Oh, Canada!

By Sailor Keddy -
We departed Ketchikan on Tuesday and we just got into Port McNeill in British Columbia. I'm back on Terrapin Flyer as we make our way down to Seattle over the course of the next week or so. The crew is great again, Alex has excellent friends. This time I am travelling with a former public defender in Palo Alto, CA and his wife who is a professor at Stanford. Great people with great conversation. The food is top notch again as well, with shrimp scampi, curried cous cous with tuna and other great dishes.

The series of straits and fjords and the islands between them make up this part of the world, from Glacier Bay down to Washington state, called the inside passages. We deviated from them yesterday to make up for lost time and went outside in the Pacific and came back in on the north side of Vancouver Island. The forecast was calling for seas of 1 meter or less (note the metric system up here, sophisticated) and winds up to 25 knots. Totally doable in a Hylas 49. Except for we didn't sail, we motored. We motored directly into a headwind and 2 meter seas, making for a rough night. I got sick twice, won't lie. And it was pouring and cold, I was soaked. But, on the flip side, I was reading about the whaleship Essex and the fate of their crew, so that took some of the misery out of it. The seas calmed when we got back inside and the sun actually came out for the first time since I've been up here, almost a week. All in all though, I'm over sailing in northern latitudes. I'd like to make one trip to Nova Scotia to my homeland (where Winchelsea the frigate came to in 1749), but other than that, its south of the Mason-Dixon for this kid.

I've had a lot of time to think on Terrapin Flyer, and I have to admit, I think the most about Alaina. She really wanted to come with me on this trip, but we have to save up cash for our trip back east so it didn't work out. She's very eager to learn everything there is to know about sailing, navigating, how a cruising boat works and the systems on it and general seamanship; and I am more than happy to teach her all I know so far. I can't help but think, every time I turn around and see something different on the boat, how I'd explain everything I knew about it to her. Next time though, she'll be with me. I mean, who wouldn't want to hire a young couple, one a boat captain and the other a yoga instructor, in their 20s to take their boat from point A to point B (so long as each point is below latitude 36 degrees north), right?

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