Desolation Sound

4/26/11

Stern tied to the cliffs at Tenedos Bay

We ended up staying the whole week at Campbell River.  It rained and was windy until Friday, so on Friday, having a bad case of cabin fever, I rented a car to drive up to Port Hardy to take a gander.  It was a surprisingly long drive, diving into the huge mountains.  Anyway, it made me decide that I much prefer exploration by boat rather than by car.  With the car, you just miss too many darn things. 

Tenedos Bay

I would have left Campbell River Saturday, but much to my amazement, the marine office was closed, so I couldn’t pay my bill.  I decided that I could get most of my projects done over the weekend as it was nice and sunny after the long rain.  I fixed the central locker door, pulled the transom hinged railcap that sits on top of the transom door, and reinforced it so that the door would be supported more from being pushed in with a large following seas.  I had to buy some teak sealer, varnish, sandpaper, etc. from the local chandlery/haulout facility in town, taking advantage of a “super-sale/boatshow” that they were having on Saturday – lots of reps there to show their product line and explain it.  It certainly reminded me of years past working in the marine industry.  And doing all of the sanding, filling and varnishing really reminded me of those countless hours laboring on the Siwash when I was the “guardian” of it in San Francisco Bay oh so many years ago.

With projects semi-done (more coats of varnish on the stern cap rail will be needed), we took off noon on Monday and had a wonderfully clear and generally windy sail across the Strait of Georgia to Tenedos Bay.  Check out this u-tube url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPS10A6xEPI

1-eye 1-horn flying purple people eater - sure is a sight to see!

Tenedos Bay, on the BC mainland, is now getting into the land of deep coves, high, snow-covered mountains that are close by, and lots of trees.  Someone once complained to me that Desolation Sound is too “dense” with lots and lots of trees - that would certainly describe it.  One of the problems with Desolation Sound is that for hiking, you need to have a good trail.  It’s pretty difficult to work your way through the unbelievably close packed trees without a trail. That might explain why Vancouver (the explorer) was constantly complaining about this area - he couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

Geese!  Wild life!

Tenedos Bay is a large,beautiful, very cliffy, and very deep – all the way to the shore.  This was the first time I got to anchor with my stern tied to shore by myself - my rope spool hanging off of my transom worked great!  I first figured out where I wanted to tie up, went away from the shore a little bit to launch the dinghy, then I got back to my spot, dropped the anchor (it was 60 feet where I dropped it at low tide), and I let out about 200’ of chain.  The wind was heading directly to the shore, so I didn’t even need to back the boat down; just let the forward anchor set and row the end of the stern line to the rocky shore.  While on shore, I had to be careful because a) it was steep and a little slippery, b) the rocks had a bunch of oysters sticking to it and I didn’t want to puncture my dinghy.  I have a nice pair of rubber boots to do this, so it all works out pretty well.

Predeaux Haven

Tenedos Bay (chart above) has 4 coves that you can anchor/stern tie up to…for expedience, I took the NW side, which proved to be just fine.  No other boats were there, too early in the season, but I understand that it can get quite crowded.  On the northeast side, there is a short trail that goes to a Lake Unwin, which I took.  The trail is fairly overgrown, but it did open out to the head of the lake, where there was a bunch of logs floating.  I couldn’t imagine swimming there, as advertised in some of the guides, but I believe there is a rough trail that goes along the north side of it, so that one can swim in the “warm water”.  Believe me, there is no warm water here now…I took the temp of the water – 48 degrees.  Desolation Sound is warm in the middle of summer at selected areas where there are not many currents, the waters are not flushed out and the sun actually warms them up. But, it’s certainly not warm now.  Anyway, I didn’t stay long on the lake…I must have been on some paranoid spell, because I kept seeing bears hiding behind all of the dense trees!  Next time I’m bringing my horn and toot it often!

Blue Bossa at Melanie Cove

The next morning, Blue Bossa went to Predeaux Haven (chart above), just around the corner.  This is all part of the “Desolation Sound Marine Park” consisting of a bunch of small islands and three anchorages, Melanie Cove the one that I went to and the next day to Laura Cove. It’s supposed to be the 3 most popular anchorages in Desolation Sound, and I do remember anchoring there years ago and really enjoying it, with the surrounding majestic, snow-capped mountains.  Back then, it was a lot more crowded (because it was summertime), but again, because I’m so early, there is nobody around…and I mean nobody!  It’s a wee bit disconcerting.

