SV Quijote 2025 - A Wee Blog for a Brief Trip

I'm at home, lying on my bed, yawning and yawning, and coming up with nothing to talk about. It was a normal voyage ending day. Transiting locks was typical. Thankfully I've got a card up my sleeve. I saved a pithy anecdote from yesterday. There was an undisclosed fourth pithy anecdote. Even better, this anecdote has a backstory. Back in time we go. 2017. I'm still El Capitan. Kevin is still capable crew. We're cruising around Vancouver Island. Thomas was with us. Vi had had enough of us. Adiosed the pair of us. One morning, against all precedent, Kevin decides he's going to start the engine. He does so and smoke comes pouring out of the engine room. I looked at him, accusation written all over my face. What had he done? It turned out to be a bad starter solenoid, but Kevin felt guilty as hell, and it was written all over his face. Skip forward to 2025.   Eight years is a long time; it's finally time to put eight years of shame and humiliation away. Kevin decide...

Our last night.    The last night of the epic, the unbelievable, the journey of a lifetime!!! Or not.    No really, it's been a great few weeks.    It was a little abbreviated, shoehorned between other trips, but it was good to get out, and really good to have Kevin along for the duration, and Tina along for the first few days. We crossed the Strait of Juan de Fuca today and headed down the throat of the Admiralty Inlet. We ended up where we started out: Port Ludlow. I have several ideas for today's anecdotal tidbit. Should I tell about getting stung by a wasp yesterday at the exact moment I was steering the boat into Dodd Narrows? Should I describe the sensation of eating Kevin's "key lime" pie? Should I tell about precisely timing turning on the deck wash hose pressure to shoot Kevin in the face with a jet of water?    Or should I tell about two crazed commercial vessel operators, on successive days, start honking their horns at me repeatedly to...

  One of our loyal followers wrote to ask me why I hadn't written a blog post in a couple days.    It's a fair question.    I write posts in my head during the day so I have some idea of what I'm going to say when I sit down.    I often forget whether I've actually written something, or just thought about writing it.  So… sometimes I have to go back and reread prior posts to figure out what I've said and what I haven't. The whole process is a little more time-consuming than it might be if I just sat down and wrote something, which is to say if I was more efficient. It's also the case that I'm usually trying to do the writing while I'm either making dinner or helping with dinner, or doing dishes or helping with cleaning up. Or    downloading weather or navigating for the next day. There are a lot of distractions. During last night's engine check, I discovered I needed to retention the fan belt. That involves digging out the tools, removing t...

Boho Bay. Another out of the way anchorage that nobody seems to know about. I don't know, maybe they don't want to know. It's a scenic anchorage with a couple of homesteads built on the shoreline. It's a little tricky to get your anchor set because it's so deep right up until it's too shallow. Kevin asked: why don't we drop the anchor farther into the bay where it's more shallow? My answer: the bay doesn't appear to be big enough for my comfort farther in. It doesn't have good swinging room, which means if the wind direction changes we might find ourselves on the bottom. A couple more boats have come in since we came. I can see them wrestling with the same decision that we came to, trolling around the shallow end, then coming out to anchor deeper. Some Cabin cruiser will come in and throw their anchor in the shallow end, but they won't have much chain out. They'll get away with it because it's not going to blow very hard tonight. U...

Here's something new... I was just observing that one nice thing about being in town is being able to open the windows without worrying about mosquitoes. One disadvantage is that the docks are noisy and can wake me in the middle of the night. Is that true? No. I have never been awakened by the dock noise in the middle of the night. But darn it, it seems like I ought to have. They're very loud. Boy, this blog has gone downhill. I should have some snippet of reflection from the day. Some pithy anecdote. Okay, here's what I've got. There was no wind yesterday. We motored four hours from Bird Cove to Campbell River. We slid sideways up to the fuel dock, shoe horning our way between two yachts. Kevin sprung for ice cream sandwiches while I rung up the fuel. We were making our way toward our assigned slip, but I lined up on the wrong one. I started to make the correction, but knew it had a cockup in the making. Sometimes there is nothing for it but to go aroun...

It's been just Kevin and me onboard for most of this trip. Neither of us are big talkers. He calls it companionable silence. It's pretty quiet. I like conversation, but, long periods of silence are nice too. Kevin is a good fit for Quijote. Our common appreciation for quiet aside, he's also incredibly conscientious about everything he does on the boat. If something needs doing, Kevin takes care of it. He's good crew. I asked him to take a look at the knot meter sensor on the bottom of the hull, his response wasn't: "are you crazy?" It was: "I would, but I don't have a mask, so I won' be able to see much." Fair enough. If I buy a mask in Campbell River, I have no doubt Kevin will dive under the hull for me. He won't want to do it in the marina (the water isn't clean), but the first anchorage out he will. I guess that's a good reason not to buy a mask. I don't want to be asking him to do what I don't feel l...

