Sat Jun 11 2022
We let go the mooring line at Stu’s place around 0630 and continued through the Johnstone Straight down to Port McNeil. There was some strong weather coming so we intended to take a marina slip for a night or two while the system passed, allowing us to poke around onshore for a bit. On this particular leg of our journey we encountered the most debris in the water yet - enormous fields of medium and large logs and we picked our way carefully through the evilness until we were finally in clear water. We had elected to top the fuel upon arrival, so we tied up at the North Island Marina fuel terminal and took on 160 gallons. Even with the exchange rate for the Canadian dollar it was painfully expensive, but we were about to wander into some rather remote territory without a firm plan and didn’t want to risk running on fumes or even a low fuel state. While I was filling the 4 tanks Isabel got the marina pricing at North Island Marina and the City Dock just adjacent, and given the obscenely cheap City Dock pricing we elected to take a slip there before the wind began to howl.
Unfortunately when we went up to the office to check in the young lady at the desk admitted mistakenly providing us with a day rather than an overnight rate, and the cost ended up being almost as much as that quoted at North Island Marina. To make matters even less interesting the wifi was only available in the marina office and rather slow. Bummer, as we had blown through our T-Mobile allowable roaming data plan once entering Canada in just a matter of days. Somewhere there’s a Starlink system in our future.
Port McNeil was an agreeable place with several restaurants, decent provisioning, a logging museum (albeit closed) and the world’s largest (unofficially) burl. We elected to go to Gus’s for fish and chips because the local craft brewery was closed, and after sitting down and getting a beer the server informed us that they had run out of fish and chips. That seemed pretty bizarre as there was an entire fishing fleet in town, but maybe they serve freezer bag food rather than the good stuff. Can’t be sure, but we did see a massive portion of fish ’n chips go by earlier and they were reported to be delicious by other cruisers. Just our luck, and what we did eat was not memorable.
We did some provisioning the following day and visited the local general store where I purchased a can of Sea Foam to treat the dinghy gasoline and hopefully clear the carburetor of some fouling. We walked around and observed a local chain saw champion practicing for an upcoming competition in Austria. It was wild - he had a coach who was videoing his every move. The entire process was very precise and timed from picking up the saw to taking out two slices of a very large log then placing the saw back on the ground. He was using a Stihl chainsaw, the same brand that my dad bought after grandaddy’s old McCullough gave out.
We moved from the City Dock to North Island Marina after one night. Even though the wind was howling on and off, we managed to find a lull in the blow and soon were firmly tied to a pontoon and enjoying “Netflix grade” wifi. Operating systems got updated, movies downloaded, banking done, mail checked, and soon we were caught back up with all the nuttiness of modern day civilization. We remained 2 nights until the weather finally cleared and Mr. Sun arrived while we contemplated our upcoming passage through the Queen Charlotte Sound, about 25 miles of exposure to the open ocean. Mind you, we’re not unfamiliar with open ocean crossings, even for weeks on end, but we had never taken Sunset into any real open water. Even now as we’re well up into Southeast Alaska, we’re still doing envelope expansion for ourselves when operating this vessel.
Early on Friday the 20th we stuck our nose out into the Queen Charlotte Strait and proceeded down to an anchorage known as God’s Pocket. There was a little resort there and it seemed well protected but it was deep and narrow and, let’s face it, Sunset’s Bruce anchor simply doesn’t impress us like our Sarca Excel on JollyDogs did, so we’re simply not willing to set with short scope and hope the chain weight holds in an unexpected blow. After examining the anchorage for a few minutes we abandoned the idea and proceeded another couple of miles to a lovely protected inlet called Port Alexander on the Southeast end of Nigei Island. By then the sky was clear, it was sunny and warm, and we had the entire place to ourselves. Good day to be alive. We downloaded fresh weather using our PredictWind / Iridium Go and the following day looked like the optimal day to venture out into the Queen Charlotte Sound. We had planned a route with various contingency anchorages along the way depending upon how things were working out, so we felt ready to launch.
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