Friday, July 12th, 2024
In our boating life we have been round trip “up and down” Johnstone Strait three times. Since the journey takes a bit over 8 hours each way, this means we have spent 48 hours in this Strait. Those of you who are familiar with this body of water understand that this is a lot of time on this Strait. So much can go wrong in 48 hours. Fortunately, today, we had a very uneventful journey. After consulting with a friend who is an expert on the app Predict Wind we were much more confident that today’s journey would be uneventful. We will elaborate more on what we learned from him tomorrow!
We left Sointula at approximately 6:45 a.m. so we could arrive at Green Point rapids when they were near slack. For the first half of the journey we were riding the incoming tide, which meant that the last four hours of the journey we were fighting the outgoing tide. We decided to take the Northern route partially because we had not been through this route for eight years, and also we were hoping to avert the winds that inevitably show up in Johnstone Strait in the early afternoon.
We arrived at our destination in Blind Channel around 2:30. Both Marlene and I believe that at least today, the Northern route didn’t make our trip any easier. We ran into an abundance of choppy seas when we turned North at Fanny Island. Not difficult, but not what we expected. We also found because the tide was going out and the water passage ways are narrow, the outgoing tide slowed our speed over water more than we would have experienced on the main route. All things equal we should have taken Johnstone Strait all the way down to the cut off for Blind Channel.
We parked the boat on the inside dock. It was a warm sunny evening. We are looking forward to a sunny day tomorrow and meeting up with old and new friends here in Blind Channel for drinks, dinner and “boat story” sharing.
