We had originally intended to stay 2 nights in Shearwater, but the weather guru said Queen Charlotte Sound (QCS) was angry, so we stayed a third night.
It's about 50 miles down from Shearwater to the entrance to QCS, and then another approximately 50 miles to cross it to Port Hardy. I have done that whole distance in one run in the past, so I know it is really too long for one day's run.
The harbor master at Shearwater told us about another place that was closer to QCS, where we could wait for better weather to cross. It's called Dawsons Landing. I looked it up in the guide book and it looked like a nice place with lots of services, so we decided to go down there and wait.
Here are 3 map snippets. The first one shows the northern part of the route. The second one shows the southern portion of the route. And the last one shows more detail of the little bay where Dawsons Landing sits.
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| Northern portion of route |
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| Southern portion of route |
Dawsons Landing is at the bottom, circled in red.
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| More detail of Dawsons Landing |
Dawsons Landing is at the top, circled in red.
If you want to check out their website you can do so at Dawsons Landing
So we left Shearwater at about 9:45 AM and made our way down the route arriving into Dawsons Landing at about 5 PM.
Soon after we left Shearwater we saw the Alaska Marine Highway ferry Columbia.
She was headed south, as we were.
Although now the southern terminus of the AHMS is in Bellingham.
Here are a few other vessels we passed along the way.
We saw this commercial shrimp boat at Shearwater. I asked them how many shrimp pots they were carrying, because they had them hanging all over the place, and they said 500 pots!
I saw this boat at Marguerite Bay USFS dock near Ketchikan a few years ago. I met the people and even gave them some shrimp. Guess they forgot because they didn't wave as they passed by.
Karen said that from a distance this looked like a pirate ship.
I think it is actually some kind of mobile loading derrick.
On the ride down I stopped once to take care of something down in the lower cabin.
We had been on auto pilot for quite some time.
When I put the engines in neutral and went down below I neglected to put the auto pilot in Standby mode, so it was still trying to steer the boat on a compass heading.
Once in neutral the boat swung sideways with the wind and the auto pilot soon beeped a warning and then failed.
It had been futilely trying to steer the boat while it was out of gear, and eventually it could not turn the wheel any further, so it went into error mode and quit.
My fault on that one, and a good lesson learned.
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| Karen at our mooring at Dawsons Landing |
At most of the places along their dock they did not have traditional mooring cleats.
They had loops of braided rope that had been nailed into the planks for boats to tie to.
Some of them looked quite worn, almost worn through.
But we held OK.
I noticed that further down along the dock they had some metal rings.
This photo gives a little better perspective on our mooring there.
Dawsons Landing (DL) is mostly all on floats, as the later photos will bear out.
It is a unique place.
Of course when we pulled in there we had no idea that we would end up staying there for over a week.
Here are a few more shots of DL that we took on that first evening that we were there.
Karen stands beside a wooden carving of an old man.
I suspect it was done with a chain saw.
There are a lot of loggers in the area (more on that later in our stay here.)
This view gives a little better understanding of how DL is set up.
Almost everything is floating.
There are "cabins," small houses, a laundry and shower room, a store, and other out buildings of various kinds all on these floats.
Some of the cabins were rented out to loggers that were working in the area.
All of the floatation is provided by huge logs, no foam floatation here that I could see.
This is the owner's house.
When we arrived the owner, Rob, was there, but his wife Nola and daughter Amber didn't arrive until a few days later.
They did not have 30 amp power available at the float, only 15 amp, so I elected to run the generator for about an hour each, twice a day, and that was all the AC power we needed.
Just before we turned in that first night at DL I took a last look up the floats.
I saw a Martin coming along approaching the boat, so I quick ran to find my camera.
By the time I returned to the back door, he had jumped up on the transom and was exploring the back part of the boat.
He took a look at some of our buckets, which held nothing of interest for him I guess, so he just jumped off and continued on his way.
I had to snap these photos through the glass on the back door, so they are not as clear as I would have liked them to be.
The next morning we noticed several loggers starting to queue up with their gear in front of one of the cabins. We learned about "Interfor," which I initially thought was a government agency similar to our USFS, but later learned was a private corporation. They had about a dozen or so loggers (a generic term, as each had specific duties) housed here at DL, and they primarily used a helicopter to take them up into the woods and return them to DL later in the day.
