Home ::  Newsletter

West Coast Cruising
Starring: Jan and Don Cosby
Jim and Sue Masters
by

Click here to see Week One

About the Authors: Jan and Don Cosby have spent 30 years boating, four of which were spent living aboard a steel Bruce Roberts designed Spray 36. They have cruised the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Caribbean, and are about to embark on another adventure. This summer, starting in late July, they spent five weeks taking a 36’ Sabreline trawler one way from Bellingham, WA, to Juneau, AK. Since they are sailors by tradition, both the type of boat and the cruising area make for a completely new experience.

Jan has worked at Bluewater Books and Charts for 13 years now, in the chart department and behind the scenes. She provides the expertise behind Bluewater’s help e-mail system, so chances are good that anybody who has ever e-mailed Bluewater for any reason has heard from Jan.

Jim and Sue Masters are longtime friends of Jan and Don. The two couples met in 1968 at Purdue University in Indiana, and they have cruised together all over the world. Jim and Sue sailed with the Cosbys in Hawaii, the Caribbean, the Bahamas, and on the Great Circle. The Masters currently live in Centralia, WA, and own a 21’ fishing boat. They spend a great deal of time fishing in the Strait of Juan De Fuca.

This is the fourth installment of a series outlining the preparation for and completion of the trip. For others, please see our July and subsequent newsletters. Jan and Don are back in Ft. Lauderdale, and Jan was sorely missed at Bluewater. Please call Bluewater Books and Charts if you are planning a similar voyage, or if you need advice on charts and guides for any part of the world.

THE INSIDE PASSAGE: WEEK TWO

Beyond Vancouver Island is the dreaded Queen Charlotte Sound, which is completely open to the nasty old North Pacific. But we were lucky. Except for a 3-foot wallowy swell it was almost flat calm and we were able to turn the corner at Cape Caution and make it easily to the protection of Pruth Bay at the upper end of Calvert Island. This also allowed us to make up for a day we had lost because of stinky weather in the Straits of Georgia.

Saturday, July 30 was a scheduled "lay day." Translation: "lazy day." And Jim and Sue were up for galley duty. But we had pushed hard for the previous two days to take advantage of the weather, so the break was appreciated by all. We stayed in Pruth Bay, relaxed, read a lot, and did some maintenance on the boat. In the process we encountered a couple of more big ripples in the learning curve. First, we discovered, to our shock, that the heads in the boat were being flushed with fresh water! Now we knew where all the water was going! As far as we knew, all boats use saltwater for the toilets, and that means using a whole lot of saltwater to completely flush out all your uric acid to avoid hose-choking calcium build-up. Thinking we were being good boaters, we had used up lots of our 300 gallon stock of fresh water this manner. We shifted our mindset from "Niagara flush" to "teacup flush" and another potential problem was headed off.

We make it a practice to go down in the engine room every day before starting the engines to check the belts, engine oil, coolant, etc. Since we had the time, we decided to do a careful check of the batteries. Some of the house batteries were not nearly full, (tsk! tsk!), so we topped them up with distilled water and moved on to the starting batteries. When we unscrewed the boards above them we were appalled to find the cable terminals and battery posts so badly corroded that they were buried beneath a "yellow snow" mound of oxidized metal. We dissolved that mess with diet coke and cleaned them up, thereby heading off yet another potential problem.

A rowdy weather front moved in from offshore during the late afternoon, bringing us strong winds from the south. The channel we were anchored in was not only deep, but it was relatively narrow and ran east to west, so our swinging room was limited. In hindsight, it would have been prudent to drop a second anchor when we heard the forecast. We thought the steep hills around our anchorage would provide better protection from the wind than they did. After dark (of course) the wind was gusting so hard from the south it was causing our anchor chain to lift off the bottom, taking the natural curve out of it. This put us uncomfortably close to the north shore. For about half an hour during the worst of it we had the engines running in case the anchor dragged. The wind subsided somewhat later in the evening, but enough squalls kept blowing through to require an all-night anchor watch. It was too dark and rainy to see anything very well, so we left the chart plotter turned on and monitored our position via GPS on the electronic chart display. It didn’t boost our confidence when a large yacht that was anchored nearby dragged their anchor and had to leave the anchorage in the middle of it all. Our anchor had been set well, so we had no problem, but this was one of those times when we would have been a lot happier tied spider-web-style to six fat poles in a marina. It doesn’t help that Sunny Sue has an enclosed fly bridge which adds significantly to the wind resistance of the boat. Trawlers have a lot of surface area to begin with.

SUNDAY, July 31. Rain and then some. All day and all night. Might as well go fishing. At 9 we headed back up Fitz Hugh Sound and Jan drove the boat while we tried trolling in Hakai Pass for a couple of hours. Not much luck there. Jim hooked a small salmon and lost it. Don fished a little but napped most of the day to catch up from the anchor watch. It rained even harder in the afternoon so we all moved inside. The clouds were almost on the deck and it was so messy we turned the radar on to improve our visibility. We were wet by now ourselves, so naturally all the windows steamed up. We had little fans to help keep the windows clear, but wiping them every couple of minutes with a spare wiper blade worked best. This part of the trip was along the cruise ship route, so it was important to know what was around. As the old sailors say, "A collision at sea can ruin your whole day!". And a collision with a 900-ft cruise ship would do a very good job of it. Sure enough, as if on cue, a big cruise ship slid by.

