Big Day, Back Across Hecate...

WE ROSE EARLY FOR OUR BIGGEST CROSSING YET ABOARD HERON:  12 hours and approx 80 miles from the southern tip of Haida Gwaii to Aristazabal Island.  Again, after a week of gorgeous weather on Haida Gwaii (especially after the prior week's relentless rain), this was unbelievably lucky. 

It was an exhilarating sail with 20-25 knots off the beam and Heron handling exceedingly well surfing a following sea...

Close Call!

BIG Highlight:  Jeff was at the helm, autopilot engaged, when this whale suddenly spouted in front of us, crossed directly beneath our bow, from port to starboard, his enormous tail fluke brushing along side of the hull.  There was no time to disengage the autopilot and steer away, and thrilled as we were, we were also unnerved to have been nearly hit by the leviathan.  (Cool as they are, we don't want to be sunk by one!) A beautiful fellow, he then turned and swam beside us for a while...    Wow.

Ancient Sites & Haida Spirits

Before visiting the Haida sites, we took a required orientation session at the Haida Heritage Center – a waterfront complex filled with a world-class collection of Haida poles, masks, carvings, and other treasures. Our days on Haida Gwaii had a rare authenticity. The orientation session turned out to be private since there were no other visitors.  In Old Masset (where many of today’s surviving Haida live in weathered cottages on a windswept point over Dixon Entrance), we stumbled upon the outdoor studio of artist Jim Hart.  (And later learned that he’s one of the most acclaimed contemporary Haida artists working today, with work in the collections at UBC, Victoria Art Museum, etc.)

Jim Hart directing carving of massive cedar pole for UBC - incredible!!

Old cedar totems onshore at K'uuna Llnagaay

Leaving Sandspit, we made a downwind run (with full sails and a steady 15+ knots) toward Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve.  We were thrilled and a little nervous anchoring off our first site, K’uuna Llnagaay, since the anchorage was pretty exposed, and we were worried about turning the big diesel off. But we did, and went ashore.  We were fortunate to get a private tour with the watchman stationed there, Freeman.   We saw both house poles and mortuary poles, and learned many things about the Haida’s matriarchal society.  

The mortuary poles, designed as an identification system honoring chiefs of both clans and sub-clans, are meant to be temporal, disintegrating over time.  The Haida believe that only when the graying poles finally fall back to the earth, will the deceased chief’s spirit be fully released.  We passed one pole that had just blown over in March, soon to be added to the moss-covered relics around the site.  Walking gingerly between the massive carved poles on the spongy grass, with the sound of sea lapping rock, soft wind in the trees, and the scent of cedar and fresh salt air was a profoundly moving and deeply spiritual experience, like stepping into eternity itself...   a shared experience neither of us will soon forget.

Wonderful carved eagle wing, cedar mortuary pole.

 Haida Watchman, Freeman, and Jeff check out  Haida Longhouse site.

It was thrilling and very humbling.  Especially when we got back aboard Heron and once again, the engine wouldn’t start. After much swearing and cursing and banging on the solenoid (for which we apologize to the Haida spirits), the old Yanmar finally rumbled to life and we raised the sails en route to a more sheltered anchorage.  An extraordinary day! 

Next Stop....

S’Gang Gwaay Heritage Site, North America's largest collection of standing totem poles in their original location.

Anchoring off S’Gang Gwaay, left the motor running! Again, aside from Haida Watchman, only ones there... incredible.

Wing over Haida Chief Carved Likeness

Grizzly Pole

Price for all this fun:  Working on the water maker again.

Yep:  we discovered the first day into our 4-day wilderness sail to the ancient sites that our water maker had gone dark, no power to the controls.  Jeff checked all of the connections and all seemed fine; sadly, we only had 1/4 tank of water!!! (With Capt. Jeff instituting "navy" showers, however, it lasted.)  Finally, we found the blown fuse, got the water flowing again, and sorted out the cause of the electrical issue.  Rest of the trip, the Spectra worked great.

Crossing Hecate Strait to Haida Gwaii!

