June 21st

BACK TO THE VOYAGE AROUND CAPE CAUTION

June 21^st We leave Storm Islands (our little hidey hole) at 5am leaving Pine Island to our starboard. We are tuned to the weather station and have an ear on the areas that we are concerned about. We know about Pine Island as we are there now and can just make it out in the fog. The ones are of interest are Egg Island, West Sea Otter, Calvert and Addenbroke. The thing about the weather channel is the millisecond that the radio transmission takes place on the area of concern it goes like this. “Egg Island reports wind and sea condition @ 0700 hrs to be % ##......pop blank blank???”  sputters and then starts up crystal clear on the next not so important place in the next solar system. What’s with that?

Fog is still here and the radar has become our eyes. We are tuned on the standby radio to the commercial traffic channel 11. It is a wealth of information and reports even the yacht traffic as non-participating but seen by them. IAS is the ticket for running in fog and combined with radar makes for a much more relaxed crossing.

There are slow rolling swells and light winds coming abeam of us. We know there is a yacht or small vessel (about the same size as us) about 5 miles ahead of us as now and again the fog is lifted by the breeze and we can just see him. We hear him on traffic talking to a tug and relaying to each other a green to green safe course past each other. We are still in fog but we can see Egg Island through the clear spots and are grateful to be in its shadow from the swells even for a short time.  We are more relaxed now as the weather has been kind to us on this passage around Cape Fear, sorry Cape Caution.

The sun breaks through the fog and we are but an hour away from FURY COVE.  You can feel the shoulders and neck muscles relax the further that we move into the cozy cove on Penrose Island. The sun is high and its getting warm we think about complaining about it begin to be too hot, but we stifle the thought.  Shore duty for the rat dog. There is a perfect pee island just across the bay that is too steep for humans to climb but Chevy has Four Wheel Drive. Again there is always the Wolf, Bear and Cougar thing so you have to keep an eye on her as she is too busy sniffing things and no doubt would walk into open jaws. 

As things stop moving about there is time to reflect on just HOW DAMN BEAUTIFUL OUR COAST IS AND WE LIKE THE LEMMING RETURN AGAIN AND AGAIN to throw ourselves into the sea.

INTERESTING BOATS AND PEOPLE (Fury Cove)

There are a number of larger fiberglass yachts in the bay some from West Van Yacht club. Lots of American vessels power and sail coming and going. The two vessels that catch our attention are the fish boat conversion 36ft “Tropic Isle” (Palmar design & build) and a trimaran called “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” . The captain is Corry Brown off the “Tropic Isle” CDN, Captain and Admiral from the trimaran are Clark and Nina Wagaman ,US. They are very busy rowing around the bay visiting other yachts and each other. A short time later we are caught in there sweep.

New Friends in Fury

The first to dink by to see us in a foldable boat is Clark. For those of you who know Terry Bubb of Red Robin CDN fame he could have been Terry’s double ganger. This man looks like he has just flown in on his twin otter executive aircraft straight from the Eddy Bauer men’s store New York. He is invited aboard and we talk about boating life and show him around. I am having trouble putting things together as I know he is of the tri sailboat and most have a reputation of than being less than yacht status. Later in the afternoon and he brings Nina over for cocktails. Nina is tall and slim and impeccably dressed. As usual I am in a BYC T shirt holes in my jeans (Penny always makes a lot more effort), she has given up on me and always says that she is  not my mom.) We ask and learn a little about their life as I am always interested in how people arrive on the north coast. They tell us he was a builder and she had a still life photography studio. They had designed and built a small Japanese style house with a very large workshop (where they built their boat) out in back country of the Sacramento River. It must have been beautifully designed and put together as when they sold the house went in days.

When I toured their boat it was classy, clean, eclectic and perfect in every way. A floating work of art inside and a racing machine outside.  I was asked to sign the log and all I wrote was “WOW”. I knew I was out-classed, as he had displayed a 30 year Scotch bottle in its rapping discreetly on the corner counter. I did catch him straitening up a coordinated colour towel set that was artfully draped over the stove handle. Again I knew beaten but I then knew he was not absolute PERFeCT.

Now Captain Brown, his friend, was at the opposite end of the rainbow. He is old as dirt like me. He can be best described as an “OLD SALT”. He had an easy smile and a twinkle in his eye. Penny and the Captain went off to talk about stuff and I think that they were having too much fun. He was discreet about his pedigree as a Yachtsman but I did spy the ROYAL VICTORIA YACHT CLUB BURGEE on his well-worn woollen club sweater and a crisp burgee fluttering high on the masthead. He was a well-seasoned sailor and we had a lot of good stories in common about boats we knew including his encounter with our old yacht “Willobee G”. He had plied the south and north coast in his yacht. We had never met personally but we did recognize his boat. He had been aboard the “Fifer” that was raked by a storm on its delivery to new owners in California.

 

We toured the sand and boulder beach on the outside of Fury Cove. Walked among and climbed over the driftwood and logs strewn about on the beach. We came upon wreckage, some old wooden ship lost in a distant past storm. The wreckage has given up the hope of rescue, but still hanging on to the memory that someone who built her still cares or remembers. She will be freed from the fury of the winter storm in time as she is ground away with her soul into the surf. Pitched on to the boulders  pommeled, scoured and splintered in molecule pieces in gales that will swept this beach for eternity.

We spend two nights in Fury.