Skull Cove was shrouded in fog when we woke this morning…no surprise really. We pulled our anchor and slowly motored through the narrow opening.
The fog kept us company off and on (mostly on) until we reached Johnstone Strait.
Our original plan was 47nm from Skull Cove to Mound Island (about 6.5 hours) but we decided to go farther, and aimed for Port Neville (71nm). We had some pretty swift current against us at the beginning of our cruise (up to 2.5 kts in places!) and we watched our arrival time of 5pm increase to a sad 6:45pm, but soon things shifted and our arrival time eventually said 4pm…so with that hour gained on our original time, we opted to go a little farther than Port Neville…to Blenkinsop Bay (73.5nm from Skull Cove, and a spot we haven’t been to). It looked fairly open to Johnstone, but conditions are calm and the wind is not expected to pick up at all (and we won’t have to cruise 2.5nm into the anchorage at Port Neville and back out in the morning).
Johnstone was super flat today. Forecast for today and tomorrow says “Wind light becoming northwest 5 to 15 knots late this afternoon then becoming light late overnight. Wind increasing to northwest 10 to 20 Thursday afternoon.” So our goal tomorrow is to go as far as we can before any annoying wind picks up! We’ll likely time getting through Seymour Narrows and then either stop in Campbell River or anchor in one of the bays across on the other side.
Just before we pulled into Blenkinsop Bay, we were greeted by 50 or more Pacific white-sided dolphins! They surfed our bow, our port wake, our starboard ake, our stern wake, and everywhere around us, for about a half an hour. How fun!! We haven’t seen these guys in a while…normally we have Dall’s porpoises accompanying us. They were jumping out of the water and tail-slapping and it was so. much. fun!!
They were all along the starboard side of Airship:
And all along the port side of Airship:
And off to the side just racing along with us.
This one on its side (in the photo below) stayed with us until the very end…eventually there were just a few surfing the bow, and one by one they peeled off. This one was the last one surfing, and darted side-to-side super fast before peeling off and joining the others. What an awesome end to a very long day of cruising!!
We both took video (with iPhones and the 360 cam) and Kevin put this together after we were anchored: