This is a much nicer place

The waterfall at Lowe Inlet was scenic but other than that the place has nothing to recommend it and I can’t imagine why we would ever go back.  The current coming off the waterfall runs about 3 knots which is cute because it keeps the boat aligned pointing at the falls.  However the wind also appears to blow constantly up the inlet and it gusts so that it makes the boat veer wildly.  When the boat veers in the current it heels wickedly and inevitably eventually drags the anchor – we dragged three times in two days and ended up with 500 feet of chain out.  We were planning to stay there until this morning but when Marilyn got up yesterday she said “why don’t we just leave?” and I couldn’t get us underway fast enough. 

We only moved about 20 miles closer to Prince Rupert but what a difference that made!  Yesterday we anchored in a little cove off the east side of the Grenville Channel.  I think its called “Kumealon” Inlet – howeverthehell you might pronounce that.  We’ve been calling it Come Along Bay. 

That’s the view out toward Grenville Channel this morning.  I happened to hear a rumble through the water and grabbed the camera in time to catch a shot of a large NOAA vessel steaming by.  We’re just far enough out of the channel that we don’t get any wake but can still watch boats going by – if we happen to look up at the right moment.  No whales or bears so far which is a bit of a downer but there was a big old eagle keeping an eye on us last night.

I think the bottom is rocky here.  There’s sand and gravel all around the bay so we hoped for a good bottom but it felt like rock when we pulled back on the anchor.  That likely means that either it won’t hold worth a damn or the anchor will be so badly wedged that we will never get it back onboard.  We’ll know tomorrow morning when we try to lift it.  There wasn’t much wind last night so it didn’t get any real test.  We’ve abandoned our expensive anchor alarm that I bought a few years ago in favour of the cutely named “Drag Queen” android app.  It appears to work really well, as long as I remember to push the button when we drop the anchor. 

That caveat applies to any anchor alarm – you need to remember to mark the spot where you drop the anchor.  If you forget to do that and end up marking the spot where the boat stops moving then the alarm isn’t real useful because of simple geometry.  If you imagine the anchor at the centre of a circle then you can legitimately end up at any point on the circumference of the circle with the radius of the circle being determined by how much anchor chain you have out.  If you mark the centre of the circle on your anchor alarm then you should never be further than the radius of the circle away from the mark which means you can set the radius as a safety distance in your anchor alarm.  However, if you forget to mark the centre and end up marking a point on the circumference then you could be as far as the diameter away from the marked spot and still not have dragged the anchor.  From the standpoint of getting a warning about when your anchor is dragging that’s twice the error (because the diameter of a circle is twice the radius). 

Of course its never quite that simple because, even if you do remember to set the centre of the circle on the alarm, the anchor never just falls neatly to the bottom of the ocean and grabs instantly without moving at all.  In the real world you are moving in some direction when you push the button and the anchor needs to fall through the water, land on the bottom, get oriented to dig in and then drag a bit once it does hook up.  On top of that the GPS position accuracy moves around a little or a lot, depending on how good the satellite constellation happens to be.  Typically with 200 feet of chain out we can set our alarm for 200 to 250 feet without having the alarm going off constantly.  We can often set the alarm for the same distance as the chain we have out because the chain actually forms the hypotenuse of a triangle defined by the boat, the anchor and a point on the surface vertically above the anchor.  That means we are always horizontally closer to the anchor than the length of chain we have out.  I like to set it a little on the tight side because I prefer to have the alarm wake me up rather than the sound of the boat grinding on the rocks.  So far we have been woken several times by the anchor alarm and exactly never by the boat grinding on the rocks.  We hope to maintain that situation.

10:00 boat time and we’re almost at the point where the solar power gets ahead of the inverter loads.  I cooked breakfast on the inverter so I haven’t started the generator yet – the batteries are still at 74%.  If Marilyn sleeps another half an hour the solar will probably carry us through to supper. 

I had another bout of my continuing generator adventures starting in Bishop Bay.  The run solenoid will hold itself in just fine but I still haven’t got the points that control the pull in coils working reliably.  I had it off in Hartley Bay, cleaned the points and tried to bend everything into better alignment.  So far it has been working but I hold my breath every time I go to start it.  I can always go below and start it manually but its much more convenient to start it from the cabin.  I’ve got one spare solenoid on the prairies but that’s not much use so I bought another one on ebay thinking that the vendor would work with me to ship it to Ketchikan.  The vendor turned out to be an absolute tit so the solenoid is now travelling by slow mail to Regina.  Once it arrives at our UPS box in Regina – assuming that is before we get back there – I can have Ahmed ship it to meet us somewhere if it turns out that we absolutely need it.