It is also extremely important that the helmsman keep a sharp lookout for floating logs, kelp, and other debris in the water, which was plentiful. By now we were pretty far away from any shipyard, so we did not want to wipe out a propeller on a log or a deadhead. A deadhead is a log, with who knows how many branches, that has soaked up enough water for one end to sink, leaving only a short fat stump showing above the surface. Meanwhile, there may be as much as 50 ft, or even more, hanging straight down. Hitting one of those can also ruin your whole day. Deadheads are so dangerous their positions are routinely reported on the VHF radio when they are spotted. Light, high-floating debris will simply slide off to the side in the bow wave. But a deadhead is heavy and it can dip right under your bow while the lower part of it is levered right into your prop. Unlike many trawlers, Sunny Sue has no protection for the props and both of them are mounted low down and out away from the hull, making us vulnerable to damage deposit loss. ($4k in our case). We kept our eyes open!

We motored on up into Fisher Channel, which runs up between Hunter Island and King Island, and anchored for the night in Codville Lagoon. This was probably a very pretty place but we could not see much of it through the murk. It was not a stellar day. But progress was made and a good time was had by all. Even with the lousy weather, it was, after all, part of the big adventure!

Sue topped off a great dinner with chocolate cake layered with chocolate yogurt and garnished with walnuts and whipped cream. Then we listened to "oldies" CDs and played cards. Jan and Jim tied for first in a marathon game of "Oh, Hell".

MONDAY, August 1. More rain. We motored across Fisher Channel and took Lama Passage across the top of Hunter Island. On the way we got a thrill - our first whale sighting! We got some pictures of it as it surfaced and blew, but none clear enough for Jim, ever the scientist, to be certain what kind it was. The rest of us looked in the nature books we had, looked at the pictures again, and immediately declared it to be a humpback whale. Lacking DNA test results, Jim remains for now, and apparently forever, unconvinced.

We turned north, continuing on Lama Passage, made a right turn at New Bella Bella on Campbell Island, and entered the harbor at Shearwater on Denny Island. This was our first stop with a laundromat, and there was also a grocery store, ice, fuel, and even a restaurant! We went to the fuel dock and were offered brown water to fill our tanks. The water was probably fine, just colored by natural tannin, but the women turned up their noses. There was no room at the dock for that night anyway, so after fuelling up we motored across to New Bella Bella to fill up the water tanks with nice clear water from their new treatment plant, got rid of a small mountain of trash, then came back to Shearwater to anchor in the harbor.

We decided that, since we were past the big water of Queen Charlotte Sound, it was about time we put down the dinghy. Once we had it in the water the Nissan outboard started right up and Don was suddenly in the ferry business. His first run was for party ice for happy hour. The temptation to dine ashore was powerful, but we resisted.

TUESDAY, August 2. Breakfast was a great meal in the restaurant overlooking the harbor. Then it was laundry time and food shopping time and shower time. The showers went two minutes for one Canadian "Loony" ($1 coin). Jan took a two-Loony shower. Jim and Sue went in together for what must have been a 12 or 15-Loony shower. Don spent the morning ferrying laundry, food, ice, and people back and forth.

The sun was coming out bright and warm and burning off the last of the morning fog when we hauled up the anchor. We basked in the sun as we headed up Lama Passage past Dryad Point Lighthouse and into Seaforth Channel. The water was very flat and we could see the Queen Charlotte Islands off in the distance to the west. Then we turned north into scenic Reed Passage. When we reached our planned stop at Oliver Cove it was only 2:45 so we kept going. Next we crossed over to Mathieson Channel via Percival Narrows. The current was strong in the Narrows so we had to briefly rev up the engines to get through it.

Canadian Weather was forecasting another gale in Queen Charlotte Sound for the night and the following morning, so we stopped in at Rescue Bay to drop the hook. To be on the safe side, and also for the practice, we dropped our second anchor - a 45-lb claw with a 300-ft-long one-inch rode - giving us a spread facing the southwest. We dropped the crab pot near the entrance to the harbor, but we didn’t have any attractive smelly bait, so we didn’t get any crabs.

WEDNESDAY, August 3. The gale we prepared for never came. It must have passed by to the south of us. Our winds were light and variable, which made the boat spin around constantly, back and forth. We thought our two anchor lines would be a twisted mess. But the rope was only wrapped around the chain once, so we quickly got everything secured and headed up Mathieson Channel. The weather was great and this was a particularly beautiful part of the trip. There was a waterfall dropping almost vertically down the mountainside on the east side of the channel, so we took the boat right to the base of it and took some pictures. As usual, there was no way to get the full beauty of it in through a camera lens.

Further north we poked our nose into Kynoch Inlet to photograph an even more spectacular (and noisy!) waterfall there. We all love waterfalls, and at this point we had no idea how many of them we would see before this trip was done.

