So I realized I haven't blogged in a long time...oops! Maybe I should change my blog title to
"Infrequent Thoughts From A Sailor" The sailing season has been amazing so far, and has been speeding by so fast I can barely believe I only have 7 trips left... The summer has been filled with great trainees and volunteers and tons of adventure and suprise! Here is one of them:
We had quite an adventure going up Knight Inlet. No SALTS vessel had ever been up there before so were breaking new territory. It's a long way up, but all of the rest of the inlets on the coast were are really quite beautiful at the top so we figured it would be well worth the trip. It started out as a hot and sunny day (I hear the rest of the province is in a heat wave as well, although I think we have it pretty good out on the water with a fairly consistent sea breeze to cool us down. We passed a beautiful glacier fed waterfall that was cascading right down into the ocean. (WE swam here on the way back, and it was definitely glacier fed, I can assure you!)
It actually took all of the professional crew to get up there. It was dark during the last couple hours of the run and there was so much debris, logs and general flotsam and jetsam floating around we had to have Sam on top of the main gaff with the "datebuster" (massive flashlight) scanning the water ahead of us, Jacob up forward with another light, Tristan on radar, I was on deck and Skipper was everywhere all at once of course. The radar was picking up everything! and it was like going through a minefield, except we couldn't really tell the size of things so we just had to dodge everything! I AM HAVING A STRESS MOMENT! We got up there and had no idea what it looked like, no-one in SALTS had ever been up there before so we launched the zody and were taking soundings on the bottom with the lead-lined(we couldn't really get a reading on the electronic depth sounder because there was so much fresh water pouring in from the estuary) finally found a place to anchor (a little sketchy) and had crew up every hour just in case we started dragging. Once we were finally anchored though everyone just crashed on deck and we were staring at all the stars. It was so beautiful, absolutely no light pollution you could see everything.
The next morning waking up was like Christmas, we knew were in the this amazing place, but hadn't seen it in the light yet, so there was this moment that we all savoured in our bunks as we woke up wondering what we would see when we poked our heads up onto the deck. We weren't disapointed, the view was amazing! however it was slightly obscured by the hundreds and thousands of horseflies that were buzzing around the boat. We had planned a bit of sleep in (0930) and a one-sitting breakfast so everyone could eat all together up on deck, but no one ate on deck due to the pesky little buzzers that apparently wanted breakfast too! We launched the zodiac to scout out possibilities for sauna, but Skipper soon radioed back saying that he had a cloud of horseflies buzzing after him and there were so many ashore he has at least 10-14 on his head alone at any one moment! It was all we could do to put on long pants and sleeves and weigh anchor as fast as we could to leave these evil devourers of flesh behind us!
So in the end it was a beautiful inlet, but I don't think we will be revisiting it any time soon!