Quijote started the trip with 110 gallons of fresh water. With two days to go, we're down to about half of that. Same goes for fuel. We started with 90 gallons and have about half remaining. That's usage frugal enough that we could have stayed out another couple of weeks. We'll be in Campbell River in a couple days. We'll fill the tanks, the cupboards, take hot showers, do a little laundry, and get our land legs back. I made reservations for two nights at the Discovery Harbour Marina. I like the marina because it has everything you'd want within easy walking distance. MegaGrocery? ☑️ Propane? ☑️ Great restaurants? ☑️ Yummy apple pies? ☑️ Fast WiFi? 👎🏻 (can't have it all) As for the here and now... we're in a lovely, spacious cove stern tied to a cliff. When we arrived there was a lot of room, but slowly it has started to fill. There are about a dozen boats in here now. Three times that many probably wedge their way in here at peak season, before the kid...

We've seen whales on a few occasions on this trip, most notably: Princess Louisa Inlet. Two or more humpbacks were hanging out, slapping their fins, and having a grand time of it while we were there... we could hear them ricocheting across the rock walls every so often for the two days we were there. Kevin made squash risotto for dinner tonight and did an excellent job of it. I made reservations for two nights at the Campbell River Marina today. They wanted pre-payment and proof of insurance to make the reservation. I'm not sure I would call this progress since the days when we could call them up on our radio when we arrived. Hopefully the process is better for them.

Thunder Bay! It's an awfully dramatic name for such a mediocre anchorage. It has some things going for it, and several things that count against it. Going for it: very few boats and the anchor sets very well.  Going against: very little protection in a blow. Especially any winds coming from the south or east. Crab pots are in the few shallow places that are suitable for anchoring. There are very few places for anchoring. The bay is mostly too deep to anchor. When dusk comes the place is thick with mosquitoes.   Given that list of shortcomings, it's no wonder there are no boats here. Kevin says he never wants to come back. Luckily for us, I happen to have some mosquito coils on the boat. We fired one up and put it near the companionway.    We closed up all the other hatches so the mosquitoes have no way in except through the smoke. It seems to be working. Finally a cool day today, the first of the trip. We even had clouds.  Digital postcards from Princess Lo...

Today is our first 0 mile day since we left. We're staying put in Princess Louisa Inlet. We got up this morning, had cream of wheat for breakfast, then jumped in the dinghy and rowed to shore. It was hiking time, or… high time for hiking. The hike at the head of Princess Louisa Inlet is steep and rough, with a lot of downed trees, veggie belays, root ladders and the like. It's a great workout and is rewarded by a waterfall when you get to the top. An old trapper's cabin is on the site as well. What's left of it. Three rows of logs and a couple of bedsprings. We'll have to time our departure for slack at the rapids again on the way out tomorrow; hit them at slightly before noon. We won't get to the next anchorage until after 8 PM. That means we won't be able to have dinner until after eight or we cook it under way. Hmmm… I guess I'll let future-Rod decide. He's the one that's got to make dinner under way. Or eat late.

It's dusk. A few mosquitoes are ineffectually staggering around the cockpit. The sound of Chatterbox Falls, a distant white noise. I enjoy princess Louisa Inlet. I like forging the (non)rapids on the way in and out. I like how quiet and calm it always is. I like the way cliff faces tower above us. I like the trail above the falls and its expansive view of the inlet. I like the deep shorelines. The first time I came to this inlet, I flew in on a float plane and and joined the boat in sailing back to Seattle. A few others flew in with me. The crew that brought the sailboat up flew back. It was a club event. That was sometime in the early 1990s. There was nobody else in here. Today there's probably 30 boats in here scattered around the inlet. I haven't tried other anchorages within the inlet except to anchor at the base of the falls, where the constant outflow of water keeps the boat aligned, so there's no need to worry about swinging out into the deeper water. To accompl...

The Canadian military does their war exercising in the strait of Georgia, North of Nanaimo. Every now and then they activate that area to keep people out of it, especially those pesky boaters. I remember many years ago, studying marine charts of the area and plotting (on paper) my course around the military exercise area. I noticed the area ran inside of a couple small islands, the Ballinas Islands. There was a space of about a half mile between the islands and the exercise area, about the width of the islands themselves. I figured I could save myself time and fuel if I thread the gap. I suppose I could have been roundly chastised for my impertinence. In fact, the gentleman that called me on the radio was very polite. Would I please turn my boat around and go out the way I came in. Copy that.

