{"id":643,"date":"2006-07-08T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-07-08T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/?p=643"},"modified":"2009-04-15T08:58:57","modified_gmt":"2009-04-15T13:58:57","slug":"s_logs-dashew-dashew262","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/s_logs-dashew-dashew262\/","title":{"rendered":"Johnstone Straits"},"content":{"rendered":"
Heading north through BC’s beautiful and fascinating Johnstone Straits. Giving Nobletec software a try.<\/div>\n

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When you’re headed to Alaska, the typical trip involves a cruise through the Johnstone Straits in British Columbia. This area starts at the town of Campbell River, and continues north through some fascinating and beautiful country. We stopped at Port Campbell to reload the larder. The fresh veggies and fruit that we purchased there are the best tasting we’ve ever had. Not sure if this is due to the scenery, or the fact that it is locally grown, but we’ve never had fresh food like this anywhere else. <\/p>\n

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Seeing as how we’re cruising in the 21st century, we’ll try some Google Earth satellite photos instead of charts to give you a feel for the area. Campbell River is at the lower right hand of this image above. Port McNeil, the end of this day’s journey, is at the upper left.<\/p>\n

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The most interesting part of this trip is through the Seymour Narrows, shown above. During spring tides, current will run at 17 knots through here. There are whirlpools and overfalls – not something to be trifled with. But even on spring tides you can get through during short periods of slack water.<\/p>\n

In our case we were on a neap tide cycle (with just half a moon showing), so max current was about seven knots.<\/p>\n

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We’ve been using Nobeltec software this summer. It includes a pretty good tide and current predictor, shown above. The upper prediction is for Seymour Narrows. The lower prediction is for "The Race", a spot a couple of hours further along the way. With an 1100 check-out time from the Campbell River marina, we were just going to drop the hook and wait for slack, but then we decided to try and work back eddies along the shore to get an early start.<\/p>\n

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The radar image above shows our track close to shore as well as the overall layout of the land as we approached the Seymour Narrows. In mid-channel the current was running at 4 to 5 knots against us. But along the side of the channel – still deep – we had less than a knot of adverse current, and sometimes a knot or knot and a half of countercurrent actually helping. There is an anchorage just to the east of Seymour Narrows where one can wait for slack water, but with a top speed of 13 knots, we figured we’d just press on.<\/p>\n

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The image above is from the middle of the straits. We’re off against the north (right) side, barely 50 feet (15m) from the rock walls of the channel. You can see that even over on the side we’ve got three knots of adverse current (B and G speed is shown as 11 knots, while GPS speed is down to 8 knots).<\/p>\n

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We tried to capture the feeling of the edge of the channel in a photo. This looks like lots of room, but it felt a whole bunch closer! And, of course, there was the tug and tow on its way down current as we were heading up, which gave us further incentive to move to the side and leave the big guy as much space as possible.<\/p>\n

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Speaking of which, we’ve been using the "zoom" feature of our Furuno 2117 radar a lot these days. In this case there’s what appears to be a double target ahead of us a couple of miles. We could not yet make it out with the binoculars so we "zoomed" in on the target – which is shown on the right middle side of the image above. Note that the radar image is "tilted" as we are using the "north up true motion" display which looks the same as the north up display on the chart plotter.<\/p>\n

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In the photo above, cropped from the previous radar photo, you can see the zoomed image, clearly a tug and tow.<\/p>\n

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We cannot imagine the skill it must take to maneuver big tows like this through tight spots like Seymour Narrows.<\/p>\n

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There must be a lot of stress with this job. But then look at the scenery, which probably helps the crew to keep life in perspective.<\/p>\n

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When the sun comes out, the lighting is wonderful. This island is located in the middle of the Race Passage, with several protected anchorages.<\/p>\n

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Our destination was Port McNeil, and after dropping the hook, this min-tug driver came by for a chat. He’s a retired commercial fisherman and has been all over BC and SE Alaska.<\/p>\n

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As a welcome gift he brought us three tasty crabs from his morning catch. Linda wasted no time in getting these into a salad.<\/p>\n

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We bypassed some spectacular cruising areas around Desolation Sound and further north. Our plan is to make tracks to see some ice before we get too late in the season, and then, time permitting, retrace our steps back this way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heading north through BC’s beautiful and fascinating Johnstone Straits. Giving Nobletec software a try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dashew-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}