Wind

I hate wind.  Regina has little to offer but I could likely have tolerated the place, absent the wind.  The wind starts blowing in Lethbridge and never skips a beat until it gets past Winnipeg.  Right in the middle of that expanse of treeless prairie sits Regina. 

This place could give Regina a run for its money in the wind department.  Mind you the scenery is pretty good here and nobody has ever accused Regina of being pretty.  But wind – that’s another matter.  I’ve been listening to the marine weather statements on VHF and they all say its calm around us but you sure wouldn’t know it in here.  “Here” being Lowe Inlet – about 50 miles straight south of Prince Rupert.  Its a seriously pretty place – we went “OOOOH” and “AAAAHHH” when we arrived.

And we saw a bear.  He’s about a 6:00 PM bear.  Maybe 5:00 if he’s working on local time.  He’s been out at about the same time the last two days.  Yesterday we took the dinghy over for a closer look. 

Two boats arrived here mid-afternoon yesterday.  They took their dog to shore to do his thing and got a real close look at the bear when he chased the dog back to the dinghy.  I’ve heard that’s a big risk of turning a dog loose around here – doggie stirs up bear, gets scared, runs back to mommy & daddy, bear follows.  I didn’t see the whole adventure – by the time I noticed what was going on, the bear was standing at the edge of the water looking aggressive and the dinghy was pulling away from the beach.  He’s very big.

Its a seriously pretty spot, if the damn wind would ever quit blowing.  They get what they call “inflow” or “outflow” winds in some of these inlets and I’m sure that’s what we’re experiencing.  The weather statements are saying 5 or 8 knots which is barely noticeable but we’re getting pounded in here.  We dragged anchor three times yesterday because the winds come mainly right on the nose.  There’s about a 3 knot current flowing past us from the waterfall at the head of the bay so when the wind gets us working back and forth we can put quite a strain on the anchor.  Right now we’ve got 500 feet of chain out and we seem to be holding but I’ll be glad to be shy of this place and I won’t come back, no matter how pretty it is.

Its a pretty seriously pretty waterfall.  I’ll miss it.  But I won’t miss waking up at 4:00 and listening to the wind buffet us around until I finally get up to check the anchor. These pictures are close to high tide.  At low tide the waterfall gets much bigger.

Hartley Bay

OK – lets get this out of the way right up front.  Call me a racist if you want, but this is clearly working ……..

We pulled up to the dock in Hartley Bay this afternoon and the first thing I saw was this sign.  Then we wandered around a clean, neatly laid out community with kids playing softball in the schoolyard.  All the houses were modern, in good repair with neat and tidy yards.

There’s no streets so the whole town is laid out with these boardwalks and the prime means of transport appears to be by ATV.  They’ve got services installed for about another dozen homes – that’s what you are looking at in the foreground of the picture above.

Even the boats in the marina look better than the ones in Klemtu did.  And our first reaction was that, as Indian Reserves go, Klemtu was pretty good.  This place, on the other hand, is somewhere that anyone in their right mind would be delighted to live.  The view is spectacular and the community is wonderful.

This morning was a glorious day for travel.  The sky was clear and the wind was relatively calm.  This afternoon …. not so much so, but fortunately we arrived here in Hartley Bay by 3:00.  Along the way we must have passed a hundred waterfalls.  And I think Marilyn took a picture of every one of them.

Klemtu and Bishop Bay Hotsprings

We just keep moving ever further north. 

That’s Klemtu, a little Indian Reserve about 100 miles south of Prince Rupert.  It was ….. pretty laid back.  We’d been told that we had to stop there because the lodge/big house was worth seeing.  So we found our way to the band office and asked to see the lodge.  It turned out that there’s both a lodge AND a big house and further that the lodge is just a hotel.  So once we got that sorted out we waited a long time and finally Shane showed up to give us a tour of the big house.  It was definitely worth the wait but unfortunately it was so dark inside that we couldn’t get much for inside photos.

The guy Marilyn is standing next to is some kind of “greeter totem”.  Apparently he is positioned so as to be the first thing you see when you come into the bay and the last thing you see as you leave. 

Inside the building there are totems like this at each end, a fire pit in the middle and cedar bench seating around the outside.  The building smells wonderful

From Klemtu we headed pretty well straight north in Princess Royal Reach, up the east side of Princess Royal Island.  The island is famous as the home of the spirit bears but we didn’t see any.  We did meet up with a couple later in the day at Bishop Bay who had been fortunate enough to see a spirit bear.  They said it was no big deal – just kind of a dirty yellow bear.  They saw the bear at the old Butedale cannery which is the ruins in the picture below.