Looking south on Melanie Cove

Melanie Cove has an entryway with lots of rocks surrounding a very narrow and winding channel, and I was in the pilothouse watching my surroundings and looking at my computer/chart, when the hydraulic steering stopped working.  Eeek!  I went out to the cockpit, which has cable steering, and worked my way in from there, my computer held by my hand while I was doing it.  Shoot! I thought - another thing that needs to be fixed.  As soon as I put down anchor in Melanie Cove, I started dragging out the stuff in the cockpit lockers to get to the stern inside and try to figure out the problem.  As it turns out, it was simply a bolt that came unscrewed from the hydraulic tiller arm and I was able to put it all back together again.  Whew!

Linda Cove

After a leisurely lunch, I launched the kayak, put on my drysuit, and started exploring.  Actually put in a couple of miles, there’s so much to look at.  I went outside some of the islands, where it was slightly choppy, and the kayak handled very well. Saw lots of wildlife (NOT) - including WILD geese and a WILD orgy of purple starfish. The hard part came when I got back to the boat and worked, grunted, and sweated to get the drysuit off - the hitch is getting it off the shoulders.  I did manage to get it off without destroying anything or pulling any muscles. I can’t wait for the water to warm up so I don’t have to put on the suit.  Hmmm, probably would help if I didn’t wear a jacket inside the suit too…

Picnic table Canadian-style

I stayed in Predeaux Haven for a couple of nights, reading and working on the boat; then we set off to Roscoe Bay.  Roscoe is a beautiful long bay on West Redondo Island, another marine park, which can only be entered during high tide.  There is a rocky bar that stretches across the really narrow entryway, and it’s exposed during low tide.  I tried to take the dinghy across the bar, but no way…plus the current going out was really strong and I couldn’t row against it.  I ended up towing the dinghy while walking in the stream to get the dinghy back into the bay, tromping on the rocks and oysters that were there in my rubber boots, and my sweat pants pulled up to my thighs.  That had to look funny.  I would have been embarrassed if anyone was there, but, like every place else in Desolation Sound, there was nobody around.

1.  

Roscoe Bay

Watch out for the salmon!

Comment:  the Northwest has a definitive season for yachties: May to the end of September, and even May is pretty slow; most people don’t get out until June.  So if you want to cruise up here with absolutely no crowds, the time that I’m doing it is the best, even though the weather is pretty iffy and that all the nice resorts are closed down.

Roscoe Bay

Getting back to Roscoe, I rowed to shore at the head of the bay, where there was a picnic table and a nice clearing, and a trail that wound inland to Black Lake.  This lake was much more scenic and inviting than Urwin Lake over at Tenedos (the trail was well marked and went way beyond the usual clump of logs floating at the head of the lake).  The lake has a stream that runs down into Roscoe Bay, and apparently there are salmon that go up the stream.  Since it was more open and less “dense”, I didn’t feel paranoid about bears (I can see that I’m going to have a real problem in Alaska).

Black Lake up from Roscoe Bay

No, this is not a scene from "Deliverance" - it's Refuge Cove

The next day I upped anchor but wasn’t sure where I was going to.  My first stop was just around the other side of West Redondo Island to Refuge Cove, possibly to dock and pick up e-mail.  It was a very quaint co-op type of “village”, if you want to call it that, with some of the buildings definitely looking like old (read “rundown”) Northwestern-style…shacks, for any better word.  A nice old couple told me that everything was shut down (being it was Good Friday and all), so after taking a quick look around, we headed across Lewis Channel to Squirrel Cove on Cortes Island, only a couple of miles away.  There is a very small community, with a marina.  I docked the BB and walked over to the local store and purchased some drinks, and some plumbing fittings for my caput water heater.  There I was able to get on the internet and even made some calls on my cell phone because there was coverage as well.