53° 47 N, 131° 36 W

TALK ABOUT BEING GLAD YOU'VE TURNED RIGHT.  IF OUR ENGINE HADN'T STARTED WE PROBABLY WOULD HAVE RETREATED, HEADING SOUTH – MISSING THE 138 RAINFOREST-COVERED ISLANDS OF HAIDA GWAII. 

If you haven’t been to the Queen Charlottes, all we can say is:  go and go soon.  Of all the places we’ve been fortunate enough to cruise to so far in the Pacific Northwest, Haida Gwaii is the most transcendent: lovely wilderness anchorages, fascinating cultural heritage, extensive colonies of nesting seabirds, challenging sailing, and almost no other travelers.  (The islands can only be reached by sea or air.)  Above all, though, it’s meeting the Haida people and visiting their abandoned village sites, that makes the experience so profoundly moving.  The spirit of the place left a deep impression on us.  What a privilege to visit!

 Haida Heritage Centre Pole, Hecate Strait

We made the 55-mile crossing over Hecate Straight in 9 hours and were blessed with ideal conditions.  (The shallow strait can be treacherous if weather comes up.) The crossing was great: we left at 6 am and got in at 3 pm, sails up the whole way with a 17-knot breeze of the port beam, a fantastic ride.  Twenty miles in we came upon a huge pod of humpbacks, we counted 50 or more – all tail splashing, fluke-slapping, just playing.  It was an incredible sight; we watched for 45 minutes, but regret now that our pictures are so poor. Even aboard the Mighty Heron we felt VERY small surrounded by so many whales and wanted to give them their space!

Huge pod of about 50 - yep we counted 'em -  humpbacks off the boat at dawn.  Awesome!

Captain Looking Good Midway Through the Crossing...

Yikes: BIG Hair Day for First Mate!

All that wind means more canvas, tho....  beautiful!!

Engine Problems

Tough Week, SV Heron

RAIN AGAIN.   SINCE WE'D BEEN PUSHING HARD, MAKING GOOD TIME, WE DECIDED TO HANG IN BOTTLENECK INLET, THEN RUN JUST 20 MILES OR SO TO KHUTZE BAY.  WHEN WE WENT TO START THE ENGINE, HOWEVER, THE KEY TURNED, CLICKED, AND THAT WAS IT.

Turn, click. Silence.

Turn, click.  Silence.

We’ve had this issue with Heron over the years… thus, installed a new starter this year.   

Turn, click.  Nothing.

Jeff went to bang on the solenoids and I took over.  Turn, click.  Turn, click.

We tried to start the engine about 75 times.  No dice.  This is not a good feeling. It’s especially not a good feeling when you’re anchored in an inlet this far off the grid, far past the middle of nowhere,  and your plan is to go even farther.

Finally, on about try 80 or 90 the big Yanmar catches and rumbles to life.  It doesn’t give us confidence, though.  In fact, we are very quickly losing confidence.  It’s dumping rain.  We’ve lost our crab trap.  Our engine barely starts...

We pull out the Yanmar Diesel manual, which pretty much falls open to “Trouble and Troubleshooting Starter Failures,” since we’ve spent time trouble-shooting the starter before.  Never this far out of range, though. We work through the various scenarios, check all the starter wires and relays.  By now we’ve got both doors to the engine compartment peeled open, and are crawling around with flash lights, crescent wrenches, and a long-handled mirror like the one a dentist uses but about a hundred times bigger.

Jeff finds a single wire he can barely reach tucked way behind the engine.  It looks like it might have been crimped, so he straightens it, and we actually say a sort of prayer. But by now it’s too late to go anywhere so we stay another night in the aptly named Bottleneck Inlet.

At what point is it unwise to keep going farther into the wilderness? This is a hard question with no clear-cut answers.  We try the engine again.  It starts on the first try.  It starts on the second try.  But not on the third… 

We decide we won’t decide whether to turn right (and on to Haida Gwaii), or left (retreating South to safer waters),  until we try to start the engine the next morning.  If it starts we’ll go.  If it doesn’t we’ll turn back. Sort of like flipping a coin if the coin happens to be a 1,000-pound Yanmar Diesel.

