Gwendal's Coastal Meanderings

Author: Gwendal

Howe Sound for BC Day long weekend

I had the pleasure of the company of a good friend for this trip.
Departure on Saturday afternoon with a small rain cell gave us a nice rainbow 20 minutes after leaving Jericho beach. The southwesterly turned to a northerly and then to nothing after a half hour. With 6 nautical miles to go we decided to use the electric motor instead of the oars in order to arrive before sunset.

The day had been mostly southerly winds in Georgia Strait so the approach to Apodaca marine park on Bowen Island was a little lumpy when we arrived even if there was no longer any wind. We had to hold the boat in the water otherwise the waves would slam it down on the hard pebble beach. After unloading I rowed out and anchored and brought back a stern line to shore with the inflatable paddle board.

The evening was beautiful and the forecast rain was shifted to early in the morning so we had a great time making dinner next to the tent on the tent pad.

The driftwood brought in by winter storms makes the approach at high tide a little more complicated if the conditions are rough. So far in the summer I’ve found it to be workable.

Watching the kaykakers head back to Vancouver as we prepared to head down into Howe Sound after waiting out the rain cells that swept down from the Sunshine Coast and in to Vancouver

The winds were fickle from Bowen to Ramillies Channel but we managed to string them up and spot the everchanging wind lines as we made our way to the north side of Gambier island to this nice pebble beach.

There are some boulders just below the surface on most of the West side of the beach so some care must be taken on the approach at mid-tide. Luckily the air was still and the water was crystal clear.

As almost anywhere in Howe Sound the bottom drops off very fast. I anchored in 12m and again used a stern tie to keep the anchor pulling uphill. Which for a small boat like this one works perfectly. The view facing Anvil Island as the day shifted to sunset was fantastic.

The next morning we loaded up and set up for a long sail back to Jericho. Fortunately the winds were favourably from the E heading back out of Howe Sound before we found the forecast north westerly funnelling through the channel between Bowen Island and Gambier. It was a good reminder to put it a reef or two before reaching Passage island and being exposed again to the wind from Georgia Strait.

I chose two reefs and put them in well before Passage Island. We then found ourselves in a very nice strong breeze and big swell that we rode in comfortably all the way on a broad reach to Jericho averaging just under 6 knots all the way.

I had put my phone away for that section but it was fun to see all the windsurfers and kitesurfers enjoying the BC day breeze. We turned into the wind just off of Locarno and hove to, to drop the main. We then did the last bit under jib and mizzen right to the beach which makes the final step of putting everything away before putting the boat on the trailer much easier.
2026-08-11
Making changes to the trailer
Since making changes to the bottom paint last year, I have noticed that the way the side bunks were sitting in such a way that they were scratching the paint. The side bunks were sitting on the inside of the two small bilge runners. This was good in the sense that the load was going mostly to the keel or through the side bunks to the floor timbers.
But I thought there is a better way. so I have lowered the bunks and strapped them to the trailer with galvanized square U-bolts.

I am quite pleased with the new arrangement as the support through the bilge runners shares the side load better and now all the touch points between the hull and the trailer are exclusively where there is a brass rub-strip. So much less rubbing of the nice bottom paint when loading the boat and transporting it.
2026-04-28
Made a lead sounding line
Inspired by our last trip to a small cove where I wanted to anchor the boat with a stern tie at high tide. I wanted to make sure the boat was beyond the low tide line the next morning. Not having any tools on a small boat this was mostly guesswork with the anchor rhode which is not yet marked (future projects).
I found that Steveston marine had 7lbs lead-line weights on sale at the end of the season. So I got to work on making a lead line. Being in Canada I decided to make the markings metric instead of the traditional fathoms.