No one had warned us about this, and when this helicopter landed about 25 yards from the front of our boat it got our attention.
The helicopter could only carry the pilot and 3 passengers, so it took a few trips to get them all.
They would wait for the pilot to land and then he would signal to them.
They would load their gear into the stowage area in the front, and then get in.
The whole process took less than a minute.
They also had a small boat that they used from time to time, but for most of the time it was the helicopter.
Here are a few more photos from around DL that we took that second day.
There seem to be boats of all shape and sizes and ages tucked into every corner of DL.
When I asked the owner (Rob) if he took credit cards, he replied, "We take credit cards, debit cards, and cash, but no boats - I've got enough boats!"
The guide book said they had laundry facilities, showers, and rest rooms, so we asked about those when we first arrived. Of course everything is on floats, in cabin like buildings. He said the washing machine might get fixed sometime soon (it was indeed fixed before we left).
The "rest room" was a little out house like shed also on the floats.
It had running water in the toilet only, and sometimes there was even TP in there.
It was not uncommon to see someone walking down the floats headed to the rest room carrying their own personal supply of TP.
The guide book also said they had WiFi, so of course we asked about that.
Surprisingly it worked better than what we had at Shearwater, probably because there were fewer users.
The photo above shows how it was wired - complex and confusing, but it worked!
This photo shows the laundry and shower - which of course were in their own little cabin on the floats. The shower costs 2 "Loonies" (a Loonie is worth 1 dollar) for 1 1/2 minutes. Of course it took about a minute for the water to get hot, so you had to bring lots of Loonies And the coin machine was just far enough out of reach so that you had to come completely out of the shower stall to put more Loonies in.
But, as we all know, sometimes any shower is better than no shower at all.
We had the shower on the boat, which we did use sometimes, but if the marina had showers available we usually used those.
They did have a fairly well stocked store, so we did not starve.
Items were expensive, but at least we had access to a store and to provisions.
You can see from the photo above that we were well stocked with cookies.
The next day, May 12th, we just hung out.
We were in contact with our weather guru via e-mail and he advised us to wait a bit longer.
Karen is an avid reader and had brought along many books.
Our down time here at DL gave her plenty of time to read.
As I said, there seemed to be boats tucked away in every little corner of DL.
I'll show more photos of "Mr. Bear" a little later, but here is one of the many we took of him.
Since DL is very dependent on logs for lumber, firewood, and floatation, they had their own very large collection of logs loosely connected into a raft near the corner of the little bay.
Mr. Bear would come out on the logs almost every day and pull up the ropes that were used to tie the logs together.
The ropes were coated with mussels, and he would chomp away on them for hours.
I spoke with Rob about this and suggested that the bear would stop doing this later in the season, once there were fish in the rivers. But Rob said this bear continues to eat mussels all summer and fall, until he goes into hibernation.
Rob, the owner, and Danny, his helper, would go out and return with logs every so often while we were there. They would take them over to the big log raft in the corner of the bay and tie them off for use at some point in the future.
That little metal skiff in the above photo was a real work horse.
It had a 60 HP outboard, and they used it like a small tug to pull and push things.
There were swallows everywhere.
The loggers told me they liked them because apparently they eat insects, which they catch on the fly.
So there were rarely any bugs of any kind around the floats.
One morning when I went upstairs to open up the fybridge canvas for ventilation there were 2 swallows flitting around up there.
I opened up the side panels and they left.
Our weather guru advised us that there "might" be a good weather window on Sunday May 13th, Mother's Day, very early in the morning. DL is about 10 miles from the entrance to QCS so we decided to leave at first light, about 5 AM.
We were up at around 4 AM, in the dark, making preparations, and pulled out just as it was getting light a little, about 4:45 AM.
We can run in the dark with GPS and radar, but there is a big risk of hitting small logs and debris in the water when doing so.
The weather guy had advised us to run 3- 5 miles into QCS and then make our decision as to whether conditions were good enough to continue.
This map section below shows DL at the top, circled in red, and our destination, Port Hardy, near the red star at the bottom. Maps are deceptive, but you can see that there is no land masses to slow down the seas as they roll in from QCS. The red arrows show the direction the seas usually come from. It is a long and exposed run, and small vessels such as ours are very vulnerable during this crossing.
Conditions were not good enough to make the crossing.
