Happy Fogust

As I write to you all today, I’m sitting in front of the laundry room at the Ucluelet Small Craft Harbour. We arrived here in the afternoon, after motoring through dense fog from Tofino, dodging crab pots as we went. Hence the term for August – Fogust. As soon as we rounded the corner into the inlet, the sky opened up and Ucluelet welcomed us with beautiful views of mountains all around (and more crab pots).

Since last we posted, we’ve been busy! We spent a day in Alert Bay to take in First Nation culture. Our schedule aligned to attend the once-a-week performance by the T’sasala Cultural Group. The group performed traditional dances in their regalia. (https://www.tsasalaculturalgroup.ca/) We stopped at the U’mista Cultural Center to ask for directions to the Big House, where the performance was to take place. The person helping us laughed and said it was up the hill next to the tallest totem pole in the world. If we could see the totem pole, we would find the Big House. We were permitted to take pictures of the dances, as long as we took them only for ourselves. Out of respect for that, I am not posting any pictures of the performance online, though I am including a picture of the outside and inside of the Big House. It was an entertaining and educational performance. It was really spectacular to see people presenting the culture, not as something behind glass in a museum, but as part of their lives. Following the performance, we spent time at the U’mista Cultural Center. They have one of the largest collections in the country of sacred masks – most of which were stolen over a hundred years ago for private collections and placement in various museums throughout the world. The Center has been successful in recovering many of their people’s stolen items and is now sharing them with visitors in Alert Bay. The rest of Alert Bay was quite sleepy. We walked the nice long boardwalk to the edge of town where the First Nations burial grounds are located. We respectfully observed the many totems from across the street, then turned back towards the dock for the short dinghy ride home.

From Alert Bay we went on to God’s Pocket, a world-renowned scuba diving destination. The few dive shop operators in the area do not dive there in July and August, given that summer conditions decrease underwater visibility. We are used to those conditions, and were eager to dive regardless. The temperature underwater was 44 degrees Fahrenheit. The current on our first dive was intense, even though it was slack tide, so we chose to dive around our anchor chain so we could grab onto it if needed and not be swept away. It was a beautiful dive and there was so much life to observe. The first thing we saw as we dropped down was a ratfish – one of my all-time favorites, and also featured on our boat logo. We went on to see a widehand hermit crab, small rockfish, feather duster worms, sea cucumbers, sculpins, a swimming scallop, and a giant pacific chiton, among other things. We moved the boat about 4 nautical miles to Port Alexander at Nigei Island for more diving. There was no current, and we happened to anchor right near a big rock ledge. From the charts we could see there was a drop off, but you never know if it’s going to be sand, gravel, rock, mud, etc. This rock ledge was a beautiful rocky reef. The first thing we saw as we dropped down were hundreds of opalescent nudibranchs. It appears they were mating and we saw couples together and eggs all over the kelp. Dropping down deeper we saw schools of china rockfish, hermit crabs, kelp greenlings, gobies, multiple red irish lords, burrowing sea cucumbers, orange cup corals, and vermillion rockfish, among loads of other sea life. My underwater camera is out for repair, so you’ll just have to imagine what it looked like. We’re both so thankful we finally had the opportunity to dive in this remote place. In addition to the undersea life, one morning I observed two canines walking along the beach. At first, I spent time scanning around for a dinghy and a person. But these were not domestic dogs, they were sea wolves (aka Vancouver Island wolves)! There are only about 250 of them, and I had the luck of spotting two! In the evenings we both heard their howls from time to time.

From there we went back east to Port Hardy on Vancouver Island. It’s the end of the road on the north side of the island and the last town to stop in prior to “going around the top” of Vancouver Island as a local we met at the dock called it. We got busy planning our passage and provisioning, and preparing to welcome two crew members aboard. Our friends from Seattle, Zac and Mark, joined us for the trip from Port Hardy to Tofino.

It was so much fun having friends aboard, and we also learned a lot about how to teach people about cruising on our sailboat. This is the first time we welcomed crew aboard, and it was great having extra hands to share the workload of navigating, taking watches on the helm, raising sails, cooking meals, and cleaning.  They brought a few games with them, some treats from Seattle, and lots of great humor. Zac and Mark also brought renewed energy to us and a wonderful appreciation for this journey. We covered 256.9 nautical miles with them and stopped in Bull Harbour, Winter Harbour, Klaskish Basin, the Bunsby’s, Santa Gertrudis Cove, Friendly Cove, Hot Springs Cove, and Tofino. We spotted lots of wildlife, including a black bear on the shoreline while passing around the north side of Nootka Island, and more sea otters than I could count. We saw quite a few mom and pup pairs in Bull Harbour, and continued to see them almost every single day. We also had a whale day where we saw spouts all around us, plus some breaching and tail slaps in the distance. As we ate lunch that day and looked off to observe a lighthouse, a big humpback whale surfaced just off the port side of the boat and swam along with us for a while. It was amazing! Conditions were decent off the west coast of Vancouver Island. We had a fair amount of ocean swell, with wave height ranging from 2-6 feet, and a variety of wave intervals. Wind was pretty minimal, and the few times it did pick up we were going head on into it. Not great sailing conditions, but we made the best of it. We also had plenty of fog, but some days of beautiful sunshine. Cruising through the fog really helps you learn to trust your instruments and charts! I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story for our cruise with Zac and Mark.

Tofino was fun and a bit overwhelming. It turns out we arrived during the long weekend for B.C. Day, so the town was extra-packed with vacationers. Tofino has a California-surfer vibe, and this was the biggest and busiest town we’d been in since we left Victoria on July 5th. For those of you who have been to Tofino, you know it’s not actually that big. You can walk everywhere within about 10 minutes. But for us, it was big. We dropped off Zac and Mark at their airport shuttle in the morning on August 5th, following a fun evening of perusing gift shops and eating excellent food! After saying goodbye, we did some errands, ate another amazing meal to celebrate 8 years together, and then took it easy on the boat for two days before heading to Ucluelet.

Thanks for reading and keeping in touch. We love seeing your comments, and receiving texts, emails, and calls from you all. One final note, Mark updated our website recently to add a new section called “The Boat”. If you’re curious about the boat specs and all the projects we worked on prior to departing Seattle you should check it out. The link to it is at the top of the page.