Evidently someone has bought the junkyard that once was a cannery and plans to convert it into a tourist destination.  Time will tell – I’m sure there’s a lot of those dreams that quickly turn into nightmares.  The location of the cannery ruins is spectacular – the waterfall below is about 200 yards south of the cannery ruins.  At one time the cannery generated hydroelectric power from the waterfall.

After Butedale it took us about another 5 hours to chug our way up into Bishop Bay which is where we are now.  Bishop Bay is another natural hot springs.  This one is a little more developed and, unlike Eucott, we have had company here every day since we arrived.  That’s not all bad either but we did enjoy having Eucott all to ourselves.

18th Century Graffiti

Today we returned down Dean Channel and on to Shearwater.  Along the way we passed the monument to Sir Alexander MacKenzie.  We didn’t know what the big deal was on the way in so we didn’t pay it much attention but we figured out what it was so we made a point of going by slowly today. 

There’s a cairn on the spot now but evidently the old boy originally just scratched a note on the rocks: “Alex MacKenzie from Canada by land 22d July 1793”.  At least that’s what Wikipedia says he wrote.  More likely he actually scribbled “Dirk is Gay” or maybe “A.M. ♥ L.B.”  We’ll never actually know.  Somewhere along the way someone built a perfectly respectable concrete cairn complete with a bronze plaque.  We didn’t go ashore and the printing was too small to read from the water but I’m sure it was all politically correct and definitely in both official languages.

He got to salt water but he didn’t get clear to the Pacific.  Evidently his guides were Bella Bella Indians and they had some longstanding thing going against the Bella Coolas so the guides were afraid to go any further.  Or maybe it was the other way around – his guides were Bella Coolas and the west coast tribe was the Bella Bellas.  Regardless, like any self respecting British adventurer, of course old Alec couldn’t carry on without his coolie guides, so that was the end of the big overland trip.

Hot tubs and computers

Here we are in pristine wilderness, so far from civilization that I can’t raise a single radio station.  Forget about weather reports, I can’t even raise the shortwave God stations.  That’s how far we are from the rest of the world.  So WTF is wrong that I am fixing bloody computers?

My kids are young enough that they don’t remember when computers used to be mechanically suspect out of the box.  It used to be that if you unpacked them and they started up on their own and ran for a couple of weeks then you could pretty well count on them to keep running.  I did some computer sales and troubleshooting so I’m not completely clueless.  I have however come to the point where I assume that the problem is NOT the hardware.  Because typically it isn’t.  Part of that attitude is driven by the fact that Microsoft routinely pushes “updates” that don’t work.  That flood of software induced problems overwhelms any memory of the occasional hardware glitch that we may have and feeds our perception that the hardware always works.  By comparison to the software, the hardware simply does ALWAYS work – there is no doubt that computers have become extremely reliable.

So hardware wasn’t my first thought when our new touchscreen HP started acting up.  In fact I went so far as to let it go online and do a couple of updates early in its life.  It seemed so lonesome when it was unconnected to the internet.  It kept sending me plaintive little messages about how it missed its friends and wanted to chat with them in order to improve itself.  And I think those early online episodes actually helped it be a better computer.  Early in its life it would routinely forget that it was supposed to be a touchscreen computer and we would have to break out the rat to run it.  After I let it do one particular update it quit doing that and has performed perfectly in the touchscreen department.

Lately though we’ve had some issues with the GPS input to the charting software.  Now realize that this GPS input comes off a Garmin mushroom external antenna, down a very long wire from the flybridge, goes through a COM to USB adapter and enters the HP through a USB port.  So there’s several potential failure points before that information gets to the computer.  Occasionally we’ll be running along, typically after a three or four hour cruise, and the ship position on the charting software will become erratic.  Typically when that happens the charting software reacts by selecting the next waypoint in the route.  That’s not a particularly helpful solution because typically I have strategically located the waypoints to avoid things like rocks, islands, shallow water, large land masses ….. etc.  So when the charting software suddenly leaps ahead to a waypoint that may be several miles in our future it can occasion a sharp turn from the autopilot into an island or a reef.  I guess that’s why its important to have a human brain in the equation somewhere at all times. 

Initially I thought the problem was the GPS antenna and I guess it still could be.  Its difficult to troubleshoot that effectively without disconnecting a lot of little tiny wires in awkward locations.  I also considered that it might be some kind of USB driver conflict and tried running with a minimal complement of USB devices attached.  That didn’t seem to do anything.  Up until yesterday simply rebooting the computer seemed to be an effective cure.  You know – the universal Windows cure - “when it doubt, reboot.”

Yesterday we had a couple of occasions where the entire computer screen went blank and subsequently wouldn’t boot up again.  That made me think that perhaps my problem was actually hardware, unlikely as that might seem.  So yesterday afternoon I tore into disassembling our new HP all in one computer.  Its pretty difficult to get inside them compared to the old square box computers that I was accustomed to tearing apart 20 years ago.  But I got inside without having to resort to the dremel tool.