We went the 10 miles down to the entrance to QCS, and then about 5 more miles into the lower portion of QCS and were getting rocked pretty good.
It was getting hard to control the boat.
It is always very hard to make that go/no go decision.
We really, really wanted to make that crossing.
Sometimes it is hard to tell exactly when conditions cross that murky line between "uncomfortable," and "dangerous."
Uncomfortable we can handle; dangerous we don't want to handle.
In any case I made the decision to turn around, and we went back to DL.
Rob greeted us with "You're back!"
He was headed out in his boat to gather more logs.
So we went back to our old spot along the dock, tied up again, and settled in for another long wait.
The weather guy said it might be "several days" before we would be able to try again.
Very discouraging.
DL was a nice place to be, but we wanted to be moving, not sitting.
The weather was nice back at DL, so we put the raft in the water and explored around the log raft, getting a few more pictures of Mr.. Bear.
One day I saw a smaller brown bear attempt to come out onto the log raft, but Mr. Bear chased him off. I guess he was King of the log raft and considered it his personal smorgasbord.
Apparently the forests started producing pollen because the water in and around the floats was coated with it.
Karen said she needed to have at least a few photos of me now and then.
Oh yes, one more thing.
When we got back from our failed attempt to cross QCS I checked the marine weather on the web.
It showed gale warnings and very high seas in QCS, so I felt like even though we were disappointed to have to return, that it was indeed the right decision.
What followed next was about 5 days of waiting.
Our next weather window turned out to be on Friday May 18th.
Recall that we had initially arrived at DL on May 10th.
DL is actually a happening place, so here are a bunch of photos taken during our forced waiting period.
They have a building that is up on land behind DL.
They told us it used to be their permanent office building in this area, but now they just use it as temporary housing when doing patrols in the area.
They just stopped by to check on it I guess.
We made friends with Heinz (like the ketchup, he told me) and Mark, who came in on a 25' C-Dory and tied up right behind us. They were also waiting for calm seas in order to cross QCS. Here they are fishing off the floats on a sunny afternoon.
This is "Zeta," Rob's dog.
She was totally devoted to Rob and was unhappy whenever she was not with him.
But, she did like to chase "sticks."
I put that in quotes because sometimes proper sticks were hard to come by on the floats.
So she would pick up some odd little twig, barely 3 inches long, or a pile of loose grass, and lay it at our feet and wait for us to throw it.
One morning Rob came by early and said we had to move back a little bit because there was a barge coming in and they needed as much room as possible to get it in. I told you that DL was a happening place.
So we moved back and the barge came in and maneuvered right up to the dock.
They unloaded a bunch of lumber that Rob had ordered.
Rob and Danny move some of the bundles of lumber that came in on the barge using their "Donkey winch," (home made I'm sure).
One day this amphibious plane came in and dropped off a whole family.
Apparently they owned the cabin/bunk house where most of the loggers had been staying.
The loggers had finished up their work and most had left, so the bunk house was available again.
Mark and Zeta check out the plane.
Rob's wife Nola arrived one day bringing with her "Bela" and "Chicklet."
She said they were "Papillions," (not sure of the spelling.)
She had a little make shift kennel area for them right in front of the store.
Karen stands by a huge fish that was carved out of a solid block of wood.
It reminded me of the book, "The Old Man And The Sea."
This was a busy place!
On what turned out to be our last night at DL I think Mr. Martin paid us another visit.
We had a food box on the flybridge seats, as well as some boxes and bags of recycle material.
He tore a hole right through the top of the food box and scattered the recycle stuff all around.
Karen said the only real food he got into was a packet of taco mix.
The weather guru said that Friday May 18th was "The Day," the day we could expect calm conditions in QCS and make our crossing.
Our plan was to once again get up around 4:15 AM and leave at first light, around 5 AM.
Unbeknownst to us the tug and barge that had come in the previous afternoon and was tied up directly in front of us decided to fire up their engines and leave about 3:30 AM.
No more sleep after that!
To wrap up this segment on our extended stay at DL I will just say that we had extremely calm conditions on our crossing of QCS, and we made it into Port Hardy without incident.
I will cover the remaining portion of the trip, Port Hardy and on into our destination of Gig Harbor, in the last posting on this trip.
Thanks for fun pictures & interesting blog?!
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