Goat Cove

0900 position 52-38N 128-30W. Underway for Bella Bella

For forty years my cruising adventures had been focused on islands in the tropical South Pacific, isolated concentrated pockets of geographic beauty and culture. We'd often spend months exploring and enjoying every nook and cranny of an area barely ten mile wide, then sprint across a few hundred miles of empty ocean to do it again.

Cruising the Pacific Northwest is as different an experience as I can imagine. The area is huge but remarkably similar over its 3,000 mile long extent. There are literally tens of thousands of miles of glacier cut channels and inlets crisscrossing the area, creating offshore islands, and penetrating as far as a couple of hundred miles inland. Without navigation aids, it would be easy to get lost in the maze of those fjords and take weeks to find your way out.

Although the nature of the topography varies little, it is all beautiful, and doesn't get boring. With so many miles to explore, it is impossible to see it all in a single summer cruising season. Team Thankful is having to make some difficult choices concerning our path home as Autumn's approach prompts us to skidaddle south. Nearly every day there is a discussion on which channel to take, which highlight to see, and which needs to be saved for the next cruise.

Yesterday Thankful sprinted fifty miles south through Princess Royal Channel to anchor for the night in Goat Cove (what are the odds?). On the way we passed Green Spit (really), and stopped for lunch at Butedale, site of an abandoned fish cannery.

Some entrepreneur appears to be making an attempt to restore the cannery as a tourist attraction, but it appears that resources, organization, or both are lacking. There has been some attempt to demolish the structures that can't be restored, but little else is happening. The only other people there when we arrived were the crew off another visiting cruising boat.

We are starting to see more fog in the mornings as the weather cools off, and today is one of those days. Vicki is concentrating at the helm as I write this, her eyes cycling between the chart plotter, the radar, and the visible patch of water ahead of us. She is dodging Thankful to the left and right to avoid the many logs that pop into view out of the fog on our bow. The consequence of failing to avoid one of those logs could be a bent prop, or worse, so the helmsman's concentration is critical. The constant attention is tiring, so we cycle the duty between the three of us.