Laura Domela 
As we mentioned in our “Rapids!!” post yesterday, our cruise to Forward Harbour was a bit on the gray and rainy side. Once anchored in Forward Harbour, the three of us dinghied around to each flotilla boat to discuss the next day’s plan. By the time we finished up at around 7:00 p.m. it had stopped raining, so Kevin and Sam took the drones up for some evening aerial photos … Read more
This is what the Cruising World has been waiting for! FIVE Boats. FIVE Rapids, One Day… and only ONE shot at slack…. Well, not really. But we did have a unique transit! Traveling north of Desolation Sound requires transiting rapids. Slow boats don’t do well in white water, so timing is critical. The most direct route is through Seymour Narrows and then Johnstone Strait, but it’s not well protected and … Read more
Today’s cruise from Pender Harbour to Squirrel Cove was about 48nm. A longish cruise, but the conditions were perfect — calm water and just the slightest breeze. A long but uneventful cruise is nice sometimes, especially when we have internet! We took advantage of the calm cruise to catch up on blog posts and some other flotilla business. (New flotilla t-shirts for 2018!) Cassidy (Nordhavn 40) and Rhapsody (Ranger Tug … Read more
The Strait of Georgia is the first “gate” on our way to Alaska. It’s only a few hours across, but if it’s windy it can be a miserable few hours. We look at a bunch of different forecasts before crossing any of the gates. Most of the time, the forecasts are pretty much in agreement. The trends are the same and predicted wind velocities are similar. For the Strait of … Read more
The beautiful weather continues! We awoke this morning to bright sunshine and our group was so excited to get going that we left Roche Harbor by 8:00 a.m. — an hour earlier than originally scheduled. All but one of us has Nexus (the trusted traveler program that lets us clear Canadian customs by phone most of the time), so one boat had to stop and clear customs at Pender Harbour … Read more
Boating is for men. I know. Not the first sentence you expected from me, was it? But hang in there and we’ll have a fun little ride. I started boating for real, with my own boat, in 2014 (in my 40s), but I grew up around sailboats and sailing. My grandfather had a sailboat. Our family friend Conrad had a sailboat. My mom had a sailboat. I spent a lot … Read more
Did you miss our seminars at the Seattle Boat Show earlier this year? Well we’re giving you another chance to catch up with us…we’ll be at TrawlerFest 2018 in Bremerton, Washington, just days before we take off with our 2018 Flotilla to Alaska! Trawlerfest runs from May 1 through May 5th, and we’ll be giving three 2-hour seminars on May 1st and 2nd. Seminars will be held at the Kitsap Conference … Read more
It’s difficult to find a high-quality new cruising boat for a reasonable price these days. By and large, the new boats being built are semi-custom – basic configurations with dizzying numbers of custom options that let the customer design exactly the boat of their dreams. Unfortunately, that means enormous amounts of labor to build each boat by hand, almost from scratch – and that means big bucks. Such big bucks, … Read more