Van Isle – Day 4: No bears yet
Our leg from the fish farm at Hardwicke Island (aka Flying Pelletsville) to Telegraph Cove had a challenging start – our simple goal was to avoid being swept over early and to be in breeze. We ended up having some nice breeze to start, and the RC even came over the radio to let the fleet know that today, the RC was giving the fleet something new – wind at the start. We opted to start with our J1, and we got a great start.
Soon, though, we were seeing our wind instrument show a steady 20+ knots, and we decided to change down to our J3. Unfortunately, we had not taken the opportunity to remove the top part of our furler to make headsail changes a peel (i.e., you hoist the new sail while you drop the old sail), and instead had to drop the J1 first, then attach the head and tack, before hoisting the smaller J3. However, once we had the J3 up, Matt and Oren were happier campers with tacking (the overlapping J1 is a beast to tack), and we could point several degrees higher. We probably spent an hour or so with the J3 up, before watching the wind speeds come back down and making the call that we needed to switch back up to the J1 again. So we did.
We expected some serious adverse current for the leg, so we watched the instruments closely, scrutinized the water, and chose our course pretty carefully. Staying close to shore didn’t seem to be helping, possibly because it was still over 200’ deep, 25’ feet from the shore, so we stuck our noses out in the middle of the channel to find stronger, steadier wind, and no noticeable change in current. We sailed a glorious tack all the way across Johnstone Strait, giving our tacking efforts a break and found ourselves sprung free from the clutches of the 3 J/109’s in our class and right up behind Zulu who had been leading our division all day. Soon everyone else was venturing away from the northern shore, but we had dealt our cards first and that made the difference for the leg. Zulu covered us to the finish, which was fine, because they finished just in front of us and owed a little time. We ended up crossing the line 2nd in our division and correcting out to 3rd, moving us into 3rd overall in our division for Van Isle.
As we were short-tacking along the shoreline, we hoped to see a bear (Matt, who is from Alaska, told us to look for bears on sunny beaches), so we’ve been looking. No luck yet, but we’re optimistic. The scenery was still plenty amazing.
After we finished, Surfrider (a Santa Cruz 50) radioed to see about a tow. We volunteered, but we didn’t quite realize what we were volunteering for, until we saw the extremely narrow entrance to Telegraph Cove. No matter, as we had the 12 crew from Surfrider and all of our crew (5), chiming in to get the situation covered. After feedback from the 17 people involved, we got Surfrider safely to the dock with a reasonable side tow.
What could have been a painful long day, upwind, against the current for 41 miles ended up being rather quick and perfectly pleasant. It still made for a quick turnaround for the next day to Port Hardy before our first layday and a little time off from the sail/sleep routine.
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