complete the ultimate voyage. As much as I loved Victoria – much more so than Vancouver – it was time to be moving on before winter storms made the Washington and Oregon coasts all but impassable.

in the gulf islands

Port Townsend:

            After a long mostly-motoring crossing of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I arrived at the picturesque town of  Port Townsend, where I dropped the anchor in the large exposed bay off the Victorian waterfront. On the second day after arriving, I longboarded across the town to do laundry and say hi to Dana, an old family friend now living there, and she even lent me her car to go down to Seattle and pick up the new life raft the next day.

            Of course the morning I planned to leave the boat to go to Seattle, it was blowing around 30 knots onshore, so I had the pleasant experience of trying to get the anchor up in that–a task which took almost 2 hours–and motor over to the marina where I could leave the boat tied up to the dock without constantly worrying about the anchor dragging. After a bit of a trial getting the boat tied up, which involved overshooting the dock and having to motor in full reverse in order to make it back upwind, I was content, and set out for the first drive I had taken in almost two months.

            After a two-hour drive and short ferry ride, I was in Seattle, where I experienced the hell of trying to find a downtown parking space in a large city, then met up with Kalissa, another friend from school, who was living in the city. After a few hours hanging out and catching up, she went to work, and I went to go pick up my new life raft, which was much heavier, making me infinitely grateful that this time I wouldn’t have to break my back trying to lug it on buses and public transportation all the way back to Port Townsend.

            The next few days I spent not doing much except walking the docks, which to a sailor were like a fine art gallery, as Port Townsend is known as the center for classic wooden boats on the West Coast, and not doing much while I waited for a decent window to get down Juan de Fuca to the Pacific.

Port Angeles

Having left Port Townsend, I was immediately thrown into some of the most frustrating sailing conditions I have ever experienced. The wind simply would not settle down, constantly changing direction and force–although the direction was always more or less a headwind–so that at one point I clocked 17 sail changes in just two hours! In that 12-hour day, I only managed to scrape my way 30 nm to Port Angeles, where I anchored off what I later found out were free city docks. I only spent one night there, but I did meet the crew of the Mamaku, a Canadian/New Zealander boat heading south from victoria, and we made plans to meet again in Neah Bay, our next stop and the last one before the open Pacific.

Neah Bay

            The next day was calm, but I needed to get to Neah bay to be in position for the next favorable weather window to sail down the coast, so I settled in for a long, 10-hour motor down the straight. This would have been a completely uneventful trip, except that around midday when I jumped below to make a sandwich for lunch, I felt a sunned deceleration then a sickening crack from the stern and I immediately jumped up on deck to see that we had ran directly into a huge clump of kelp, and that the paddle for the wind vane, which I had left down in hopes that the wind might pick up enough to use it, was trailing behind the boat on the end of its tether.

            This was the first major breakage of the voyage, yet compared to how frustrated and petty I had become when faced with contrary wind and current the day before, I surprised myself in how calmly I addressed the situation, so that before I even arrived at Neah Bay I had called several machine shops in port Angeles and found one who could probably fix the piece or fabricate a replacement, and I even enjoyed sighting a small sunfish feeding near the surface and the last few minutes in which I sailed into the bay in the light breeze that finally filled in.

            That evening I went ashore for fish and chips with Harry, Sarah, Jaunty, and Don of the Mamaku, then later went to their boat to celebrate Don’s birthday with a home-baked cake and drinks. We spent the night discussing plans for the best time and route to head down the coast, solutions to my wind-vane problem, and celestial navigation, as well as swapping the usual stories about previous voyages. We became quick friends, and decided that we would try and met up again further south, as our routes were almost identical; Harry and Sarah returning to their home in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand via the same route that I planned to take across the Pacific.

            The next morning I was up early and took the first bus from Neah Bay to Port Angeles, where I brought the broken part to the machine shop and they said they could have it done by the next day. I returned to the boat, explore the massive breakwater that encloses Neah Bay with the crew of Mamaku, then said goodbye, as they planned to leave early the next morning to take advantage of the tail end of a passing northerly gale. In the morning I took the same early bus to Port Angeles, got y reconstituted part, then was back n the boat and off the anchor by 4:30 pm, headed out to the open ocean and long offshore days for the first time since leaving Alaska.

the broken part

good as new