12/8/10
Park Bay "serenity Now!" |
Looking out from Park Bay |
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.
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!
Park Bay is where my old friend Alan Shanks and I collected crab larvae back in 1985. We published a paper on it.
ReplyDeleteWhats the water temp?
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