Day 4 – Pender Harbour to Teakerne Arm

Airship Goes to Alaska – Day 4

We left Pender Harbour yesterday morning at 7am, headed for Teakerne Arm.

Pender Harbour morning light:

Our fleet on AIS, just south of Powell River:

The Pacifica Papers pulp mill where they have ten old Liberty Ships as a breakwater:

I think this was Savary Island, but it could have been something in the Copeland Islands. The Sunshine Coast was really earning its name yesterday…the weather was gorgeous. Again.

Coming around Sarah Point and getting our first view of Desolation Sound:

We headed into Teakerne Arm and toward the waterfall. This was our intended spot for the night, right in front of Cassel Falls:

Mark asked how many people wanted to stern tie…there were three or four of us who did, and the others were going to try to find a spot to anchor. We’ve never stern tied and it’s a common thing to need to do here in Desolation Sound where it’s mostly really deep, and where it’s shallow enough to anchor, there’s not a lot of swing room. You basically anchor on the slope near the shore with your stern lined up with where you plan to stern tie, hook your anchor, and then take a stern line ashore and tie it around something like a tree or a ring/cable that’s installed for this purpose. 

Here’s Mark scouting for cables:

And here he is taking our stern line to shore. (As a thank you for teaching us to stern tie, we cooked dinner last night. He said he’d help us stern tie any time.)

Both of us anchored in front of the waterfall. Mark will stern tie after the tide goes up another three feet so he can reach the cable from the dinghy (ours was really low already).

One boat from our fleet anchored and stern tied in the cove around the corner and let the other Nordic Tug (Dorothy) raft up with them. The other boats never found suitable anchorage, so they opted to head back outside the cove to some previously spotted spots.

Several of us made a plan to meet at the dinghy dock at 5pm for a hike up to Cassel Lake, and in the meantime, Kevin did a few flights with the quadcopter and got some fabulous footage! We'll upload it as soon as we have a little faster internet.

Dinghy dock:

Standing at the edge, looking down at the boats:

Airship, Sea Raven, and then a big yacht with fishing boat attached (not one of ours):

Cassel Lake:

They once did logging here and used the lake to move the logs over toward the falls, and then had a series of pulleys and cables and this donkey thing to pull/push the logs over the falls. 

There, they would collect them and take them off to the mills. These logs apparently never made it over the falls:

Back at Airship, we sat up on the top deck and had a cocktail. We got out the truffled goat cheese from Salt Spring Cheese that we bought in Ganges to share with Mark and Margaret, and then cooked up some pulled pork tacos with a spinach salad for dinner. It was a fun evening! 

Today is rapids day!! We’ll be leaving this morning at 9:30am headed for Yuculta Rapids, Gillard Passage, and then Dent Rapids. We’ve timed it to arrive at Dent Rapids (the most important one) at slack, and it sounds like we’ll have about 3 knots against us at Yuculta, less than that at Gillard Passage, and then hopefully none at Dent. 

Also, lesson for the day: just because a knot looks like a knot, doesn’t mean it’s a knot. We were working away happily this morning and our neighbor Ron comes popping over in his dinghy after taking his dog to shore for a walk, towing another dinghy. "Is this your dinghy?"

Um, yes. That's our dinghy. Why the heck wasn't it still tied to our boat? It had “gotten away” earlier this morning and Ron found it around the corner and brought it home. (I was the last one to “tie it up” so guess who needs a little refresher on a proper clove hitch? SO. EMBARRASSING. I owe Ron a bottle of wine.)

Wanna know how I knew it went missing this morning? Because just a little while ago as I was looking out from our spot, I saw a dinghy just out past the rock corner of our little cove, and I couldn’t see the boat it was attached to and thought (without really thinking, just that kind of observation that you notice later on when you realize it might have mattered):  “Hm, that dinghy looks like it’s all alone. I guess the boat it’s attached to is just out of view.”

Heh.

Oh yeah, here's today's track (53.3 nautical miles, 7 hours 48 minutes):