We arrived in Nanaimo in good form around 1 PM. The anchorage was only busy. It wasn't insanely busy. Which is to say, we found enough empty space to give the boat room to swing. With plans to meet friends from Victoria, we entered into an episode, which I can only describe as a (potentially dangerous) keystone cops moment. We set up the dinghy with the outboard and headed toward town. Midway through the channel, the outboard died. I'd convinced myself it had plenty of fuel, figuring if it didn't, we'll just row - better than refueling and smelling like gasoline for the rest of the afternoon. Well, it ran out of fuel. Worse, when we started to row, we discovered that one of the oars was broken. The paddle would allow a couple of strokes and then turn on the shaft giving no purchase at all. So attempting to return to Quiote to resolve the problems, we got into a rhythm: row a couple strokes, adjust the oar, row a couple, adjust, row, adjust. We were making progres...

We have three maintenance orders for the day: reattach the starboard side NAV light, replace the zip tie on the anchor shackle, and remove the chart table to clean the milk I spilled that was inaccessible except by disassembling the chart table. Better a little work than the smell of sour milk. One ordinarily doesn't attach equipment to a boat using zip ties, but it's not a bad practice if you're only doing it temporarily. Or so I said to myself two years ago when I mounted the port side NAV light. Kevin discovered the light unattached and hanging from its wire. The zip tie that was used to hold it in place had gone brittle and broken from exposure to the sun. To his credit, Kevin set out to do something about it. He chased down my zip ties and went forward to the bow to reattach the light. Awesome! It should last another couple years. We are in Dogfish Bay tonight. This is my only my second time mooring here. There are mooring balls in the bay marked with the Vancouver...

We're in Bedwell Harbor this evening.    We cleared customs on our way in, one of the reasons I stop here every year. It's quiet, well protected and clearing customs is easy. The network of trails around the island is also a nice feature. We could clear in Nanaimo. In fact we did during COVID when Bedwell was closed. But Nanaimo is SO chaotic: boats, ferries, and float planes; military vessels, dinghies and kayaks; they're constantly flying everywhere. You have to be constantly on guard, watching everything that moves. The threats come from everywhere. I find it to be such a stressful environment. it's always a relief to get out of Nanaimo.    We'll be there in two days when Tina departs, but for now we have Bedwell Harbor.  Two highlights of the day include the hiking we did as soon as we got here. The island is hilly, so hiking across it is a grunt. It's not likely to be done without sweating. Therein lies the second highlight of the day: showers on the back d...

The weather today has been perfect: sunny, not too hot, a bluebird kind of day. In fact I'm feeling like I've had too much of a good thing and came below to write and get out of the sun.  The conditions today were polar opposites of yesterday. Calm, smooth water, current pushing rather than impeding. It felt like we were flying along on a jet boat compared to yesterday. We made it to our anchorage at the south end of Lopez Island before 1:00. That left us plenty of time for shore exploration. We pumped up the dinghy and paddled ashore, looking for a home owned by friends on this island. Their home is under construction and nobody was in, but it was nice to see the place and get some walking in. Nice too to get off the boat for a couple of hours.  Kevin is on the hook for dinner tonight. He doesn't know yet but he's making Thai basil fried rice, a favorite of Quijote's captain. As good as it is, I've always thought the basil described for that dish was a little d...

  It was a slow day from the start. It took us two and a half hours to get through the locks, more than double what it normally takes. There was never any explanation.     The locks just wouldn't open.     Even the commercial traffic sat and waited while the locks sat idle. The tide was flooding into Puget Sound from the North for most of the day, so the current was against us. The wind was blowing against us too.    It's a good thing we only had 25 miles to travel.    Fighting our way into the chop, 20 knots of wind in our faces, it was impossible to go any faster without burning a lot of fuel, and there was no hope of making progress under sail. Thankfully we weren't in a hurry. We plodded along, as slow as at 1.5 knots for a while, and waited for improvement. Eventually things turned and we made better progress. At 4pm we were finally anchored and ready to start dinner. Plans to dinghy to shore for more cooler ice were shelved, and we star...

It's the night before our departure. I'm only now thinking about the fact that I haven't yet started a blog for the trip. In 2016 I held crew meetings to discuss navigation, menu choices, emergency procedures, anchoring techniques and the like. It was a good way too get the crew familiar ahead of the trip. Familiar with each other, with the boat and with our collective expectations. For that trip up the Inside Passage to Glacier Bay, Alaska, I had sixteen crew come and go over fourteen weeks.    You can read about it here if you're interested:  http://svquijote2016.blogspot.com     There are 114 posts, each a paragraph or two.  Nine years later it will be just me and Kevin for most of the two and a half week trip. Tina will join us for the first several days and depart in Nanaimo. Kevin and I plan to continue on up to Desolation Sound, then turn around at Campbell River for the return trip.  Just two and a half weeks is all I have time for this year. A...