Day 6

Today was a day of variables, both in terms of weather, and just in general. It started out with a cold early morning drizzle in Pender harbor as we left, and even before leaving the bay and heading out into Malaspina straits, the usual morning petty disputes between mom and I had escalated into a full scale row, with threats of mutiny and sulking at either end of the boat, myself at the helm and mom in the V-berth, with Carmen in the main cabin separating us. This boded ill for the voyage, as never being more than 28 feet apart at the very most, and forced to live in the same room day in and day out for the next week or more did not seem very pleasant. However, by around 11:00am, the sun came up, and with the help of some Jimmy Buffet (Changes in Latitudes Changes in Attitudes was especially appropriate) and the wind off the port beam we soon made up and enjoyed the sailing.

Just like our moods, the wind started out pretty wishy-washy as well, sometimes gusting up past 20 knots for 10 minuets, only to drop back to 10 knots as soon as we started to reduce sail. As a result we ended up dropping the jib altogether and sailing under the main alone. I was against this at first, as usually without a steadying jib up forward boats will develop quite a bit of weather helm, or resistance on the tiller, but Darwind seemed note to care one ay or the other, and maintained her usual balanced helm so that I could leave the tiller to walk up to the foredeck and back without the boat straying off course more than five or ten degrees. This trick turned out to be extremely useful later in the day.

After we cleared Malaspina straight and had some slightly more open water, the wind swung around and came back from the southeast, or dead astern, beginning to rise steadily starting around 10 knots. What followed was a series of increasingly fast reaches and runs all day until around 3:00pm, when the wind had increased to well over 20 knots from astern and we were making 5.5-6 knots with only the single-reefed main up, and looking back on it we probably should have put the second reef in about this time, but we were having too much fun surfing the boat downwind and trying to catch a larger boat that had overtaken us over the past few hours. Unfortunately, they continued to gain, and by the time we were up to the Copeland Islands, our destination, we had way too much sail up and had to do three or four chicken gybes in the narrow channel before we eventually just dropped the main and started the engine. (A chicken gybe is when you do a full circle, turning the boat all the way into the wind and onto the other tack in order to avoid the boom slamming across the boat)

We motored around in the Copelands for a bit, but the wind was still blowing straight through them, and all of our books said that there was poor holding and little shelter from the southeast anywhere in the islands, so we kept going another mile or two to Bliss Harbor, where we ended up staying the night because we were the inly transient boat on the docks, and free Wi-Fi and unlimited hot showers could not be passed up. This turned out to be a good decision as the location and facilities were amazing. As for the wildlife, we saw a small garter snake and a family of Canadian geese with a dozen very young chicks, and the couple running the marina told us that there was a cougar in the area that sometimes came down into the little settlement.

Flying along at 6 knots in the wind and sun!