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...