Cruising on Crazy Anna

This year, for our sailing vacation, we decided to take a two-week cruise in the general direction of Desolation Sound.  This would be our first real cruise on Crazy Anna, our new Vancouver 27. We are now members of the Maple Bay yacht club and it was so much easier to load up our supplies without having to row them back and forth in a dinghy. After more than ten years of keeping our boat on a mooring, we sure appreciated the easier access. Still, it took us two whole days to prepare for the trip. You would think that after years of doing this we'd be able to get things done in less time...

On the first day, we set sail for Nanaimo, in the hope of eventually catching up with Jim and Franca who own a similar Vancouver sailboat. They had just crossed the Strait of Georgia to Pender harbor on the Sunshine coast and were at least a day ahead of us. We planned to arrive at Dodd Narrows in time to pass through on the last of the flood tide, but we left a bit late that morning and were unable to reach the narrows in time. So, we stopped at Ruxton island and tied up to my friend Andy's mooring ball in Herring Bay. Andy rowed out with a nice bottle of red wine and we spent a very pleasant afternoon together.

 

Around supper time we untied and motored north, passing through the narrows about an hour before the turn of the tide and fighting currents of two to three knots. The wind came up from a favourable direction and we sailed north to the Nanaimo anchorage at Newcastle Island. The only hairy bit was avoiding the Gabriola Island and Vancouver bound ferries, all of which pass through the body of water between Dodd Narrows and Nanaimo Harbour. 

 

Rani looks back through a completely circular branch on an Arbutus tree

 

We checked in with Jim that night by email and he told us that they were returning to Nanaimo and suggested that we meet up at Newcastle Island later the next day. We spent much of that day hiking the trail that goes around the island. This entire island is a provincial park managed by First Nations and it has many kms of beautiful trails. With the very low tides we've been having, we were able to see the island in a way we've never seen it before, the shoreline receding in a long shelf along much of the outside of the island. Across the sparkling waters of the strait, the Coast Mountains make an impressive backdrop to this walk. And it's always neat, walking on what will be the bottom of the ocean in a few hours. Jim and Franca arrived in the anchorage late in the afternoon, and we had them over for supper of homemade vegetarian lasagna and spent a very pleasant evening with them.

 

Walking the beach at an extreme low tide on Newcastle Island

 

We had already decided the next day that we were going to cross the Strait of Georgia to Howe Sound, rather than trying to go north as we had originally planned. The 20+ knot northwesterly winds would have made the trip unpleasant and military exercise area Whiskey Golf was active, so we would have had to make a passage directly northwest inside the safety area in order to avoid the torpedo testsing exercises.  Before leaving, we had to deal with a small issue with our fresh water tanks, that turned out to be caused by a leak in the fioot pump. All our water from one tank - about 70 liters - ended up in the bilge and was pumped overboard. I enjoyed a good hour of morning exercise, bucketing water down the jetty to the boat from a pump in the park. We decided not to repair the problem, but simply closed off the tank valve when not using it to avoid losing all our water again.

 

Our sail across to Howe Sound was an uneventful reach with three or four foot swells and a couple of feet of chop - a little bit splashy but very pleasant. We did this under a reefed main with a partially reefed genoa, and sailed into Howe Sound just in time to pick up the afternoon inflow winds that blow up the sound toward the mountains.

 

Much of the logging that happened here was old growth hand logging

Old burnt out cedar on Gambier Island

Beach looking toward the Sea to Sky Highway

Big tides mean a steep climb up the ramp at Camp Artaban in Port Graves

The highlight of our trip was our stay in a bay at the south east end of Gambier Island (Port Graves), from which we spent three full days hiking the hills and swimming in lakes.  This island has some pretty impressive hills that rival those on the mainland around it, including Gambier peak itself, which is close to 3,000 ft. We didn't climb the highest peaks, but we did visit Gambier Lake which is at 1400 ft and we climbed up to Mount Artaban which has view back over English Bay on the Sea to sky Highway. Altogether my pedometer said we walked about 83000 steps in 3 days. And a lot of this was up and down. Rani keeps me young!

