Park Bay, Shaw Island and West Sound, Orcas Island

12/8/10

Park Bay "serenity Now!"

Looking out from Park Bay

This last weekend, I decided I needed a break from Friday Harbor.  I zipped across the San Juan channel to Park Bay, which is on the western side of Shaw Island.  It is a scenically beautiful bay, usually very quiet.  I think it’s mostly quiet because the land around it is owned by the Washington Biological Preserve; ie: no trespassing.  That’s kind of a drag as the landscape invites one to go ashore and walk around.  Despite that, the quiet is a nice respite from the relative noise of Friday Harbor, it’s only 3 miles away, and it’s well protected except from winds from the north.  I spent a very quiet day and night doing a lot of reading and fiddling around with the boat.

For those who have never been boat owners, fiddling around a boat is doing whatever to make the boat run better, or make it more comfortable.  In my case, I decided to learn new navigational software that I had just installed on my Mac.  Only until a couple of years ago, if you wanted to do navigation on your computer, you had to own a PC.  Now, with MacENC software and it’s ability to read Navionics charts, I now have all the capabilities of navigation all the way to Glacier Bay in Alaska. 

Not to say that I’m going to totally rely on that – I will also need to pick up paper charts too.  That can get really expensive, and, in fact, Canada stipulates that you need paper charts all the way up the inland passageway, which is at least 30 charts; at $20 a pop equals $600.  But I heard that there’s a book store in Sydney, on Vancouver Island, that has used charts that sell for considerably less, so I am planning next week to journey to Sydney for a couple of days, stopping by hopefully this weekend at Stuart Island, which looks very promising for exploration.  Hope I can find a good weather window.

Pole Pass

Anyway, getting back to my previous outing, I left Shaw Island the next morning and weaved my way around the Wasp Islands, poked my way up to Deer Harbor to look around, then headed southeast to go through Pole Pass.  This was not planned. I had not looked at any tide charts. But my timing was lucky.  There were no strong currents. so this notable "problem pass" was crossed without any problems.  

 After that, I headed east until I got to West Sound, and headed up, meaning to go to West Sound Village.  The hills behind West Sound Village dip down a bit which allowed a strong and cold NE wind to pipe through.  There didn’t seem to be any anchorages around there and I didn’t want to tie up to the docks, so I went NW, further up the sound, going by "Victim Island", working my way up into "Massacre Bay", and anchoring next to  “Skull Island”. Apparently there had been bloody Indian encounters on Orcas Island, way in the past, with Northern Indian tribes raiding the Lummis Indian Tribe in West Sound.  

Wasp Passage

I spent a couple of hours there exploring in the kayak.  Maybe I was psyched out with it's grisly history, but I decided I didn’t like the anchorage very well and headed back to Friday Harbor.  During that trip, I got to experience another “problem pass” by navigating through the Wasp passage before heading south to Friday Harbor.

I have to correct a mistake on my last blog.  The island that sits across Friday Harbor is Brown Island, not Bear Island.  Oh boy!  What was I smoking?  No wonder I didn’t see any bears!