CAMPBELL RIVER

First things first - pictures I couldn’t upload yesterday:

Elaine with her Bear Bell

Hiking in the Rain

The Cedar Tree

Had a nice dinner at the Blind Channel Resort restaurant last evening and a quiet night at their dock. We studied the charts, the tide tables and the current tables to plan out our day today. All of the atypical planning, for us, was because we had to transit Seymour Narrows today. This is a relatively narrow channel between Vancouver Island and Quadra Island. A huge amount of water flows north from the Strait of Georgia through these narrows to Discovery Passage. The currents can run as high as 15 knots, with severe upwellings and whirlpools - severe enough to have sunk ships in the past. You must time your transit to coincide with the slack tide, that is, between the flood tide and the ebb tide - either at the end of the flood or at the end of the ebb. The good news is that we did not have the usual high winds typical of Johnstone Strait, the bad news is that it is a new moon, so the tidal changes are about at their peak flows.

We left Blind Channel around 7 AM and had the current with us the first 4 miles, then we turned on to Johnstone Strait and were bucking a 3-4 knot current. There was a lot of water movement, and it was a challenge keeping the boat headed in the right direction. On top of that, the visibility was very poor, with thick fog intermittently obstructing visibility down to less than a quarter mile. Oh, and it was cold and raining, too. So we had the usual routine of heater, defroster, and windshield wipers, but we added the fog horn to this routine as well. Once we rounded Chatham Point, things calmed down a bit, although we still had a current on the nose.

We timed our arrival at Seymour Narrows to coincide with the slack, but it also coincided with the thickest fog of the day. We had been monitoring the vessel traffic control (kinda like air traffic control, but for commercial ship traffic) on the VHF radio, and knew that a passenger liner and a coast guard cutter were coming through the narrows the opposite way, but we couldn’t see a thing. As they came through, we identified them on radar, but didn’t see them until they had almost passed us.

Even though we went through at slack tide, the water was anything but slack. I increased the engine speed, but at times we were going only 5 knots and then, very quickly, we were going 10 knots. Lots of eddies and whirlpools for a slack tide!

Anyway, we made it through, and the fog lifted. We continued south to Campbell River where we docked at the Fisherman’s Wharf Marina with all of the commercial fishing boats. We took a quick walk into town and perused the art fair along the (closed) main street and ran a couple of errands. There are a couple of museums here in town we’d like to see, and a Farmer’s Market nearby tomorrow morning (and the sun is supposed to shine), so we will decide tonight whether or not to stay here another day...