Skipper’s perspective:

This leg of our trip was slow to start. We were stuck in La Conner for two days waiting for the right window of tides, weather, and work schedule to move forward. The morning of Wednesday, April 19th, the factors finally aligned to allow us to get started.

The trip up the Swinomish Canal through and through the northern entrance was uneventful. There was a trawler ahead of us in the channel blazing the trail. No other traffic passed us going south to crowd the channel, so we were able to stay in the center the whole way through. We left at an ebbing 5′ positive tide, and never saw less than 12′ on the depth sounder, so more than 14′ of water the whole way under these conditions. We passed under the twin bridges of Highway 20 with what felt like plenty of clearance. In theory we had 75′ clearance at a mean high water of 9.4′, so at a 5′ tide we would have had 9.4′ between the top of our 70′ mast and the bridge. My primary concern had been the overhead telephone cables on the charts marked as having a clearance of 72′, but we saw no signs of these.

From La Conner we motored into the San Juan Islands, stopping in Blind Bay for a few hours to finish the online workday before continuing on to Roche Harbor late in the afternoon. We hunkered down at Roche for two nights weathering a big blow that came through from the southwest on Thursday, dropping anchor up close to the southern shore of the bay just west of the marina. We saw gusts over 33kts at anchor that Thursday, the winds clocking the boat around a peripheral ring of crab pots that kept us on edge. Our trusty Rocna anchor held us solidly in place, pulling up a hefty glop of shell-encrusted mud when we weighed anchor the next day.

Friday at eleven we set off for Victoria to catch the ebb tide and time our landing in-between meetings. The Haro Strait was choppier than I had predicted, with about 12 knots of southerly wind pushing against the ebb. Melinda slowed the boat to keep from pounding, and with the ebb were still making good time. By the time we rounded Discovery Island, we started pushing into the incoming flood, and were against a couple knots of current. We’d marked her course to go outside Discovery to avoid having to navigate the Mayor Channel and we were now in the heaviest flow of the flood current.

We changed course at this point to cut north of the Trial Islands through the Enterprise Channel, rather than staying further out in the Juan de Fuca Strait. We caught a bit of a back-current east of the Trial Islands, but a hefty flow against us while in the channel. Once we were clear of the Trial Islands we had an easier time in nearly slack water up against Vancouver Island.

The area around Discovery Island was littered with debris in the water worse than most I’ve seen in the area. Logs and sticks appeared in front of the boat with random timing, along with drifting tide lines of grass and kelp. It took constant attention on the water in front of the boat to avoid these obstacles.

It’s always fun to come into Victoria from the water – it seems just about the right level of waterborne activity to be interesting but not overly stressful. The buildings, floating homes, and water taxis provide ample eye-candy for a visiting boat as you move deeper into the harbor.

As you enter the inner harbor there is a set of yellow buoys to mark the traffic lanes for small boat traffic. You just keep these close to your port side as you move in and out of the inner harbor.

About half way into the inner harbor is the customs dock on the south side of the channel. You can make it out by the yellow caps on top of the pylons. I’ve never seen any Canada Border Services Agency officials here, but it’s where you tie up to make the call to them to clear in. It can be busy in the summer – after the first few times using the phone on the dock I switched to just calling the number from my mobile phone from the comfort of my boat.

We’ve been very lucky each time we come to Victoria. We’ve only ever been here on either our catamaran or a chartered catamaran, but we have always been able to get onto G-dock since we are beamy. This puts us right in the corner between the Empress Hotel and Parliament, with a good view of the street activity and passersby on the waterfront.

One of the bad parts of staying in a marina? Gulls! They seem to enjoy making a mess of your boat, and this trip to Victoria had to be one of the worst instances of birdification of the top deck that I’ve experienced. The docks themselves were littered with crab components, and the gulls were clearly pulling them up onto the dock for munching. I found the remains of a crab feast on the top deck the next day, and more a few days later that I’d missed on the solar array. Yuck!