Sign below Mount Artaban

View from Mount Artaban

 

View from Bert's Bluff, named for a life guard at Camp Artaban who made the trail up to the viewpoint

 

Swimming at Gambier Lake

 

After Gambier Island we spent a day at Keats island, near Gibson, which has a park and mooring balls in the anchorage. We enjoyed a shorter day here with only a few hours on the trails and then rather than head up north into northwest headwinds, we decided to cross back over to the Gulf islands. 

 

Colorful canoe at Keats Landing on Keats Island

 

Lovely views towards Vancouver Island from Keats Island

Granite coastal bluffs and islets - Keats Island

Looking toward Gibsons from Keats Island

 

We selected Porlier Pass as our entry point to leave the strait and head into the sheltered waters of the Gulf Islands. This allowed for a better angle off the wind and some very nice sailing. The winds were fresh, though, and we had 15 knots initially rising to 20 knots quite consistently as we were near the middle and staying up until we reached the pass. It took us only four hours of sailing, averaging around six knots, and we made our way through the pass with a favorable current, ebbing at one or two knots. We anchored in between the Secretary islands, an anchorage we'd never explored before. Unfortunately these islands are private and when we landed, we saw No Trespassing signs on both the North and South Secretary Islands, so we had to wait until the next day for our hike.

 

The next day we sailed down under jib alone to Wallace Island where we anchored in a little cove off the south end that provides excellent protection from northwesterly winds. Wallace Island is almost entirely parkland and has hiking trails that run for the entire length. There was a summer camp on the island, popular with vacationers from Victoria and Vancouver in the 1950's. Some of the camp's buildings are still standing in the campground near Connover Cove.

Rani looks down on Crazy Anna anchored at the south end of Wallace Island

By this point we were resigned to not making our way north and decided to visit a few places nearby that we had not seen for a while, including Dionisio Park at the north end of Galiano Island and Montague Harbour further south on the same island. Dionisio is right on Porlier Pass and has no really protected anchorages, so we opted to anchor on the Gulf Islands side of the pass. We paddled over to the park fighting the current and using back eddies to get around from our bay to a landing spot below a range light. It was a weekend and the park beaches were covered in mostly young sun bathing Vancouverites. You can take a ferry from Vancouver to Galiano and then bicycle to the park, which is not accessible to cars. The trip back in the kayaks was hair raising because the tide had turned and we had to fight currents of more than three knots even right up against the rocky shore.

 

The sandstone almost looks like a petrified sand dune - Galiano Island at Dionisio park

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Rani had not visited Montague Harbour for many years, so we made that our next stop and anchored north off a lovely sand beach in the company of a half dozen other sail and power cruisers. This is also a camping park and appeared to be full as well. From here we decided to begin heading home, cutting our trip short by a couple of days so that Rani could take part in a friend's birthday celebrations and I could play sax at the highschool graduation. We made Prevost island our next stop and enjoyed two days of hiking in the federal park land on the north west end of the island. We met an American single hander named Calvin on a Morgan 38 sailboat here. He was heading north to Alaska and then planned on running down to Central America for the winter. 

 

Beach on the hiking trail at Russel Island Gulf Islands Federal Park

 

We did all our off-sailboat travel using two 10 foot Pelican kayaks

 

Lovely late day light at Selby Cove on Prevost Island 

 

Our final night was spent at anchor off Russel island in Fulford harbour, only a few hours sail from home. Rani had not visited this lovely little island before, which lies close to Sydney, but still feels remote. The island has ties with Hawaii and we met a local who recommended "Maria Mahoi of the Islands" as a good read to learn more about this.

 

Crazy Anna never let us down

 

 

We came home this morning and were unpacked and home by 2pm. The room is still rocking for both of us after spending a very satsifying two full weeks on a small boat.