I got away from the dock at Heriot Bay on Quadra Island [north end of the Strait of Georgia] at 1120 on May 26. That was, to digress, a wonderful place to visit and to leave Old Coot for a few weeks. The docks are kind of decrepit, the historic Inn has seen a little too much deferral of maintenance, and the pub crowd sometimes sounds rather rowdy late into the night. The people there were sweet and treated me very kindly however, especially Tyler the bartender and Terry the dockmaster. Everything on my boat was exactly as I had left it.
We have a photo of Old Coot in the December S-t-S.
I tried to ghost along for a while, but the wind died and I set a course under power for the south end of Marina Shoal. It rained lightly. It was not exactly foggy, but visibility was a little impaired. It seemed cold. I began shivering a few times. The fog increased, but I was able to pick up my landmarks without trouble. The GPS was working, after having been occasionally inoperative. I imagined that maybe I had learned how to baby it. At the south end of Cortes Island I changed course for the Malaspina Peninsula. Someone in a big power cruiser flying the Stars and Stripes, as I was, bothered to step out of his wheelhouse to wave at me as we passed each other. I saw dolphins, seals and sea lions.
Making for Bliss Landing on the Malaspina Peninsula, I could barely make out the Powell Islets I was to leave to my north. I was concerned about a rock lying midchannel between the islets and Towaly Island to the south, but it was marked by a couple of little black cans and I passed it on the starboard side with plenty of room. Without any difficulty GPS and the chart led me straight to the dock at Bliss Landing around 1700, motoring over glassy seas almost the whole way. I tied up at a nice new dock, which is part of a real estate development.
They wanted a dollar per foot for moorage, and five dollars for a power hookup, more than I paid in Roche Harbor and twice what I paid in Nanaimo. So I decided to motor on and anchor in Copeland Island Marine Park a couple of miles to the south. Thulin Passage flows between these islands and the Malaspina Peninsula, running north and south. I found an anchorage recommended for fair weather in the Douglas Cruising Guide. What the hell, it had been quite still all day. Soon after I anchored, however, the wind began to blow. The sequence of events was something like this:
I found what seemed to be suitable spot and dropped my working anchor, a Danforth knockoff of at least the standard size for my boat, with plenty of scope. When I tried to back down on it to set it, I broke the shear pin on my outboard. I inflated my trusty Sevylor kayak and paddled toward shore with my small lunch hook anchor and 100 feet of line, paying it out as I went, hoping to use this for a shore tie. I came a couple of dozen feet short, so I dropped it there and paddled back to Old Coot. Then I tried to set both anchors by pulling them against each other. I only partly succeeded, and at the cost of shortening the scope on both of them. This seemed to be really bad holding ground for these anchors. I could not decide if it was slime over smooth rocks or rocky debris too big to let the anchor bury itself and too small to provide anything to grab onto.
Anticipating that I might need to motor out of this insecure anchorage, my next order of business was to haul in the outboard and replace the shear pin. I was tired and hungry, so I wolfed down a couple of peanut butter sandwiches. I decided that my shore tie was the weakest link, so I looped another line around the lunch hook anchor rode, paddled it to shore, and secured it around a rock outcropping. The loop around the rode slid down to the anchor, making this now a pretty secure tie to shore. Another sailboat, a sloop maybe thirty-six feet long, came and anchored upwind of me to starboard and rigged shore ties of yellow polypropylene rope. As things developed, both of us were across the wind. Downwind of me, the cove narrowed into a funnel shape with a little rocky beach at the end of it.
Now the wind was really screaming. Luckily, the cove was small enough and protected so that there was not much wave action. I loaded the largest of my three anchors, a 7.5 kg Bruce with 16 feet of heavy half-inch chain, remember this is only a 23 foot boat, and 200 feet of line into my dinghy. I paddled backwards directly into the wind while I paid out the line and dropped the anchor overboard when I got to the end. By this time my working anchor had dragged, and Old Coot was touching shore. That bank was so steep that I do not know whether it was the rudder or the transom that was touching. When I got back on board, I alternately tugged on the two anchor lines and gradually pulled her off. The big anchor finally seemed to set, but not until I had pulled in about 50 feet of its rode. The working anchor definitely dragged and was more or less useless at this point.
I wanted to orient the boat so it was not across the wind, so I retied what previously had been the stern tie up at the bow. Now I was lying at the apex of a “V” from the shore tie and the Bruce anchor. I stopped and observed how she swung. The swing to port took her dangerously close to an underwater ledge I had noticed earlier, and the swing to starboard took her within a foot or two of the rocks. Nothing was touching, however, so I decided to rest and take stock. My depth sounder showed 18 feet under the boat throughout the arc of the swing. It was then that I noticed that my dinghy was adrift and sitting on the beach at the end of the cove.
Meanwhile, my neighbor had decided that across the wind was not satisfactory for him either. He took his inflatable dinghy and ran stern lines at least 300 feet long to the bank on my port side. He hailed me to warn me about these lines, as it was about dark, so I wouldn’t run into them if I should decide to motor out in the middle of the night. He asked if I was okay, and I said yes for now, but I did not expect to get much sleep.
I spent the rest of the night resting with all my clothes on, lounged on the settee next to my little galley, setting the alarm clock at half-hour intervals. Although I had plenty of shelter from wave action, the wind shrieked. Everything held. Around 0400 the wind fell off a little and I slept for two hours.
In the morning the tide was out. Old Coot’s rudder gently touched occasionally at the extreme starboard point of her swing, and possibly somewhere in the middle. The depth sounder registered 12 feet. The inflatable kayak lay high and dry up on the beach. I rigged a second shore line, using my boathook to set a loop over a rock. This was to limit my swing to port in the direction of the underwater ledge. This shore line turned into a little problem of its own, because it occasionally fouled the rudder.
My neighbor came to call on me and took me ashore in his dinghy so I could retrieve my kayak. Otherwise, I would have had either to clamber onto the rocks from Old Coot when she was at the starboard extreme of her swing, or don my wet suit and swim for it. I checked and retied my shore lines. My neighbor told me he was lying to his storm anchor, a 20 kg Bruce on 80 feet of chain and 300 feet of line. I think he dragged a little, even so. He seemed a lot closer to me in the morning than he had the previous evening. He left, spending a half-hour or so breaking out that anchor.
And I did too, managing retrieval of all my lines and anchors without damaging anything. The wind was still howling in the channel, and there were some waves out there. I tried to short tack against it with main only. It was too rough to motor; the prop left the water too much. After a little of this I gave up and ran back to Bliss Landing, where I arrived about 1130. I was very glad to pay that dollar a foot!
It took me two hours to tidy Old Coot and get all the anchors and lines stowed properly. Then I walked to Lund, more than 5 miles away over a couple of steep ridges on a logging road. That also took more than two hours. I did this in part to avoid paying a dollar per minute for a call on a satellite phone in Bliss Landing, but it really was to burn off nervous energy. In Lund I enjoyed a cup of coffee and a slice of something resembling pizza and telephoned my sweetheart. I was tired enough to ask about a water taxi back to Bliss Landing, but when they told me it would cost forty dollars I turned around and walked back. I saw bear poop on the road. I saw deer. A yearling, altogether too tame, let me approach within 50 feet before ambling off.
My next order of business was a shower and shave at the Bliss Landing facility. Then I ate a nice supper of Dinty Moore’s Beef Stew and went to bed. I slept the solidest 10 hours within memory. I awoke feeling totally rested and refreshed, ready for the next adventure.
Pete Holm, Old Coot