Lead-line coiled with markings
Here is the markings I used from:
(https://www.maritimestudyguides.com/sg/bridgewatchrating/lessons/lead-lines/) (link no longer works)
1 meter, 11 meters, 21 meters One strip of leather
2 meters, 12 meters, 22 meters Two strips of leather
3 meters, 13 meters, 23 meters Blue bunting
4 meters, 14 meters, 24 meters Green and white bunting
5 meters, 15 meters, 25 meters White bunting
6 meters, 16 meters, 26 meters Green bunting
7 meters, 17 meters, 27 meters Red bunting
8 meters, 18 meters, 28 meters Blue and white bunting
9 meters, 19 meters, 29 meters Red and white bunting
10 Meters Leather with one hole, 20 Meters leather with one hole and two strips, 30 meters leather with one hole and three strips.

We shall see if this logic gets internalized over time. Most of the time I think I will be sounding in less than 10 metres. My line is 30m long and I may also use it before putting out my crab trap.
2025-10-07
New bottom paint & an overnight trip
Last summer’s longer cruise and additional time in the water started to show some new cracks in the enamel paint I used on the hull, mostly below the waterline. I started to think that after five years it might be time to update the bottom paint. My debate was, do i just sand the bottom and lightly scrape the cracks and just re-apply the existing enamel bottom paint… that would have been the easy option and I would likely have been done in a weekend of work.
I however was tempted to install a proper hard bottom paint that would have an epoxy primer and be more resilient to the trailer and spending more time in the water. I bought a couple quarts of VC Offshore and Interlux epoxy primer. This it turns out, was the longer and harder option as I had to remove all the alkyd enamel paint and primer before applying the new epoxy primer.

Propping up the hull by myself is a feasible and I have almost full access without having to flip the hull.
I started out with a scraper and a heat gun which felt effective at removing the pain, but quickly got old.

The first day of scraping
I quickly realized that although it was good, there was still a fair amount of primer left on the surface. I decided to get some paint stripper to help remove the primer and have a fully clean bottom to be able to put on the two part expoxy primer that needed everything removed.

Day two of scraping

Then I moved the boat in the hangar hoping to quickly have all the primer removal done with the paint stripper. But as I got into it, my attention to detail increased and I ended up spending a second weekend just preparing the hull.

Feeling pretty good about the progress
I then took the opportunity to put a little more expoxy filler in the fillets between each strake. The idea was that it would be easier to paint and I would also contribute to a slightly faster hull.

I used System Three epoxy fairing compound

Then a final prep of the hull after some sanding with acetone to remove any oils or blush that might make it harder for the epoxy primer to stick.

The first coat of primer was done on Sunday evening at sunset. Fortunately the days were warm and there was little chance of dew overnight.

The next day after work I came by and added a second coat of epoxy primer, this time with a white colour that made it easier to see where I was putting it on the grey primer layer before.

And then all week I came back every day after work to add another layer of VC Offshore bottom paint.

The results are pretty nice and I hope will last quite some time. I was finished on Friday night and Saturday morning I had to roll the boat back down and onto the trailer.

In a couple hours I had the boat all rigged and loaded with gear and ready for a weekend trip across to Howe Sound with my family.

We launched on a beautiful late August day from the Jericho Sailing Centre.

In a couple hours we were at Passage Island to visit a friend who has recently purchased a property there. The access is somewhat adventurous.

After a visit for a couple hours we then crossed over to our BC Marine Trails camp spot.

Using my inflatable paddle board I was able to anchor with a stern-tie far enough to be sure to be still in the water at next morning’s low tide.

The boat looked pretty good just at the mouth of the cove. The bottom is not excellent for anchoring but with the stern tie providing a constant pressure from one direction, I felt pretty confident.

By sunset we had our tent set up on one of the tent pads and dinner was cooking. It felt pretty cool to be able to get out of the city for camping by dinghy and be in a place that although has capacity for a few more tents, did not have a soul this weekend.

The next morning I found the boat exactly where we had left it with a falling tide.

The south-east orientation of the site meant that I was able to lay out the solar panels to re-charge the battery for the electric outboard which we had used a little bit in the approach to Passage island where the winds tend to do funky things around point Atkinson where the Howe Sound and Georgia Strait winds are sometimes at cross purposes.

Just at the head of the beach in the cove there is a small stream coming down in a little “V” in the rock which we used to have a nice fresh water shower after a dip in the ocean.

