June 21, 2000 - Goodbye, Canada
A few weeks have passed since we arrived at our last Canadian port of Prince Rupert. Now that I'm finally sitting down to write our log for this leg of our journey to Juneau, I've realized that the things I've been writing have been quite cheery; one might think we haven't had a single problem all these miles.
Not so...we've had a fair number of disturbances, but looking back now it's very hard to remember those. In fact, our trip so far has a very dreamlike feeling in my memory. But, if I think hard enough, I can definitely remember those times when our tempers were high from stress or exhaustion, the rain and fog we motored through for what seemed like days, the time the leech line ripped out the entire leech seam of our tired jib, when our watermaker started spewing out water that smelled like seaweed.... I actually grin at those things now, for they just add to the flavor of our trip.
Like the drunk sportfishermen we encountered at Bishop Bay Hot Springs, who took over the float and began siccing their huge dog on our cats, so we ended up staying only two hours at that float and reluctantly continued on for our next port. At Prince Rupert, we had a great time exploring that little town and hanging out on the government floats for a few days. We had an especially good time eating out for the first time in what felt like months and in general being part of civilization again. After miles and miles of nothing but forested mountains and abandoned towns, Prince Rupert feels like a mecca in the middle of the wilderness (which it still has plenty of -- we even had an eagle land on our mast right in the harbor!).
After a few days in Prince Rupert buying fresh groceries and running errands, we made our crossing of Dixon Entrance and into Alaska. Dixon Entrance can get pretty wild (windy and wavy) being directly open to the Pacific, but our crossing was quite mild (we even had to motor). Later, anchored in Foggy Bay, we learned that some friends had crossed the day before and met 35 knot winds. Were we glad we'd stayed that extra day in Prince Rupert! By the way, after hundreds of miles of sailing and motoring, the kittties now don't even flinch when they hear the motor start. They even hang out with us in the cockpit most of the time (in fact, here's a photo of Xena napping on our cruising guide in the sunshine during our Dixon Entrance crossing). They are truly salty kitties now.
As we crossed 54° 41.1', we entered Alaska, and celebrated of course with a bottle of Alaskan Amber (which we miraculously had left of our supply we'd purchased way back in Seattle from Costco). A few hours later, we were anchored in our first Alaskan bay, Foggy Bay, very excited about checking back into the U.S. in Ketchikan the next afternoon.
-sdj-