When we wake up we have no idea, literally, if we’ll be heading on, or turning back.  

Uncharacteristically, neither of us can make the call on our own.  It’s  too hard a choice, too easy to psyche ourselves out.

We wake early, turn the key, and….   Chuga-chuga-chug!! 

The engine springs to life the first try.  Heron evidently does want to continue the trip after all, so we high-five one another and turn right, heading North toward Hartley Bay, our next stop on the very long journey to Haida Gwaii.

Sails Up. Pot Sinks.

Downtown Shearwater's cool "United in History" Mural

Day Ten:  Anchored off Shearwater, Denny Island 7 a.m. Fat raindrops pelt the cabin.  Best sound in the world when you can snuggle in, harder when you need to get underway.

Clad in foul-weather gear, we dinghy over to Shearwater Marina, hit the grocery, and make our rounds in the steady downpour. It’s great to be back in Shearwater, Denny Island’s tiny, always interesting boating community.  (During WWII, the hangar housed the Canadian Airforce’s seaplane fleet.)  The ladies in the tiny grocery tell me how grateful they are for the rain, how eerie it was last month when it hadn’t rained for three weeks straight. 

Next to the laundromat, we meet Jay in the new gift shop. (A former boat captain, he tells us about crossing to Haida Gwaii (no sweat), and how the planes based here in WWII were used for reconnaissance.  He also has a great display of local resident Ian McAllister’s books, including autographed editions of the latest, “Great Bear Wild:  Dispatches from a Northern Rainforest,” which is stunning.  By the time we’ve finished our chat, the rain has stopped and, miraculously, sun is actually breaking through clouds.  

Hello humpbacks!

Decks drying out, steaming in the sun...  yay!

We make a beeline out Seaforth Channel, round Ivory Island Light, and nose into  Milbanke Sound where the water and sky open wide, and where, for the first time in 10 days we find enough room and wind – an easy 12-knot westerly – to raise the main and even the jib.  It’s a beautiful sail, steam rising from the decks as they dry in the sun.  Instead of heading to Klemtu, we anchor in Bottleneck Inlet, a small passageway that opens to a gorgeous wilderness anchorage with bald eagles, seals, loons, and flocks of tiny bright white terns.  There’s a southeasterly forecast, but Bottleneck feels like a bombproof anchorage with water so dark and still it shines spruce green reflecting the trees. Jeff dinghies out to set the crab pot in what feels like a goldmine of Dungeness.  (After all, Khutze Bay, where we once pulled up 27 crabs one night is just around the corner.) It’s a gorgeous night, warm enough for rum and tonics and dinner out in the cockpit, yay!

Sailing up Milbanke Sound

Beautiful evening anchored in Bottleneck Inlet

Tragedy Strikes. 

But then, the unthinkable happens:  Jeff goes to check the crab pot, which he’s dropped in about 65 feet of water and pulling it up, finds….  Nothing! Not even the pot! The end of the line comes up dripping, surely one of the saddest, loneliest sights ever:  the moment when you realize you're miles from anywhere, it's taken you weeks to get there, and your only crab pot has slid to a sad, watery grave.

Evidently the new line we’d bought, a hundred feet of bright yellow nylon, doesn’t want to lay right and, sickeningly, uncoiled itself out of a bowline, leaving us stranded in the Holy Grail of Dungeness Crab Country on the first night of the best crabbing of the whole trip. 

“I bet we can pick up another pot in the Queen Charlottes, ” I venture.

But Jeff is bereft; he simply cannot believe it. 

Losing our crab pot feels ominous, somehow, like the worst possible sign.  We sleep heavily and wake to steady rain...

Hakai Beach Insitute

ONE OF THE VERY BEST THINGS HAPPENING ALONG THE B.C. COAST is the Hakai Beach Institute. 

The first time we came upon it, we were simply looking for Hakai’s white-sand beach and sheltered anchorage in its adjacent Pruth Harbor.  Once there, however, we found not only the beach – one of the loveliest anywhere north of Vancouver Island – but sturdy research vessels and a serious concrete dock.  A pair of biologists testing water samples on the dock told us the place had been a private fishing lodge, but had just been bought by a Canadian couple who planned to turn it into an ecological research center.  We were intrigued.