At the lowest tide near noon, we were able to practically ferry all the camping gear by foot or stacked on the paddle board. I then just had to coil up the stern tie and we were able to sail off the anchor.

On the way home we had a really beautiful sail with a solid thermal breeze that gave us a nice broad reach all the way back to Jericho.

Passed by all the anchored tankers

This was a fantastic way to close out August and get a nice overnight sail from Vancouver back to Vancouver. I am hoping to do this again and connect more dots along the Howe Sound Marine Trail.
2025-08-25
Random small boat work
This winter I had a good list of things I wanted to do to improve the boat autonomy this summer.
#1 glue together my take apart scarf 12′ oars. By planing down the scarf a little, I was able to shorten the oars to 11’6″ (350cm).
#2 make a second set of 295cm oars that fit between the bulkheads on the floor. These I am making out of reclaimed windsurfing masts. The blades are vacuum bagged carbon and fibreglass over XTPS foam that I shaped into a simple oar blade.

The vacuum bag is a standard large bag used for storing woollens out of reach from mites. It works great as a ready-made vacuum bag for epoxy work. The only thing I learned after the fact was that it is worth adding an absorbent layer between the peel-ply and the bag. This will help pull more epoxy out of the layup, help with avoiding the wrinkles caused by the plastic.
2024-05-23
Five days in the middle of the Salish sea.
This trip really saw An Aod Oolichan come into its own. Going into tiny bays and anchorages, breaching to drop off camping gear, carrying more than five days of drinking and cooking water and doing nice long passages under sail.
One of the many little bays on the south side of Thormanby
Our plan was to set out from Halfmoon Bay and explore Thormanby and then the Jedidiah marine park and the Simpson marine park Islands nestled between Texeda and Lasquiti in the middle of Georgia Strait a little more than 40 nautical miles north of Vancouver. No matter where you come from there is a crossing of at least 10 to 15 miles to get there. That relative remoteness is what attracts me to this place.

right as the front of the ferry
Wednesday August 23 was busy at the Horseshoe bay ferry terminal. After getting the boat ready for travel and hitched to the car we were at the ferry at noon… and were the first car not to make it on the 4:15 pm ferry. So we had to wait until six to cross over to Langdale. This setback our launch to 7pm when we arrived at Coopers Green boat launch. By the time the boat was rigged and the car and trailer was parked in a legal overnight spot it was 8pm which is also sunset.
So with my GPS in hand and a nice still night we motored out 2 miles out to Thormanby to arrive and navigate our beaching in total darkness.

We were off and the next four days would allow us to explore the middle section of Georgia Straight and some of the northern Gulf Islands.

In the morning I was happy to see that my new 4kg Rocna Vulcan anchor had found a way to nestle itself in the large beach pebble. Definately one of the harder substrates for an anchor to be effective in. If I’d set just a little further out their was good mud and sand.

The boat settled down on the pebbles perfectly, I felt lucky as a little further out there was a bit of a minefield of boulders on the beach and the drying out would have been a little more fraught. Fortunately the morning was very calm and this particular bay is nice and sheltered. The anchor buddy really was handy in this kind of anchoring context, allowing us to quickly bring the boat to shore if needed.

Nice hike out to Walter Mathers memorial lake
We then set out in a nice NW breeze with two reefs in the main to go towards our next destination of Jedediah Island.

About two thirds of the way there, the wind started to lighten up and we were able to shake out the reef and and get from the north end of Thormanby to Lasquiti on one tack.

Arriving into the channel to our anchorage there was a big junk anchored right at the entrance and for a moment I thought we were going to get a close visit of China Cloud.

It was however a 45 foot steel junk built in east Sooke. It was on it’s maiden journey to get its mainsail being made in Quadra.

The tides aligned perfectly and our arrival was at high tide.

This was a wonderful setup for making dinner.
The next day on our walk through Jedediah we met the local feral sheep

This amazing south facing bay has what appears to be decades and decades of winter storm driftwood.

Day 3 there was a southeasterly we did a nice day sail out to Jervis island with a fast down wind sail under full sail.

