Waddington Bay - Lagoon Cove - Blind Channel - Gorge Harbour - North West Bay - Telegraph Harbour - Montague Harbour
8/9/2024 Having accepted the fact that our water heater is dead and needs to be replaced soon, we abandoned our plan to linger in the Broughtons for a month and charged a course to re-join Kinship and Second Verse and travel south with them. We spent one night in Claydon Bay, very sheltered and calm. We had a foggy start the next morning and a challenging ride to Lagoon Cove with a lot of counter-traffic in the rocky/foggy sections.
8/11/2024 We journeyed next to Blind Channel, another of our favorite stops. The Cedar Post Inn, which has wonderful German food, is located here. It wasn’t open for the season yet when we stopped here in May so we were looking forward to it this time.
8/12/2024 Our next stop was Gorge Harbour on Cortes Island, BC. This included a beautiful cruise through Dent rapids, Gillard rapids, and Yakulta rapids. Our captains timed it well and all three rapids were non-events, just the way I like it.
As we docked in Gorge Harbour our stern thruster broke again. The good news is it was the coupler, again, and we had one more spare. The bad news is he isn’t sure why this is happening. He had the stern thruster motor rebuilt over the winter and maybe it is working too well. Another boat mystery. He was able to replace it faster this time. Practice makes perfect.
8/13/2024 Our next planned destination was Tribune Bay on Hornby Island. This is a very large bay with a beautiful sand beach that is very popular. We read in a post from a few days ago that there were about one hundred boats anchored there. That was a weekend day, and this was a Tuesday so we were hoping it would not be a crowded and decided to give it a try. We had quite a bit of chop on our way and once in the bay decided this might not be a comfortable night as the bay is open to the south east and the south east wind was creating a lot of fetch. After crew consultation we decided to continue further south and try North West Bay, which faces, well north west.
Along the way we found ourselves on a path with a pod of about four humpback whales also traveling south. Annette got some great video (sorry, too big to post here). We got a nice tail picture of the one at the back of the pod. I found a website called happy whale.com that crowd-sources data to ID and track humpbacks. I submitted a tail photo and received an identification for my whale a few days later.
8/14/2024 North West Bay turned out to be a good choice and we spent a nice, quiet night right until 0630 Wednesday when the local logging operation used their horn to get Second Verse to move! St. Florian and Kinship were not in the way, but we had an up-close view of their operations as they staged a very large log boom.
8/14/2024 We left North West Bay at 0900 in order to time our trip through Dodd Narrows. Our timing was perfect and the trip was so uneventful I didn’t even take any pictures. We were tied up in Telegraph Harbour Marina by 1500 and had time to enjoy the beautiful, sunny day.
8/15/2024 We took a short trip from Telegraph Harbour to Montague Harbour for our last night as a trio. I’m trying very hard to not sound sad, but I am sad that this amazing trip is at its end. Tomorrow we head back into Washington to get our water heater replaced. Kinship and Second Verse have a day at Ganges on Salt Spring Island before they split up. Second Verse heads to Friday Harbour to re-set their customs status before going back into Canada to have some work done. Kinship has two days at Poet’s Cove in Bedwell Harbour before heading to Anacortes to empty Kinship, she is for sale and will be sold in about one hot minute.
It’s been a blast!
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