Once inside I found a particularly lame method of grounding out the USB ports that I believe may have been our problem.  Time will tell I guess but its a piss poor system, even if its not the problem.  There’s two USB ports side by side with metal jackets on them and an RJ45 port next to them, metal jacketed as well.  They’re all just jammed into the plastic housing and they take their case grounds through a flimsy bit of stainless steel spring with tabs that touch each port and another flimsy tab that touches the metal case further on.  The whole works is held in place by plastic tabs.  I rubbed all the metal with a pencil eraser and bent the flimsy tabs so they would push harder against the metal they are supposed to be connecting but I’m sceptical that anything I did would constitute a long term solution.  A soldering iron may be called for but that would likely void any warranty that may remain so I held off on that final step.

The bay that we were heading for while dealing with our computer issues is up near Bella Coola.  Its called Eucott Bay and it sits in an obviously geologically active region.  There’s a mountain to the northeast of us that looks to be topped with lava flows.  We’re here because there are hot springs here.  Last night we sat in a little pool in the rocks with probably 100 degree water.  There’s an old iron pipe coming out of the mountain that dribbles water into the pool and you can adjust the temperature in the pool by stuffing a stick in the end of the pipe.  Too cold?  Take the stick out.  Too hot?  Put the stick back in.  It works well and it is surprising how fast the pool warms up when you take the stick out.  We could tell where the hot springs were as soon as well pulled into the bay because Marilyn spotted the steam rising from the mud where the overflow leaves the hot pool.

The little speck in the bay is Gray Hawk – the foreground is the natural hot tub on the beach at Eucott Bay.

Hot water comes out of the mountain through that old iron pipe – there’s a piece of stick that you shove in the pipe to reduce the water flow when the pool gets too hot.  And it gets REALLY hot on a warm day.  The first night it was kind of cold out so it took a lot of hot water but the next night it was piping hot even with the stick in the pipe.

This gives a little better perspective of the pool and the bay.  Gray Hawk looks pretty tiny in the middle of the bay.

North of 52

We crossed 52 degrees of latitude today.  We’ve spent a lot of time working our way northwesterly since we left Cow Bay but  from now on we’re grinding steadily north. 

We’re seeing some spectacular scenery but not many boats.  We meet the occasional tug and this morning we met a great humming big BC Ferry but other than that, zippo. 

The scenery has always been pretty good but – if its possible – it is getting even better. 
This last one is of Ocean Falls, which is where we are tied up tonight.  We wanted to come here just to say we had been here.  There’s not much to see.  It was a company town until the company left town.  The BC government ended up owning the town and eventually sent in the bulldozers.  Before they got the town flattened whoever was left in town did an Arthur Dent and got the bulldozing stopped.  It looks to me as though they should have let the government finish the job.  You can buy property really cheap in town – cheaper even than in Buchanan.  But you probably don’t want to. 

A brief history of Ocean Falls, excerpted from the bulletin board on the wall of “The Shack” at the Ocean Falls dock:

1783 – Captain Vancouver stops in, June 5th.

1906 – Site clearing for Bella Coola Pulp & Paper Co mill at Ocean Falls.

1909 – Union steamship “Camosun” ships the first load of pulp from Ocean Falls.  Lumber is being produced at the local sawmill.

1912 – new owner for the pulp mill – Ocean Falls Company

1913 – O.F. Company in receivership

1915 – Pacific Mills buys O.F.Company

1918 – Concrete dam 677 feet wide by 60 feet high with a 112 foot high spillway built to produce power.

1941 – most of the local labour force was forcibly relocated inland (WAY inland) because of WWII.

1954 – another new mill owner, Crown Zellerbach this time

1971 – Crown Zellerbach walks away, leaving the BC government to pick up the pieces.  In typical government business operating fashion, this plan does not work out well.

1980 – BC Government finally throws in the towel.  The power plant was sold to private interests and continues to provide local power as well as power for Shearwater & Bella Bella.

1986 – Government doozers show up to flatten the town with bulldozers but can’t even get that right. 

Currently whoever wrote the notice on the bulletin board claims 40 fulltime residents - “a mixture of workers and children of workers from the mill days, also of those seeking an alternative lifestyle.” (my italics)  They clearly don’t live here in Ocean Falls proper – the only citizen we saw on our walking tour yesterday was a tramp apparently living in a panel van in the parking lot.  There does appear to be an active Post Orifice – what a relief that must be on Friday (when the welfare cheques arrive).  There is another community about 2 miles east called Martin Valley which appears to have 20 or 30 well maintained houses in it.  All in all we’re glad we came.  We saw.  And we won’t come back.