The sail back up was upwind and felt much more comfortable under two reefs.
Day 4 we hiked up to mount Gibraltar with a full view of the whole southern strait obscured by forest fire smoke,

and a close encounter with the goats of the island

After the hike we set out in 12-14 knots with a nice NW wind to push us out Sabine Channel into the strait and back to Thormanby

The final treat was a close encounter with a humpback whale just off of Bertha Island on the south west tip of Thormanby.

One last night of camping before we pulled the boat up on Sunday and drove back to Vancouver.

2023-08-28
August sailing adventures

August sailing adventures

2023-08-24
An Aod Oolichan: to Saysutchun again
As is our tradition, we plan a group campsite booking at Saysutchun once a summer, either on Canada day or Labour day long weekend.
This year we chose to kick off the summer season with camping at Saysutchun. The weather forecast was solid and amazingly we had a South Easterly forecast for Thursday.
My sister was my crew and the rest of the family took the bus and ferry over. Our plan was to meet up with my friend Justin on Shamrock in the strait as he was leaving from mosquito Creek marina in Burrard inlet. We indeed had a good SE from Vancouver to Newcastle for 2/3 of the way and and even put in a couple reefs for the early part of the crossing. The last 10 miles were light for which I used my electric motor. We found Shamrock which is a 26′ keel boat with a much smaller sail area to whetted surface ratio than An Aod Oolichan. The had at times used over 1000W on their electric motor to motor sail to keep up with us. Along the way we were treated by a nice visit of Humpback whales with whale watching boat in tow. Total trip time 8h55 min .
We had a wonderful stay on the island and I kept the boat anchored at Brownie Bay. Except on the eve of the departure I moved it to the docks so that we could leave even at low tide and it was easier to load the boat.
However the way back for my brother in law and I on Monday had a strong wind warning of NW winds against tide from 11:30am onwards. So I stayed an extra night and set out at 10am on Tuesday in 18-23 knots with all three reefs in the main. It was a beat in short chop to get around the north end of Gabriola, but after that we had a fun broad reach to Vancouver. Half the time it was wind with a falling tide. With the swell we started to surf and peak on these boats should be going. The rest of the time we were cruising at 5.5 to 6 knots until the wind died and we had to shake out all the reefs.
I just motored for 45min and caught the thermal at the entrance to Burrard inlet and sailed all the way in. Total trip time 7h05 minutes.
It is a big exposed crossing and so far the wind has slackened somewhere along the way. It is nice to know the boats can do it but I certainly want to continue to respect the strait. I’d much rather sail for 3 to 4 hours and get somewhere fun to shake out the legs. My kids are not really into the super long crossings either. So the next trips will be looking for shorter legs and changing up the camping locations.
2023-07-15
Caledonia Yawl project: Labour day long weekend, sailing back across the Salish Sea (part 3)
As you can imagine, once you’ve crossed the straight of Georgia and it went so well there is both a sense of accomplishment and trepidation as now I have to do it one more time. Even though I’ve done it dozens of times on different sailboats of various sizes from 21′ to 130′ this 19.5′ Caledonia yawl is by far the smallest one. Without a keel and with only oars and a 1276Wh battery the prospect of making it across in a reasonable time does make me a little anxious.

The evening before looked like this and so with a forecast of light to moderate north westerlies building in the late afternoon, I felt somewhat confident of the prospect of a good crossing.
The boat was anchored in Brownie bay with a big low tide at 8am which I knew would dry out the boat and so we would be able to carry out all our stuff directly from the group camp site to the boat and not have to bring the boar around to the marine park dock.

We then waited for the tide to float the boat and with only a few inches of water we were able to walk it out to deeper waters at 11am while our families set off to catch the BC Ferry from Departure bay to Horseshoe bay. I had a new crew for the sail home with my friend Patrice and my brother-in-law Lucas. We set off with a solid 10-12 knot NW breeze and lots of sunscreen with zinc oxide.

The boat was a bit lighter than on the way back and for an hour we were making great time averaging just over five knots.

