Quail Eggs, the Seymour Narrows and Happy Mistakes

June 30th 2017

"Not all who wander are lost."
-J.R.R Tolkien

Coordinates:49.2723° N, 124.1931° W, 50°20.005, 125°29.27

Look, sometimes people misread charts, right? And sometimes it’s like, “Hey! That rock wasn’t supposed to be there! Turn the wheel, turn the wheel! AAAAH!” *CRASH*.

Or sometimes you end up doing yoga on the deck of your ship in a deserted Cove of awesomeness.

Luckily for us, it was the latter yesterday. But let’s back up.

We left Schooner Cove early, and motored our way back into the Strait of Georgia. Again, we made lots better time—more knots per hour, if you want the nautical term—than we expected. Which means the whole crew huddled around a chart (sea-people will flog you if they hear you call a chart a map) deciding where to stop.

Only there was a snag. SEYMOUR NARROWS. Seymour Narrows is kind of infamous up here. Remember those currents I talked about? Well, the currents can reach 16 knots in Seymour Narrows—which is awful, because of BIG waves and the fact that 16 knots is double the speed of the Northern Star. Think rubber ducky in your tub with the faucet on.

The key is to enter the Narrows at slack tide, or the brief period where the tide isn’t whooshing in or whooshing out, so not much current. But that takes some clever timing, and sometimes just plain waiting. So before we found a place to stop, we had to find a place to wait.

So we chose Discovery Marina by Campbell River on Vancouver Island, where we waited for one hour—or rather shopped for an hour. We needed eggs and dish soap (go figure). Turns out, you can buy two dozen spotted Quail Eggs at your local Canada Supermarket. And they have sweet potatoes the size of YO FACE.

An hour later (for which the Marina charged us ten bucks) we headed north again through the very beautiful Narrows, and started talking in earnest about where to stop for the night, hopefully with showering facilities. Captain Mark says you never leave known shelter for the unknown, but we figured we knew our options. See, we found a few names on the maps that looked promising. One was ‘Elk Bay’, but after looking in three chart binders and a book, we figured there was nothing in Elk Bay but the elk. So we moved on to other spots, debated, and then discarded them.

Finally, Alyssa had been figuring out Navionics, a navigational app, and chirped up about a certain Otter Cove. It showed up in the map under “Moorings and Marinas”, and in the book it was a good place to “wait out foul weather”. Plus we liked the sound of the otters. So we decided to head to the wonderful Marina that was Otter Cove.

Turns out it wasn’t a Marina. It looked a lot more like this:

Which quickly made us forget about our hoped for showers. Because these place was magical.

As we slipped into the cove, we curved past sheer storm-gray cliffs topped with pines, and the cove echoed with the sound of birds singing evening-songs and chatting to one another. There was a small island in the mouth of the cove, likewise covered every inch in tall, arching pines. Looking out from the cove, we could see a snow-capped mountain to the left and rolling mountains like camels’ humps to the right. Even better, there wasn’t a soul in sight.

Add to this the feeling of being on a slowly turning Ferris wheel, and you about know how it felt. Because when you don’t have a place to dock, you anchor. So for the first time this trip, we found out how it is to sleep while your ship is tugging on its anchor chain, slowly spinning in place, the view outside constantly changing, the ropes hanging from the mast softly clanking.

There’s a certain amount of trust you have to have in your anchor job—and your anchor. It’s a tough task, holding 30,000 pounds of boat (15 tons) roughly in one place, come gale or calm seas. You have to go to sleep trusting you won’t run aground at 3 AM, on the other side of the channel. But if you do the job right (thanks to Captain Mark and Captain Gary), anchoring can give you an opportunity to be all alone in a wonderful, wonderful place. Alone, that is, except for those people you’re lucky enough to have with you.

After all, not everybody will do yoga with you on the deck of your sailboat with you. But my fantastic sister Sissy will (Deckhand Alyssa, for those who don’t know). And Mom and Dad came out on deck too, all of us combing the beach with binocular for items of interest, and naming the mountains ourselves, and exclaiming over the view. By the way, we spied two massive tractor tires washed up on beach, with a sadly weather-beaten chunk of dock. “That with the tide, is to another brought,” says Shakespeare. (Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXBdWDAYAcI)

We were all lying in our slowly turning bunks as the light faded away, when Sissy says, “Hey! There’s a cruise ship!”

We looked out the window and saw a massive cruise ship in beyond the cove. It looked more like a sparkling town floating in the channel than anything else—out of place among all the dark mountains and wild trees. We watched it disappear than reappear beyond the island, feeling very glad we weren’t on it.

So, another sailing tip? Sometimes, when you misread the charts, it’s Providence. And sometimes misreading the charts can bring you something you just can’t plan:

A little magic.

Skipper Krystal

Photo cred: Deckhand Alyssa :D

You Tube Channel: Sailing the Northern Star.