At the head of Mathieson Channel we took Sheep Passage west past the north end of Pooley and Roderick Islands to Hiekish Narrows. It was getting cooler and windier and beginning to drizzle. The guys were trying to be macho so they were bundled up and toughing it out on the fly bridge. The women were being sensible and were curled up with books in the main salon. At Graham Reach we rejoined the cruise ship route and motored about another hour north to Swanson Bay, which was supposed to be a good anchorage with plenty of shallow water to anchor in. We poked around for most of an hour, but our depth sounder did not show any shallow water except very close to shore. Don had the bright idea of dropping the anchor off the bow in deep water and taking a stern line to shore with the dinghy. Dropping the anchor was easy enough and it set fine, but the currents and the breeze in the bay drove Don crazy as he struggled with the dinghy to keep the stern pulled around so the line would reach shore. The shore was all rocks, which made it almost impossible to land the dinghy. And the rocks, exposed as they were at low tide, were covered with all manner of slimy marine life, which made them amazingly slippery to walk on. After a great deal of fumbling, stumbling, and mumbling, Don finally got the stern line tied to a big rock, but the whole operation took over an hour, and it must have looked like a skit out of a Benny Hill show. Also, it was not the safest (smartest?) thing in the world to be doing so many hours from an emergency room.

There was a fairly large stream running into the bay, and Jim, avid fisherman that he is, was keen to try his luck. He tied on this new, really bizarre-looking lure that had been recommended to him, but that he had never tried before. He cast it out just to get the feel of it and to see how he should fish it. His rod was almost jerked out of his hands. To say he was not ready for that strike would be an understatement! Line was stripping off his reel and he began barking orders about getting things out of the way and getting the net and his club ready. The fish was running all around and under the stern of the boat and we were sure it would get the line tangled in the props or the dinghy or the rudders. Finally it got tired and we got it in the net and on board so Jim could bonk it on the head. It was a beautiful King Salmon which must have weighed close to 30 pounds.

THURSDAY, August 4. Our next adventure was to try out one of the many hot springs that dot the coast. But first we had to negotiate a couple of more bumps on the learning curve.

When we did our engine room check, drive belt for the raw water pump on the starboard engine was loose. That would have been no problem, except it appeared to be impossible to get a wrench on the adjustment bolt to turn it, and the bolt could only be felt, not seen. We needed a 17mm socket. We had almost every other size socket on board. No 17mm. In typical male fashion Don and Jim harrumphed and scratched and fussed around until Jim suggested that Don try a wrench on the bolt on the other engine, which they could see, and perhaps learn from that how to do it. Brilliant! What seemed impossible became easier and, with much cursing, got done. Don vowed to buy a 17mm socket somewhere!

But now the chart plotter would not turn on and we feared the worst. We thought the plotter was shot. We could do without the electronic charts and everything else temporarily, but when you need radar, which can be at any time in this land of barge tows, purse seiners, and cruise ships, you must have radar. But Don’s multi-meter showed low voltage on that circuit but nowhere else. For a while he was stumped, but then he went into the back of the switch panel and started tugging on the wires and Voila! One wire almost fell right off. When he screwed it down tight everything worked! "Aha", said Jim. "Aha", said Don. "Hurray", said the girls. And we went to the hot springs.

The hot springs were in Bishop Cove, which is up Ursula Channel off Fraiser Reach. Along the way we passed the old abandoned salmon cannery at Butedale which was rotting and beginning to fall into the water, and which made an interesting photograph. Note the trees growing on the roof of the adjacent building.

There was a small dock to tie to at the Bishop Hot Springs. That and the house over the springs were provided courtesy of the local Indian tribe. It had been cool and rainy all day, so it was a real treat to soak and suds up in the 102 deg F water. Dinner was, of course, fresh salmon steaks cooked on the grill. Cordon Bleu chefs eat your hearts out!

FRIDAY, August 5. When we returned from a leisurely walk ashore there was a whale blowing out in the bay. So we quickly fired up the engines and began to follow it as it made his way out of the bay. It was not bothered by us, and it thrilled us by surfacing and blowing several times just off our bow. We finally lost it, (or it lost us) so we turned into Ursula Channel and headed north again. It stayed cloudy through the day and got cold again as we hooked around the top of Gribbell Island and into Verney Passage. Then we stopped on the other side of Douglas Channel at a small village called Hartley Bay and bought some ice from a lady in a house in the village. Some of village kids were showing off to their friends (and impressing us) by jumping off a bridge into what had to be a very cold river. The main street in the town was a boardwalk stretching all along the shore.

From there we motored south on Stewart Narrows to anchor in Coghlan Anchorage. Jim set out the crab pot using the head and other scraps from the salmon he caught. Sue made a wonderful salmon casserole for dinner and we had little pizzas for happy hour. We took a walk along the shore looking for waterfalls and shells. There was one small waterfall and several tiny babbling brooks.

Two weeks gone already. We felt like we were really seeing the inside passage, but in reality, for every mile we went, we were probably passing up twenty miles of inlets, channels, and bays that would have been even more remote and unspoiled. Also, it seemed that when we went farther up the inlets and channels that lead into the mainland, the mountains were higher and steeper and the scenery was all the more dramatic.