Buddy Boats

         

We were definitely closer to civilization, we were seeing sailboats constantly now instead of one every day or so, and a couple passed us, headed in to Bacchante, on our way out of the area on Friday, August 17. One of them was familiar, we had shared Bottleneck Cove with them during the worst of the deluge. It looked a little different now without the Great Blue Heron perched on his anemometer vane. I was surprised that the vane had survived at all.

Since Losloper had followed us out of Bacchante Bay, we were curious to see where they would go next. Since losing track of Pacific Wanderer we hadn’t seen any boats with regularity, but now we would wave back at boats we recognized from previous anchorages or fuel docks. Sure enough, they followed us all the way to Ahousat.

 They went further, into the anchorage, while we stopped at the Ahousat General Store for much-needed water and supplies. I tasted the water to make sure it was decent, then filled the tanks. More on this later...
 The store had decent stock and the prices were fair. At least half the store was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of marine parts: oil and gas filters, nuts and bolts, plus all sorts of faded and shopworn odds and ends. A remarkable number of the odds and ends were priced at $60.20 for some reason, despite being worth anywhere from half to twice that amount.

We had lunch with the Losloper crew, Magnus and Ronel, who had come to the dock to fill their solar shower. The restaurant owner had decided to open even though it was Saturday, so we were in luck. Right next to the store, they served excellent fish and chips and pie with ice cream. Fresh seafood has been difficult to find, strangely enough. Everybody just catches their own, and since I don’t fish, Anne has to depend on the generosity of strangers.

After lunch, we anchored next to Losloper at the head of Matilda Inlet, where Anne went exploring in the kayak, and where we spent a rainy night. On the morning of August 18, it looked good enough to move to Quait Bay, where we hoped to find a famed “floating garden” called Fireweed, structure made from found materials, painted magenta and green. The Losloper crew had the same idea, so we followed them out of Matilda Inlet, but not without first doing a tour of the bay. 

The Atleo Greeter

Shawn Atleo, Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations of Canada, has a house on a small island in Matilda Inlet, with a magnificent greeting figure.

The Indian village of Marktosis, quite large by village standards, occupies the bay across from Ahousat, and their greeter is even bigger. Everyone we met along this path had lived up to  this tradition. It was reassuring to find ourselves so welcomed everywhere we went.

The fog cleared away quite early on our trip, so we were in bright sunshine within an hour or so. As we came in sight of Quait Bay, however, the exhaust noise from the engine changed abruptly. Unfortunately, I knew that noise all too well, and shut the motor off before the overheat alarm sounded. No cooling water was coming out. I expected to see some weed in the intake water strainer, or even a fish. We had already had two separate incidents involving fish getting stuck in the water intake before this adventure. When I took off the front of the engine cover, I found a tattered belt from the raw water pump lying in the bilge. The water was fortunately flat calm, with zero wind. It was a perfect day for a mishap like this. I requested Losloper to maintain radio watch in case we had any issues, since there was a reef nearby, and they turned around and came back to stand by until we fixed the problem. I had to remove the alternator belt to put a replacement belt on the raw water pump, so I replaced that with a new one also. Twenty minutes after we turned the engine off, we were under way again, with Losloper following just in case.

Losloper at the entrance to Quait Bay

We of course anchored at opposite ends of the bay. In our case, we wanted to hide one of Quait Bay’s peculiarities, a floating luxury lodge, currently closed. The caretaker lives on her boat at the dock. The last report we saw prior to the closure was that the dinner menu started at $100, so we could understand a certain lack of business from the locals.

We spent part of the day looking for the floating garden, but neither of our two search teams found it. They found what was possibly the framework of something like that, but that was it. Things move and disappear out here, frequently without warning.

After another rainy night, we saw Losloper pulling up anchor early, in a light mist. They wanted to get to Ucluelet that day, and from Quait Bay it was a bit of a trek. We were just going to Tofino,  about ten miles, so we hung around for a couple of hours and waited for the boat to dry off a bit. By the time we got our anchor up the sun had broken through the clouds and it was well on its way to being a beautiful day. We got to Tofino at 12 noon and went to the fuel dock to top up our diesel and fill the propane tank. The motion was ridiculous. With no breakwater, the constant flow of float planes and whale-watching boats blasting by at full speed left the water in a roiling mess. With the noise, I couldn’t tell how much diesel we needed. Usually I listen for the change of tone as the diesel fills the tank and starts to fill the hose to the deck fill. I didn’t want to spill a lot of diesel into the water so I picked a safe number of liters and went with that. We ended up with 3/4 of a tank. I wanted to look through the marine store there, in particular I wanted a spare raw water pump belt, but we couldn’t stay on the fuel dock for the search. We decided to go to the Fourth Street Dock, the largest and probably the only one with room, then walk back.

