Day 16

Today was one of the best days in terms of both mileage made good, and in sailing. We left the Walker islands at 5:00am in order to catch the currents and wind just right, and as a result spent the first few minutes motoring, but as the sun rose the wind started to pick up, but from the east, exactly opposite of the west-southwest winds forecasted only that morning. Thus, it was warily that dad and I raised the #2 jib and full main, and killed the engine as we started to run off the wind at around 4 knots. By this time the engine was raised up and secured, and was not to touch the water for another 11 hours.

            As we left Queen Charlotte strait and entered the sound, open to the Pacific Ocean, to the west, we started to feel a large ground swell running opposite of the east wind, which made for some interesting motion to say the least. Also as we entered the open water, the wind gradually picked up until we were beam reaching under nothing but a double-reefed main across wind gusting well over 30 knots, with sustained boat speeds of over 6 knots. Needless to say, it was some extremely exhilarating sailing, but dad and I had to take shorter watches to deal with the hard work at the tiller, and as we were always on the same tack, our right arms soon became sore and tired from constantly straining against the forces imposed on the tiller by such fast sailing. Despite the hard work, it was still an amazing ride and by 9:00am we were rounding cape caution and bearing off even more, with the result that the ride smoothed down a bit and the weather helm was much less, thou we were still making 5.5-6 knots easily.

            As the day wore on and our speed failed to diminish, we kept moving our destination farther and farther ahead as we raced past each successive bay, not wanting to waste one second of this amazing and surprising wind. As we entered Fitz Hugh sound, what was left of swell was forced to wrap around the point to came directly behind us, as was the wind, and as if we weren’t already going fat enough we had a 1 knot push the whole way, with the ebb pushing us out to Cape caution, and the flood carrying us back into Fitz Hugh.

In Fitz Hugh, the sky which was overcast for most of the day, dropped down to sea level in big banks of fog and rain, during the worst of which we couldn’t see the shore either side of us and had the eerie sight of a cruise ship suddenly materializing as if out of thin air then slowly fading away as it passed about half a mile away.

For the ret of the day, the wind maintained a steady 15-20 knots from either astern or the beam, and under full main and jib, we steadily ate up the miles northward. The only time we had to use the engine was when the wind died for about a mile where there was a confluence of two channels, which surprised us, as usually this means stronger winds. However, after a few minutes the wind picked back up and we sailed the last few miles to Kiltik Cove, where we anchored in a tiny nook that was absolutely flat calm, without even a hint of wind to ruffle the surface. In total we made 63 nautical miles over a period of 13 hours, an average speed of almost five knots, truly an amazing feat for a boat of this size.