Teakerne Arm Falls

Instead of staying there, I opted to going north in the intent to anchor at Teakerne Arm, which is a fiord famous for a nice waterfall.  Unfortunately, the wind was blowing hard from the west, making it not a good place to anchor, plus it was so deep right up to the shoreline, that I would have to put more than 200’ of chain out, and tie the stern up a few feet away from the cliff.  So I took some pics of the waterfall and left, intending to go directly to Octopus Islands.  But while I was heading north and looking at the guide books and charts, I figured out that I was going to have to go through “Hole-in-the-Wall” rapids to get to my destination.

Teakerne Arm - falls at the very end

Here’s the thing about this area of inner waterways of BC.  The current between tides in some passages that are narrow and have to squeeze a lot of water in a very short time are horrendously dangerous.  The current increases and produces hazardous tidal rapids, creating lots of whirlpools and bubbles, thereby decreasing the effectiveness of prop and rudder, and making your boat pretty much helpless to prevent crashing into rocks and overhanging cliffs. It’s not like you’re in a kayak where your paddle can hit deep and be nimble to avoid some of the rocks…and even if it hits a rock, it would bounce off, no harm done. With a boat, it would not be a pretty picture.  The best time to go through these areas is during slack water (the time when the currents are changing from flooding to ebbing or vice-versa). That’s when there’s no current.

And what made Hole-in-the-Wall particularly tough was that I had no current chart for that spot to time it during slack water so I didn’t know when slack water was.  I had a tide book for only selected areas in and around Desolation Sound made in the US.  I found (too late) that I needed a Canadian tide and current tables which had all of the slack water times for most of the problem passes.

Ouch!  Watch out for the rock! This one you can at least see...

So I changed my plan and instead of continuing north up Lewis Channel, I went around the north point of Cortes Island and headed south to Von Donop Inlet, also on Cortes Island to spend the night.  Like so many other places on Cortes Island, it had a narrow entry way and then a huge bay inside.  Because it was low tide and it gets shallow at the entrance, I went dead slow.  I was glad I did, because BB grazed off a rock with her lead keel causing a little shock in the boat.  Ooops!  Shortly after that little shock, it got deeper and I made it all the way to the very end of the bay and spent a very restful night with my anchor securely embedded in sticky mud (sticky mud is better than sand, as it often is mixed with clay – great holding, but a bear to wash off from the chain and anchor. Luckily I have a saltwater wash-down pump, which I can attach a hose and nozzle on the bow next to the windlass and wash down the chain and anchor while it’s being pulled up by the windlass – ahhh! such nice luxuries!)

Hamfrey Channel

My plan was to go through another narrows called Beazley Passage, which I did have on my current book, Since I had to be there at 10 in the morning in time for the slack water, I decided to leave the next day (Von Donop didn’t have enough things to keep me interested, and frankly, I was getting tired of completely enclosed anchorages – am I getting claustrophobic in my old age??) and headed further south to round the south point of Read Island and started to head north.  After another 5 miles, I anchored in a spot only a couple of miles from Beazley Passage called Hjorth Bay (how do you pronounce that - probably like Hjelte – a good Swedish name with the H's silent).  It protected BB against the current southerly wind.  Except for the point, it was all open…if a westerly or northwesterly came up, I would have to up-anchor and get out.  Luckily there was another cove up a little further north that protects against westerlies and northwesterlies, so I was covered. 

Boston Whaler in Santa Cruz Island anchorage

Comment: This is the kind of cruising that I’m used to – open roadsteads with no protection except one direction.  I can’t tell you how many times I and my son, in the middle of the night on Santa Cruz Island (during one of our surf-trips in one of my Boston Whalers), would wake up to heavy winds and sloppy seas on the nose in some little open cove in the middle of the night, have to up-anchor and look for protection elsewhere and hope we didn’t run into anything, as all you could see was a somewhat indistinct outline of the coast and the bright phosphorescent wake behind us zooming along at high speeds.

After anchoring, I did more projects on the boat (disconnecting the freshwater hoses to the broken water heater and joining them together…the water heater had been leaking badly, using up my precious fresh water; also putting another coat of varnish on the rail cap on the stern).

