Water travel in Washington and BC

[SalishAire]

The "Would you Loop in an A25" thread is getting a bit hijacked with folks from here in heaven writing about places to go in an A25 in the Salish Sea (AKA Puget Sound, Straits of Georgia, and Strait of Juan de Fuca). So lets do this right and do our bit for tourism by letting our secrets out.

I'll start by letting the world in on the secret of Princess Louisa Inlet. On a chart it hardly looks like its worth the hassle as it takes a full day in a slow boat to get there with virtually no place to tie up and rest along the fiord (fjord?) and a significant tidal rapid to cross at slack (Malibu). That said after visiting in our first boat when a BC local pointed out that in our first "far north" outing we had just enough time to go and visit we have made it a tradition that every boat we own must get its photo taken in the inlet at least once.

A hardly touches the surface description: After passing through Malibu rapids your boat enters an inland "lake" (except its salt water) surrounded by cliffs rising straight up from hundreds of feet deep to thousands of feet high. In the summer the place is amazing but usually very busy with visiting boats. We went up once in the fall and had the inlet to ourselves in a massive rainstorm - the usual handful of waterfalls went up to about 20 in number by morning and Chatterbox Falls at the head of the inlet roared and it was quite magical.

Some hints on getting there: We usually begin in Pender Harbour where we dock in Hospital Cove after getting fuel for the night. The next day we run up to Eggmont Harbour and dock for the night and make sure to walk over to Skumchuck Narrows to watch one of the fastest tidal rapids in the world at maximum change. Then we double check our current tables to find the afternoon slack time at Malibu Rapids and head out for a very long day running up the fiord. You will know you have arrived at Malibu when you see a youth camp in the middle of nowhere on a rock. The rapids run around that rock and you will see other boaters idling around the entrance to the very short rapid section waiting for the first one brave enough to see if the water has truly reached a calm state (we have passed through with some inbound current in our Nordhavn 46 and got a bit of a wild ride as the whirlpools inside of the entrance hadn't settled yet - be forewarned and don't have a cup of hot tea where it can fly across the cockpit!). Once inside you can take your time getting to the marine park at the head of the inlet (or there is a small section of park about 1/2 way in where we sometimes see boats). At the head of the inlet there is a very long dock that you can moor on if there is space (an A 25 may be able to sneak onto the back side but know that the shore is a very steep and unforgiving solid granite rock). Otherwise you need to anchor (a word of experience: unless you like waking up in the ground at low tide, don't anchor in front of Chatterbox Falls where there is shallow area - long story about a bent rudder post on our first visit that we'll not tell at this time). Anchoring in the fiords of BC can be interesting. Look along the shore and you will often seen metal rings imbedded in the wall or signs of rope burns on trees from shore ties from the stern of anchored boats (now you know why you often see Salish Sea boats with reels of line mounted on the stern). There is a shelf that goes out from the shore that quickly drops off to never-never depths. The idea is to put you anchor on the shelf (or the edge of the drop-off) and then make sure you don't swing out over the deep section and dangle your anchor by pulling the stern back to shore and tying it off.

Here is a chart of sorts: https://www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fm-gp/map ... 4-eng.html

Now some photos to explain why its worth the hassle to go there:

[11kolive]

Beautiful description of Princess Louisa and all it offers. We took our A-25 up there years ago and wrote a blog about the trip. http://princesslouisa2010.blogspot.com/

We have been back there many times after this first journey.

[WillieC]

Like I said...don't tell anybody.

[DesertAlbin736]

Ah yes, Princess Louisa and Chatterbox Falls, 2016. Certainly one of our most memorable experiences equaled or exceeded only by Desolation Sound two years later in 2018. In our case it was a Plan B alternative from our original 2016 goal of getting to Desolation Sound. We were buddy boating with or besties from Flagstaff who trailered their O'Day 25 up from Arizona. That was the time we lost our Boatex dinghy when a wave ripped it off the snap davits around the same time the lower gudgeon on the transom hung rudder of their O'Day broke. Georgia Strait can get rough at times! I've told that story here before. We had crossed the Strait from Nanaimo, spent a night in Smuggler's Cove, then went over to Pender Harbour/Garden Bay. We'd lost several days to mechanical delays when the raw water pump on our friends' boat broke down plus weather delays. So by the time we got to Pender Harbour we were anxious to move on up the channel on the inside of Texada Island to Lund en route to Desolation Sound. The morning of July 11, 2016 it looked like conditions would be calm enough to make a run for it, knowing wind and waves were forecasted to kick up later in the day. We figured if worse came to worse we could duck in to a sheltered anchorage on Hardy Island. But we only made it about 6 NM to a bight off Nelson Island when a wave caught our dinghy & tore it off the snap davits. Chaos ensued. The dinghy swamped & capsized, the painter fouled the prop and jammed the rudder, leaving us adrift toward a lee shore. Luckily a large sailboat heard our distress call and gave us a tow back to Pender Harbour. Meanwhile our friends had their own problem, nearly losing their rudder. After an attempt to drop anchor their rode fouled their Saildrive prop they had to get a commercial tow back to Irivine's Landing in Pender Harbor. Here's a few pictures from that:

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Just getting hold of the tow line and making it fast to our samson post bow cleat was an adventure. Seas were too rough to get close enough for the tow boat to toss a line, so he backed off, ran out a hundred feet or so of his floating poly stern tie line, then swooped by trailing it astern & I caught it with my boat hook as he passed and had just enough time to wrap a turn around the samson post. As seen in the photo, I stayed up on the bow tending it, tethered to the forestay chain plate that's part of the sail rig option on our boat. Once back in calm water I went back to check on the dinghy and it was gone, never to be seen again.

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So from that point we huddled & decided to skip Desolation and go for Princess Louisa & Malibu instead, heading up Agamemnon Channel, skipping Egmont on the way up with an overnight raftup in Vancouver Bay so as to time our arrival at Malibu rapids for the afternoon slack tide the next day.

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It helped having a two boat flotilla, which allowed for photos of each other's boats.

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A cropped b/w version of the above photo was used in the BoatUS magazine article we were featured in the February/March 2020 issue.

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Then there was Chatterbox Falls itself.

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And finally we did stop over night at Egmont on the way back & stayed at the Government Dock for a night. As always, click in any photo for a full screen view.

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So it's easy to see how one could get spoiled, even jaded, when it comes to comparisons with any other cruising ground. It's like flying a fighter jet compared to a Piper Cub.