Report from club member Mark May 17

Friday 17 May

At 6 am we extricated Mariposa from her spot on the dock which was smaller than herself (yes you can park your boat in a spot that is smaller than itself because unlike cars, they're not square and you can overlap bows).  We then moved from the inner bay to the city warf in the outer bay from where it was an easy walk to Cafe Guido, the only place in Port Hardy that I know of where you can get free internet. We arrived there at 7:02, just when they opened up. With hot beverages we stayed for nearly an hour. It was the first decent internet connection we had on this whole trip. I could finally see the pictures in e-mails I had received earlier but unfortunately my iPod already no longer listed some of those. 

A Coast Guard found us in the cafe to warn us that there wouldn't be enough water at low tide where we docked the boat but this time that was fully anticipated. We had approached our spot on the dock with the utmost prudence with the intermitently working depth sounder and had a fair guess of its depth. We were only staying for an hour around high tide anyway. 

Port Hardy at 6 am:

 As you can see in the picture above Port Hardy is a fishing town--and you'll know for sure by the smell as soon as you enter the inner bay. While we were doing laundry the previous day, Jenny and Laszlo got in a conversation with an old fisherman. He told them he had just seen the largest pods of whales behaving so wildly at close quarters that he had the scare of his life in his boat. Unfortunately we didn't get to see them ourselves on our approach to Port Hardy. Wales move fast.  

The other bit was that there is no fish this year. So yes, congratulations to ourselves! We finally did it. We killed all them scaly bastards!

After our internet fix we motored away and were engulfed in fog pretty rapidly. 

Motoring in fog:

Jenny was at the tiller and remarked how easy it is to get completely disoriented.  Fortunately it didn't last more than half an hour. We motored for a couple more hours before we had enough wind to kill the engine. 

It was a really slow sail, mostly between 3 and 4 knots across the open stretch of Pacific Ocean. With the frequent rain showers we didn't hoist the spinnaker since as you can imagine, there's no practical way for us to dry it. When our speed finally fell to under 2 knots, we motored again for 3 hours then could sail a bit more but still had to motor for the last hour. The weather forecast had been for 20 knots of wind pushing us...  We ended up motoring for about 7 hours out of 13.

The mild ocean swell didn't agree with Jenny. She took a pill and skipped most of dinner. 

We surprised a sea otter on the way. It was clearly asleep resting its head on some kelp and only about 2 meters from us did it start and dive under. 

Fury Cove was reached well before dark, my favorite anchorage in the Pacific Northwest. We're in the boonies now and should finally have frequent encounters with whales!  It is getting bitterly cold but we're mostly acclimated. I'll still add a third layer of socks.