Well, we called the wharfinger on VHF radio, we called them on the phone, and there was no answer. The area on the docks marked for recreational use was filled with fishboats and decaying sailboats missing masts and other important bits. After a futile fifteen minutes of trying to raise some response I made an executive decision, and we headed out to sea, bound for Ucluelet. With all the noise and motion we wouldn’t have been happy at those docks in any case. We had heard from other cruisers that Tofino wasn’t cruiser-friendly and our experience bore that out.

We passed Lennard Island on the way, dodging crab trap buoys all the way out. The water is shallow around here so we were in 40 to 60 feet for a long time. We thought the buoys would disappear as we got further out, but we were wrong. We dodged them all the way to Ucluelet.

We got the sails up and drawing as we passed Lennard, but soon ran out of wind and motorsailed with the main up to give us some stability. The seas were reported as three to six feet, with a two-foot chop on top of that. It was lumpy. With six knots of wind off the starboard quarter, the boat rolled like a drunken pig and the mainsail emptied and filled with a big bang on each roll. I was concerned that our main wasn’t going to last for another three hours of this, so we took it down and rolled out the genoa instead. It gave us some stability and added a bit to our speed, especially since the wind filled in from abeam about five minutes after the main came down. So we rolled and pitched down the coast, seeing what we could through binoculars. Because the water is so shallow and there are many rocks extending from the coast, we kept about three miles out in 100 feet of water. Long Beach is very long. One of the peculiarities of the whole west coast of the island is that because there are so many things to hit close to shore you have to stay well out so you really don’t see a lot of the coast close-up, especially in fog.

Amphitrite Light

As we closed in on Amphitrite Light, at the entrance to Barkley Sound, the seas got even lumpier and more random. The joys of shallow water with reefs strewn through it at random.
The instructions for entering Ucluelet Inlet involve starting at whistle buoy Y42 and heading directly for bell buoy Y43. “Whistle buoy” is a bit of misnomer, that buoy sounds like moans from Hell.

I thought I saw a bit of a spout off to starboard as we did the run to Y42, then suddenly a humpback whale surfaced right off the bow, traveling almost on a reciprocal course to ours. I grabbed my camera and held the shutter button down for continuous shooting as the whale surfaced twice more before diving. That was a huge kick.

SALTS ships in Ucluelet Inlet

Ucluelet Inlet is long and shallow, the buoyed path to the public docks snakes past Spring Cove and Port Albion before you get to Ucluelet proper. We had phoned ahead and they made room for us at the dock and two uniformed dockhands were there to help us in. That was good, we were in a spot just long enough for us, although with enough extra room to tie the dinghy sideways across the stern. Getting in involved heading straight for the middle of the space then turning hard right as the bow swept the dock, simultaneously putting the boat into reverse to suck the stern in. We got it first try, which was good since missing it would have involved backing off into a mud bank. The harbour has been dredged, but only for another 50 feet or so beyond our dock. This means that most of the outgoing and returning charter fishboat fleet goes right past our boat. The Canadian Princess boat drivers in particular, handling 40-foot powerboats, only have two speeds, on and off. One had to do a panic stop/start from ten knots right beside our boat when another large boat showed at the entrance; he missed crushing our starboard side by four inches and sent waves crashing into the side of our boat. That would have shortened our holiday on the spot.

Civilization, more or less.

After showering, we had pizza for lunch yesterday, the first pizza for months. It was excellent. We also got to do some shopping in the relatively huge Co-op store. Fresh lettuce! Apples, oranges, exotic fruit like nectarines that we hadn’t seen since we left Victoria. Unfrozen meat! They delivered our groceries, wine, and Anne to the dock for $3.50. I got to walk because there were only two seats in the van. I spent a lot of time pumping out the water we had loaded in Ahousat; it wasn't bad, it was just a weird yellow colour. After emptying the tanks, I half-filled them, then pumped out and rinsed the water heater. Two hours later, we had tanks full of water which didn't look like a lab sample.

Our refrigerator is full, which is good because it’s going to be a long time until we can get more. There aren’t any stores in the Broken Group in Barkley Sound, which is our next destination. Later today, after more shopping and topping up with diesel for real, we are off to Lucky Creek in Pipestem Inlet as a starting point, and we will see where destiny takes us after that. We have given ourselves enough time to enjoy what is reportedly the best part of the west coast. Our next report will probably come from Bamfield as we get ready for the final 80-mile sprint down Juan de Fuca Strait to Sooke.

This is something I have been working on for years: water totems. Early in the morning or late in the day the light is more sculptural and the water is flat and mirror-like. Every once in a while one of the images I capture works as nature's Rorschach. You can make up your own story about this one.