Fast-forward six years, and the Hakai Beach Institute is an inspiring example of private money doing a world of good. The founders, Eric Peterson and Christina Munck, run it as a research, teaching, and leadership center focusing on long-term ecological research –  studying this remarkably wild stretch of coastline and how it’s changed over time.  (Say, the 15,000 years since the Last Ice Age.) They are particularly interested in the coastal margin – the line where Pacific Ocean meets temperate rainforest. 

We’ve returned to Hakai almost every year since then.  And every year there has been some terrific improvement: cedar planks just the width of your foot laid down along the muddy forest trail to the beach; cool new research labs built atop the dock; yurts pitched in the forest as housing for visiting grad students.

Boaters, amazingly, are welcome to anchor, sign in, and walk the forest trail to the beach.

This time, we had the pleasure of meeting Christina and were able to learn more about the new research labs and some of the other programs' recent improvements – all of which Christina and Eric oversee personally.

We both left feeling inspired not only by our walk on the beach by one couple's remarkable generosity in taking such a hands-on, long-term approach to this part of the planet.

One of Those Days, or Two

Returning to the boat always comes as a surprise, no matter how many weeks we’ve had to prepare for it. This time, Heron lost shore power during our absence. Steve Jackman, dockmaster extraordinaire at Port McNeill’s North Island Marina, and his wife Jessica, heroically rescued all our chilled provisions in time – including six-weeks-worth of frozen food – hauling about 50 pounds of wrapped meats off the boat to their own deep freeze. 

We learned from Steve upon our return that an eagle had landed on a transformer -- not only frying himself but knocking out power to the entire dock, making an exciting week for both Steve and the ill-fated eagle.  Of course every other boat’s power cycled right back on.  Every other boat, that is, except Heron.  Once her power was tripped, Mighty Heron, quirky British dame that she is, didn't feel like cooperating. 

Fortunately, engineer Paul LaRussa, who often troubleshoots Heron’s tricky systems in Seattle happened to be on Vancouver Island working on another boat.  He drove up from Campbell River, identified the problem within 15 minutes (a pair of hidden breakers that only a Moody’s makers would put behind the instrument panel), and hit the road. 

Welcome Home.

Returning to the dock a week after all this excitement, we repacked all the frozen provisions and now extremely ripe month-old cheeses in the fridge, then hauled our sheets and towels up to the Laundromat.  Since it was “BC Day” in British Columbia, pretty much everything in Port McNeill was closed – the diner, the café, the liquor store.  Thankfully the market and pub were open.  We restocked our fresh produce and collected enough Loonies for the dryers.

But there were more surprises!

At the end of our chilly motor across Queen Charlotte Strait, the swells picked up and we hit a massive side swell just as we were tucking into the night’s planned anchorage, one of our favorites:  Skull Cove.  The swell sent everything in the cabin that wasn’t secured sailing across the main salon – including the big storage bin under the settee.  It came flying out, exploded completely off its hinges, and landed squarely in the middle of the floor.  Hmmm...

After anchoring we unpacked everything out of the drawer (most of our pantry), removed the screws from the drawer, disassembled it, screwed it back together (going so far as to glue the screws in this time), and slid it back in.  No dice.  The impact of a single monster side-swell had busted the tracks.

Captain Jeff gets out the tool kit...

Big Drawer, No More. Luckily, the Moody 54 has many secret holds and compartments and we weren’t expecting any guests for this remote and rainy part of the trip.  We squirreled away all our nuts, dried fruits, cookies, and boxes of crackers in the forward stateroom’s closet shelves, turning it into a walk-in kitchen pantry.

Settling into a beautiful evening at Skull Cove, we realized we were in an extraordinarily wild and beautiful place, and that it was all worth it.  It turned out to be a perfectly still, high-tide evening punctuated by a resounding chorus of birds going bonkers  - including many breeding pairs of loons so loud they sounded like dogs barking on the water.  We sat in the cockpit, incredulous, listening to the night.

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