SHEARWATER

Happy Canada Day! Today is the 150th birthday of Canada and major celebrations are going on in cities all over the country. Well, except in Shearwater.

We left our beautiful anchorage at Green Island in the rain this morning, and it rained pretty much the whole day. It was another low-visibility, running lights, heater and radar day for about 45 miles up the Fitz Hugh and Fisher Channels, over to Bella Bella then around the corner to Shearwater, one of the major towns out this way (the picture shows just about the whole town). I’m sure we passed through incredibly gorgeous country, but all we saw were some hazy outlines of mountains and a handful of boats going south (one of which was another Nordic Tug). Navigation wasn’t much of a challenge today, just headed north and turned left into Lama Passage. We kept ourselves entertained by watching for whales, figuring out why the autopilot remote wouldn’t work (batteries were dead), trying to surf the swells which were coming from behind and keeping our eyes peeled for all the driftwood logs the rain washes into the sound. I did see one whale - after seeing him spout, I saw his flukes surface then disappear. That was about the most excitement today…

Elaine wanted to be in civilization for Canada Day and enjoy the celebration, therefore our destination of Shearwater for today. Unfortunately, the rain, quite literally, dampened their planned activities, so it has been a pretty understated afternoon here. We hope the firework display scheduled for 10:30 tonight (you have to at least wait for dusk) will make up for it. However, now, at 8:30 PM, it is still raining steadily.

We did stop by the local pub this afternoon for a piece of “birthday cake,” but most of the time we’ve been aboard the boat, doing little projects (i.e. replacing the batteries in the autopilot remote), making dinner (crab pad Thai with crab leftover from Allison Harbour) and doing a little planning for our route the next few days. Even though we only travel 40-50 miles each day, we’ve made a fair amount of progress. If we keep up this pace, we’ll be in Ketchikan, Alaska next week. That assumes, however, that the weather cooperates. The forecast for the next four days looks pretty good - not a lot of sun (in fact rain the next two days), but very light winds, which means that the times we need to get out into ocean waters we should have reasonable conditions…