Thursday, July 10, 2025
It is my father’s birthday today, Happy Heavenly Birthday Dad! We all miss you so much.
One of the lovely things Sullivan Bay does is make homemade cinnamon buns and fruit turnovers fresh every morning, but you have to preorder the night before. At 9AM we walked down to the store to pickup our order only to find out the cinnamon buns were delayed by ½ hour. We were anxious to get underway, so walked away with just one apple turnover which frankly was just fine by me. I love cinnamon buns and pastries, but they almost always make me feel unwell afterwards! After farewells to the Mitchells, we were off the dock by 9:30, and headed out Wells Passage towards the Queen Charlotte straits. When I am at the helm (I actually drive a lot) and it’s low tide, I am constantly searching the shoreline with the binoculars for bear sightings and this morning I was rewarded with sighting a big fat black bear rolling rocks on the beach as we cruised by! No time for photos unfortunately, as we were on a mission to get to our next destination, Allison Harbour, to position ourselves to cross Cape Caution tomorrow. Google “Cape Caution” and you’ll find all sorts of stories about what it can be like during a storm – you want settled weather to do this crossing. It is an open ocean crossing meaning there is nothing between you and Japan for a period of about three hours. John is always looking up forecasts and weather so we can plan ahead and about an hour into our voyage he informed me that today is actually a very good day to cross, even though we’d miss out on Allison Harbour which we were both looking forward to since we’ve never been. But you have to make the right decision for your safety and well being, so we decided to just go for it which meant adding on another 4 hours past our original destination. It was indeed a beautiful day with calm seas and we made the right decision. The last hour or so the wind picked up and was opposing the tidal flow so that made for some chop, but not too bad. We rolled into Goose Bay (River’s Inlet BC) around 5PM, set our anchor, and settled in for the night. The warm sun was so welcome, as I poured myself a glass of wine and sat on the back deck to soak in the last of the warmth of the day. Meanwhile, John got himself all set up for fishing for tomorrow! He brought new downriggers up with us but didn’t realize that the electrical cord wouldn’t reach the plug in the whaler so had to quickly do some “MacGyvering” to add a section of electrical cord so it would work. He loaded the tender with poles, net, gear, and set up his two new fishing reels “knuckle busters” (nickname) to replace the older reels. They are called knuckle busters because if the fish takes off with the line and you get your knuckles in the way, the reel will whap your knuckles pretty darn hard, so you have to make sure you pull your hand away from the reel when it’s peeling out! The forecast for tomorrow is another big rain event so I informed John I would not be joining him on his morning fishing trip – I am a fairweather fisherwoman! The crabpots are out everywhere here in the bay, as it’s quite a good crabbing spot and the local fishing lodges crab here too. A beautiful loon couple was hanging out behind our boat just floating about, maybe resting because they weren’t even paddling around, they were just floating. There is only one other boat in the bay with us, another WestBay Sonship, and not just any Sonship but it’s the owner of the Sonship brand. We’ve not had a chance yet to go say hi, but we will. Around 6PM a williwaw blew through here out of nowhere which was a bit of a surprise on an otherwise calm evening! All of a sudden huge gusts came screaming through here and it lasted about 10 minutes, then it was gone. Weird weather. Since we traveled all day, the easiest dinner to make was burgers so that’s what we had.
❤️
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