Tag Archives: Salish Sea

Caledonia Yawl, Excursions, sailing, voile aviron

Five days in the middle of the Salish sea.

Leave a comment

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.

20230823_172224
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.

20230823_215454

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.

Screenshot_20230824_000208_Boating

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.

20230824_071117
20230824_071130

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.

20230824_122801
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.

20230824_154416

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.

20230824_182352

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.

20230824_184139

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.

20230824_185935

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

20230824_195223

This was a wonderful setup for making dinner.

The next day on our walk through Jedediah we met the local feral sheep

20230825_131900

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

20230825_135016

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.

20230825_174551
20230825_183544

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,

20230826_120401

and a close encounter with the goats of the island

20230826_120455
20230826_120616

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

20230826_153655

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.

20230827_104825
Caledonia Yawl, Excursions, Voile-aviron

An Aod Oolichan: to Saysutchun again

Leave a comment

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.

20230629_112501

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 .

20230629_105537

20230629_211619

20230630_072826

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.

20230701_192812

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. 

20230704_114436

20230704_162444

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.

20230704_170824

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.

Caledonia Yawl, Excursions, sailing, Voile-aviron

Caledonia Yawl project: Labour day long weekend, sailing back across the Salish Sea (part 3)

2 Comments

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.

20220904_192404

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.

20220905_110524

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.

20220905_110536

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.

20220905_134051

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.

20220905_134100

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.

20220905_150934

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.

20220905_194333

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.

20220905_194344

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.

20220905_194415

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.

20220905_195111

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.

20220905_195926

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

20220905_201750

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.

20220905_204707

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.

Caledonia Yawl, Excursions, sailing, Voile-aviron

Caledonia Yawl project: Labour Day weekend (Part 2)

3 Comments

For the next four days we did little day trips around Protection Island and out to Kanaka Bay on Saysutchun.

20220903_065156

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.

20220903_064140

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

20220903_065910
20220903_070735

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.

20220904_113042

In the next part the voyage back to Vancouver.

Excursions

Boat delivery from Steveston to Jericho

Leave a comment

Today my friend Dom asked me to help him take his boat RedFive, a J30 back from the boat yard in Steveston where it had bee hauled out and sanded down, to the RVYC marina at Jericho.
We set off at 14h00 in a light drizzle and a rising tide.

IMG_8090.JPG
All was quiet on the south arm of the Fraser as we motored out

By the time we got to the Fraser lightship station at the mouth of the south arm where we would be able to turn north, the wind had freshness up to 12 knots out of the northwest. As we moved towards Point Grey the wind rose steadily and peaked at about 20 knots with a solid set of waves hitting us on the nose.

IMG_8102.JPG
The combination of the shallow shelf and the long fetch made for short steep waves.

IMG_8149

We finally saw the bell buoy Q62 at sunset.

A nice sight good old Q62 bell buoy off Point Grey

And turned east into the darkness as the wind started to freshen up behind us.

IMG_8144.JPG
Dominique at the helm

 

We tied up the boat in the dark and were quite happy to stop in the club for a bite to eat, warm up and watch the final game of the regular season for the Whitecaps on the television in the corner.