Billy Goat Bay, Johnstone Strait, British Columbia, April 30, 2018 – thanks to John Vins, CaroBabbo is back on line.
I don’t have a good explanation about why I wasn’t writing posts to put online all at once when CaroBabbo.com was back online. I didn’t, and here is a fast catch-up.
We’ve been on the trip twenty days so far. Alone, just Jennifer and me. It has been a lovely trip with unexpectedly good weather. We been taking our time and are just entering Johnstone Strait today.
We stopped many places along the way; we’ve anchored and spent time on docks. Compared to last year, the weather has been wonderful. It is been sunny close to half of the days versus almost no days last year.
Before we started the trip, we decided we would sail much more than we did last year and have been holding to that. This means we travel less on a typical day than when we were motoring. So far the winds have generally been mild and, more often than not, behind us.
Tomorrow that will all change when we start beating up Johnstone Strait with winds that should climb into the 20+ knot range. We’re safe in the knowledge that if it is something we don’t want to do for a while we can just start the engine and motor. We can also pick a harbor somewhere – out of the wind.
All day today the weather has been gorgeous. We made a short day of it, traveling only 20 miles and all of that under power. We weighed anchor at 5:30 AM to get through the Dent narrows with swirly water and a five knot current moving in our direction.
We spent the rest of the day doing some financial online business; it is the first day since Saturday that we’ve had a connection. We rowed around the bay for a while and finally started our outboard for the first time. We used the outboard on the back of the Portland Pudgy to go explore the next bay over.
Last night was a typical night at anchor, no one in sight and the anchorage to ourselves. There was little wind and a full moon.
Today, after a calm, lovely and sunny afternoon, two 50-foot aluminum cutter-rigged sailboats arrived and anchored nearby – it is a very small bay, there is no place to anchor other than nearby. The wind has picked up and it will not be a calm quiet night.
There is much to catch up on, including seeing our friend Joe Myer in Campbell River, meeting the very famous Mark of Shoal Bay and so very much more.
All major systems on the boat are doing well, though this is the trip of antennas and freshwater leaks. We made an appointment to have an antenna engineer come onto the boat in Port Hardy and help us figure out what is going on. The internal reflection (VSWR) in the antenna is very high. So much so that we have bought an additional whip antenna until we can figure out what is going on with the masthead antenna.
We still have fresh (rain) water leaking into the starboard locker in the aft cabin. I’ve been unable to fix the leak, so I have instead fixed the symptom: I’ve drilled a hole in the bottom locker to let the water that leaks in drain out into the bilge.
We have developed a fresh water leak in our storage tanks. It looks like it is one of the original hoses and is slowly leaking water into the bilge. The leaking freshwater storage bladder on the starboard side of the boat has been repaired. The leak was a slightly out of tolerance connector that with a little convincing is watertight now.
And finally, as part of the 2000 hour maintenance, I replaced the thermostat on the engine. Norm at MER gave me some very slippery miracle gasket, which leaked no matter what I did. In Nanaimo, along with the whip antenna, I bought a very standard run-of-the-mill thermostat gasket for seventy cents that fixed the leak.
It’s unlikely I will actually catch up on everything that’s happened in the last three weeks. New things are happening all the time and there is much to do, and there will be much to write about.
We’re having a good time. We’re hoping that friends like you will come visit us. And we’re looking forward to the new adventures.
Tomorrow is 1 May, and we plan to be in Port Hardy on the fourth.
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