But soon as we went past entrance island and it’s beautiful lighthouse we saw that the light part of the forecast was really going to take over. We started to motor-sail to keep the boat moving at at least 3 knots and set up the solar panels to recharge the battery as we went along. This worked quite well as we moved them around to stay in the sun.

The MPPT charger is a bit hard to read as it’s refresh rate seems to match the shutter speed of the digital camera but you can see it was stepping up an input of 19.2V to 48V for an input of 1.8 Amps. This was with just two panels out. We then managed to find a spot for a third 50W panel on deck. My plan is eventually to have all the panels lay flat on an inflatable paddle board that I tow behind the boat so that all four 50W panels can get shade-free sunlight with minimal resistance from the paddle board.

Nevertheless with 25 nautical miles to go and very little wind, it was still a question if the 1276Wh battery would take us far enough to catch a breeze or we would be left rowing at the end of the crossing. We kept optimizing the motor output to keep it around 250W-300W which seems to move the boat easily over 3knots and then would feather it back if we caught a little bit of breeze.

As we approached the shipping lane to the NW of Point Grey we caught the thermal sea breeze that helped to pull us towards English bay. There were a few moments of doing some time on distance calculations to figure out what the best course was as we had to navigate one freighter and one tug with barge while crossing the shipping lanes. I was very happy to have a handheld VHF radio and a full sized Davis collapsible radar reflector hauled up on a flag pole to the top of the mizzen mast. Which hopefully made this little wood dinghy much more visible on the water.
As the sun set the sea breeze started to slacken and we eeked out every last ray of sunshine to charge the battery by holding the panels up to near vertical until there was no free energy left to harvest.

After 9 hours on the water with most of it motoring it was amazing how relaxed and comfortable the crossing had been. The electric motor was so quiet that we did not feel like it had been a tiring day at all.

That said, the motor readout was letting us know that at the current rate we had just 40 minutes of run-time left and there was still over three miles to go from the bell buoy at the entrance to Burrard Inlet.

It was fun to have a visit from the Jericho Sailing Centre’s rescue boat as they did their evening sweep of the bay. We switched on the portable running lights and let them know we would be alright making it back to the club under our own steam.

A beautiful twilight lingered long enough for us to enjoy the return to familiar waters.

As we got within sight of the Jericho Sailing Centre we had just 20 minutes of run-time on the battery left. It felt like such a fun accomplishment to stretch the capacity for the 1276Wh battery to more than 7 hours of run-time to do this 30 nautical mile crossing.

Luckily the centre has great lights in the compound which made taking all the gear out and putting the boat to bed a relatively easy task.
2022-10-18
Caledonia Yawl project: Labour Day weekend (Part 2)
For the next four days we did little day trips around Protection Island and out to Kanaka Bay on Saysutchun.

The boat stayed comfortably at anchor in Brownie bay at the north east end of the camping area on nice sand between two sandstone rock groins. The tides were nice and big and so the boat would lay on the sand each morning for a few hours. This is how I was able to go and walk out to the anchor and see exactly how it lay. It is fishermans with folding flukes which allows it to pack up into a nice small package aboard. I also have a Fortress FX-7 4lbs anchor but I find it much more involved to take apart and so my tendency is to keep it as the backup as it is quite cumbersome on a small boat when it is put together. I’ve been eyeing the Mantus M2 8lbs anchor as it looks to be quick to take apart and would stow away nicely. It is just a little expensive and not that easy to source in Canada.

The boat in the morning at anchor looking back towards the camping area of Saysutchun. Note that there is a no anchoring area that protects eel grass for half the channel between Saysutchun and Protection island. I’m anchored further out where there is mostly just sand and less eel grass.

Each morning, I could not help but go out to take pictures of the boat at sunrise as it was such a nice light.

This one really captures the feeling of a languishing summer morning.
I also took the time to recharge the ePropulsion battery with my solar panels. On the way over we had only motored a little to get out of English bay and then near the end to do the last few miles to the Saysutchun dock. So it only took a few hours to top off the battery.

In the next part the voyage back to Vancouver.
2022-10-18