By now, I had just finished a book that I inherited from my Mom, the book being a gift from one of my parents friends while joining them up on their boat Compadre.  It was a collection of memoirs of adventures on a small 25’ wooden powerboat in the early 1930’s with a woman and…her five children!  Every summer, they would leave their Vancouver Island cottage (somewhere near Victoria, I think) and cruise as far north as Caution Point, just north of the top tip of Vancouver Island, in Queen Charlotte Strait.  The book is called “The Curve of Time” written by Muriel Wylie Blanchet in 1960.  In the book, she has stories of some of the characters that they visit in the Vancouver Island waterways, in a lot of the coves that I’ve been to…for example, Predeaux Haven had two coves – Laura Cove and Melanie Cove, both of them I have anchored in described earlier.  There were two old hermits that lived in each of those coves back then, and there were a lot of good stories about them and the wild life that they had to endure.  They also had a ton of adventures in areas that were isolated and that you had to be self-reliant to the max.  No radios, no EPIRBs, no GPS, just some charts, a pilot book and a compass.  There was even a chapter where her engine quit and she took it apart to fix the timing belt with only a minimum of tools in some bay far away from civilization.  She had an unusual take on the native culture, visiting many Indian burial grounds and old native villages.  Their adventures would deal a lot with animals in the wild and hard-core forces of nature, such as storms, and dealing with rapids.  She really reminded me of my grandad, who went all over southern California and Baja in Siwash with no engine, huge and unmanageable sails - this back in the 20’s.  There is something about that generation that really amazes me – people seemed so much hardier and took more chances.

Anyway, it’s a book that I would highly recommend, if you can find it – I’ve seen recent reprints of it in some book stores.

So on Monday, I left Hjorth Bay at about 10 and went through the notorious Beazely Passage – a cakewalk.  The slack water was timed just right.  No worries, except all of the other narrow passages that I still need to take.

Octopus Islands

Next stop was Octopus Islands.  There were two entrances of this bay surrounded by islands; one was difficult, the other was easy, but a little bit out of the way…I selected the easy one.  Normally if there was another person on board, he/she would be stationed at the bow, keeping a close eye for any wayward rocks, while the helmsmen would steer and watch the chart.  But, as a single-handed skipper, I have found it better to steer in the pilot house, as I’m much closer to the bow and have a better view all around – but I can still miss things (such as the rock dance at Roscoe Bay); so I try to avoid a too difficult entrance if possible and go really slow if I’m not sure.

The Octopus Islands were very beautiful and there were a ton of places to explore, but by the time I got there, it was raining very hard, so I elected to stay inside and start studying the charts more vigorously than I have been and plan. 

The Maze

Check this picture out and tell me if Desolation and Broughton Sounds are maze-like – I can’t believe how hard it must have been for Vancouver to actually map out this place!  It’s like seeing a delta, but, instead of having almost no elevation to the islands, the NW islands are at least 100s of feet high, all with thick forest on them.  If I didn’t have a GPS plus a chart plotter on it, I would have a much more difficult time trying to figure out where I was (in “The Curve of Time”, they were always getting lost and trying to figure out by chart where they are – it especially got dicey when it was foggy).  Needless to say, the charts that I would have would be heavily marked up.

I decided that I would go the 18 miles to Blind Channel Marina, where there is a store that has those tide charts that I needed.  So I left at 11 in heavy rain, ran through Upper and Lower Rapids (no problems with that) and finally joined up with Discovery Channel, which eventually became Johnston Strait, a definitive dividing point between it and Desolation Sound.  This is where the Broughtons start.

Blind Channel Resort - not a lot of boats around!

So here I am at Blind Channel Resort, which has a marina, a small store (yep, they did have the Canadian current book, so now I feel much better – I can shoot the rapids with no worries), showers, laundry and electricity.  I’m going to stay here two nights, do some work on BB, walk on some of the trails (the owner says bring a horn – heh! heh!) and then be on my way.  My goal is to get to Port Hardy in 2-3 weeks to pick up packages and fuel up for the next stage. 

Desolation Sound Course - hope you can follow it!

What my route to Port Hardy will look like remains to be seen.  So many choices!