Day 7


Today, Friday June 3rd, is the one-week and 271.3 nautical mile mark for the voyage of the Darwind, and despite being a Friday, it turned out to be a pretty good day. The major event was the passage of Yaculta and Dent rapids, which can run over 10 knots at full flood and can create whirlpools dozens of feet across. However, if you time it just right so that you can pass through at slack tide, they become benign and relatively safe.
            To make sure we arrived at the rapids well before slack and also to fill up our fuel, we left Bliss early in the morning and had some intermittent wind to Refuge Cove, a few miles north in Desolation Sound, where we arrived a bit early and so waited around and rested at the fuel dock for a few minuets before topping off the tanks and getting a few provisions for the next week. We also got one more five gallon jerry jug of gas, as there isn’t any gas in this area and we might be fighting some nasty currents through the narrow channels, besides the actual rapids, all of which eats up our meager supply.
            After leaving Refuge cove, we almost immediately picked up a 15 knot following breeze, that though it was gusty, pushed us through miles of narrow channels less than a mile across at speeds often exceeding six knots as we gybed back and forth across the channels between gusts, and sailing the whole time wing-on-wing, with the main and jib never on the same tack for over three hours! This kind of amazing sailing is extremely rare in these narrow channels where light winds or headwinds are the norm, and it felt so amazing to be flying down channel at hull speed, with sheer, thickly wooded mountainsides rising thousands of feet into the sky straight from the water only a few hundred yards either side of us.
            As we neared the rapids and exited Lewis channel into a junction of three or four channels and islands, the wind died down and we had to motor the last mile or so to the rapids. Due to the unexpected fast sailing earlier in the day, we arrived almost three hours early for the 4:30pm slack at Dent, so we tooled around for a while before heading over to a small bay with another sailboat anchored up. When we got there, it looked like the anchoring wasn’t really that great except for right where the other boat was, and we were about to leave and just motor around in circles, when the owners of the other boat called from shore that we could raft up with them if we wanted. Thus we met the crew of Muse, a Canadian boat also bound for Alaska.
            At 3:30pm, we both left the little bay and headed out into the rapids behind another sailboat and a couple of bigger mega-yachts. For the first rapids at Yaculta, we purposefully hit about an hour ahead of slack and so were bucking a 3 knot current at some points and passed by a couple of small whirlpools around a yard or two across, one with a 6-foot log swirling around in it. After we passed Yaculta, we headed through the second rapids at Gillard Passage about five minuets before slack, and finally, at Dent rapids we passed right over the ominously named “Devil’s Hole” just as the tide was starting to turn in our favor and push us out the other end.
            Once through the rapids, it was only an hour or two to Bickley Bay,  where we anchored in a secluded anchorage with only Muse as company. This was our first completely uninhabited stop on this voyage, and it was great to be able to listen to the birds and the quiet for a change. We also met back up with Muse to exchange contact info, and after a nice chat on the beach, I headed over to their boat in the dinghy to help Robert untangle a few thousand feet of longline he had found on a beach, and ended up coming back to the Darwind with at least 500 feet of line to be used as a stern tie in tight anchorages or other smaller projects around the boat.
            We went to sleep in Bickley bay knowing that for the first time in over two weeks we would finally be able to sleep in and not be leaving as soon as humanly possible.
Provisioning at Refuge Cove

Through the rapids

Anchored up at Bickley

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