Lake Union, Seattle, WA, 7-OCT-2018 – These are two short sailing videos shot when we were heading north in British Columbia this past May. They demonstrate most of the sailing we did this year: to windward.
The first video is taken in Johnstone Strait. The night before the video, we anchored in Billy Goat Bay with two aluminum French boats. They had sailed north, with a third boat, from Polynesia to the Kenai Peninsula and were now working their way southward. The idea to do the same would take root in us after we spoke with Tom Kelly in Juneau.
Leaving Billy Goat Bay, we motored through the strong and erratic currents, and then set sail:
Two weeks later, Jennifer took us south from Bay of Plenty on Laredo Inlet. The light morning airs were not enough to sail on. Jennifer, who can bend the natural world to her will, told me there would be wind around the corner in Laredo Channel. There was. We were also alone in the channel.
We quickly double-reefed the main and began to beat northward up the channel at our above our hull speed. On AIS, we could see one of the cruise liners heading up the channel towards us as we tacked back and forth. We called the ship.
Cruise ships and cargo ships aren’t very wide, a few hundred feet at best; in a mile-wide channel that isn’t a very large percentage. But, they travel at twenty knots and it can be difficult to get out of their way traveling at one quarter their speed. [We’ve since learned by watching a cruise ship thread through fishing boats south of Juneau, that they can change direction more easily than we knew.]
The man answering the radio told us to hold course, he would be moving west to avoid the shallow waters we were sailing across. Behind the cruise ship was a Canadian Coast Guard ship.
As the coast guard ship came up to us, it slowed and watched. After we tacked, it resumed speed. While we’d like to think the people on board we’re enjoying the sight of Caro Babbo racing across the very choppy water, we suspect they waited for us to tack to see if we actually knew what we were doing.
