Saturday, August 23, 2025
Today we are heading back across the border to stop at Blakely for one night. We have a small aluminum boat there that John wanted to try towing behind our big boat to see if it would be viable to take that with us next year to Alaska. Also, John’s parents and sister Kelli’s family were all staying at the Blakely cabin celebrating Kelli’s 60th birthday – and we wanted to celebrate with them! So back to departure, it’s about a 5 hour run down to Blakely and we had planned to depart around 6AM to get following seas with wind, which wasn’t predicted to be much. Unfortunately the forecasters were wrong again and we had a solid 15mph wind and waves on our beam, another rough ride. The Canadian mainland coastline due to the convergence with the Fraser River is such that there is a shallow shoal that stretches at least a couple miles offshore so we had to take the waves broadside for two hours before we could turn south and join the following seas. Such a relief when we could finally turn and we had a much more pleasant journey from there on, as the water calmed even more as the day progressed. We arrived at Blakely Island and John ran in to fetch the aluminum boat while I held down the fort on Esperança. After hooking up the other boat and trying to tow he quickly determined that it wasn’t going to work for us, so we made our way into the marina with both boats and got settled. We have a very full freezer on the boat and very little freezer space at our townhouse in Bellevue, so we offloaded the entire chest freezer into the Blakely freezer for storage. We had a wonderful day with John’s family, visiting on the deck all afternoon, and a big family dinner in the evening, then made our way back to the boat for the night.
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