August 25, 2005
48°33'N 123°W
Friday Harbor, San Juan Islands
Washington, USA
Hello again –
We’re back in mainland US waters after spending the last eight weeks cruising the more remote parts of the British Columbian coast. We left Prince Rupert on July 1 bound for the isolated Queen Charlotte islands. The islands are located sixty miles off the mainland and stretch for over 120 miles from north to south. The southern half has been declared a national park and consists of an archipelago of dozens of small islands, with many long, fjord-like inlets and twisting channels. The national park is called Gwai Haanas (Gwie Hahnus) which means Islands of Wonder or Place of Wonder. Throughout this area, there are abandoned longhouses, totem poles, and other relics from the Haida people, the First Nations tribe that have lived on the Queen Charlottes (known to them as the Haida Gwaii or Islands of the People) for 10,000 years. The islands are referred to as the “Canadian Galapagos” and boast the largest black bears in North America, quite a few unique bird and mammal species, and unique flora that managed to escape glaciation during the last Ice Age.
The islands are covered with old growth forest – ancient Sitka spruce and cedar trees 15 feet and more in diameter. If you’ve ever heard of the Queen Charlottes, it would probably be in that context. About 15 years ago, the southern islands were under threat of logging by Weyerhauser after it purchased a Canadian company with logging rights to the islands. The Haida protested by chaining themselves to bulldozers and trucks, tying themselves to trees, and doing all sorts of other things to gain publicity. Some 79 people were arrested, but finally the parliament voted to make the entire park a logging free zone.
We had to wait a week before crossing Hecate Strait when a series of low pressure systems swept in from Alaska bringing gale-force southeast winds. But the wait was well worth it. We spent three weeks in the islands, exploring the narrow channels that twist into the mountainous interior, watching bears dine on shellfish on the beach, counting a dozen bald eagles in sight at one time and visiting the Haida sites where Haida watchmen led us through the ruins and described the ancient history of a mighty civilization that is finding its pride and its voice once again.
From the Queen Charlottes, we sailed 150 miles to the northwest corner of Vancouver Island and then down the island’s west coast. Very few roads cross the spine of mountains that run down the center of Vancouver Island, so many tiny communities on the west coast are connected only by boat or float plane with the outside world. Six large inlets run up to thirty miles inland, right to the base of mountains some of which reach 14,000 feet in height. We’ve never sailed an area with so much wildlife both on land and in the sea: Sea otters, fur seals, sea lions and whales in the water; auks, puffins, phalaropes and murres on the water; bears, bald eagles and blue herons along the shore. Our route down the outside of the islands meant we had more wind than we would have had in the Inside Passage, and we were able to sail most of the 800 miles from Prince Rupert.
We came through Juan de Fuca Strait under Vancouver Island a week ago and found ourselves back in civilization. We’re now anchored in busy Friday Harbor in the San Juans, the group of islands lying between northern Washington and Vancouver Island at the conjunction of Juan de Fuca Strait and the Strait of Georgia. We’re a bit shell-shocked by the hundreds of boats in the marina and anchorage, the five-story high ferries that depart and arrive every couple of hours and the quaint town that feels like a major city after weeks spent in tiny outports of a couple dozen families.
We’ve made arrangements to leave HAWK in a boatyard here from mid-October to mid-January while we spend some time with our families in the northeast. After 50,000 miles, she needs a bit of attention, and we’re having a couple of major projects undertaken over the winter. Until then, we’ll be cruising the many islands in this area, content to float from anchorage to anchorage in the light winds with no pressing need to make it over the next horizon.
If you’ve sent us an e-mail and we haven’t responded, that’s because this is the first internet café we’ve seen since leaving Prince Rupert. We appreciate all your notes and will get back to you soon.
Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
June 28, 2005
54°19'N 130°19'W
Prince Rupert, British Columbia
Hello everyone!
We arrived in Prince Rupert last evening after a seventeen and a half day passage from Honolulu. We had both expected this to be the toughest passage of the season, but it turned out to be the easiest. We had lots of light wind, a bit too much motoring, no gales, and, in the last week, some fabulous downwind sailing. We made landfall on the north end of the Queen Charlotte Islands after a night where the glow from the setting sun hadn’t faded completely before the first blush of dawn colored the horizon. These large islands lie sixty miles offshore from mainland British Columbia and are separated from the Alaskan border by the thirty mile wide Dixon Entrance. It took us the rest of the day to reach the islands and channels that lead to Prince Rupert.
And what a day it was! We had twenty knots over the stern and were sailing along at 8 and 9 knots through the water with the main and poled out jib. The air was soft and summer-like, with the temperature in the low seventies. To the north, the soft, gray outlines of the mountains of southern Alaska were etched against the blue sky. To the east, the rounded blue-gray hills near the shore rose to higher, snow-speckled peaks further inland. Over the course of the day, we passed trawlers, cruise ships, ferries, freighters, barges and tugs and started to get a feel for this busy waterway. We also dodged several logs, one of the navigational hazards in this region where logging makes up a significant portion of the local economy. We dropped the anchor in Casey Cove at 55°N, across the channel from Prince Rupert at 8:00 in the evening, under bright sunshine and blue skies after an 8,300 mile run across the Pacific Ocean that started three months ago at 47°S.
Prince Rupert is a combination of commercial port, working fishing community, and tourist trap located on an island tucked into a notch in the mainland. It’s a small town with a population of 18,000 the heart of which consists of three streets running parallel to the waterfront for a dozen blocks. Despite its beautiful setting, the town is not particularly aesthetic. The architecture tends toward 50s institutional, with the most prominent building being a ten-story high concrete Howard Johnsons that would fit well into any communist-era Soviet city. This is the termination of the trans-Canadian railway, where freighters call to take on logs and grain. Cruise ships dock here a couple of times a week, discharging thousands of passengers to visit the mall and the tourist shops along the waterfront. Fishing boats come and go, bringing in large catches from the surrounding waters. Despite the industrial feel, the town has a frontier charm, and the locals are easy going and very friendly.
We plan to be here in Prince Rupert for a few days, and then spend the next six weeks or so working our way south to Vancouver Island. This will give us a taste of cruising this area and help us to decide what we want to do next season. Since leaving the Chesapeake in 1999, we have now sailed 50,000 nautical miles on HAWK. While we will eventually make our way back to the east coast to complete this circumnavigation, our current plan is to cruise this area for another season first. We will both be spending some time with our families this winter, taking advantage of being based in North America again for the first time in six years.
We hope this note finds you happy and healthy and enjoying life. We’re looking forward to exploring another new area, and to spending some time with friends and family over the coming months.
Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
May 16, 2005
21°30'N 158°W
Ala Wai Yacht Harbor, Honolulu, Hawaii
Hello everybody!
Since our last HAWK update, we’ve sailed 6,000 nautical miles, covering some 67 degrees of latitude and 50 degrees of longitude, in forty days at sea. We took two short breaks of less than a week in French Polynesia, on Raivavae in the Austral Islands and Makemo in the Tuamotus. We’re now two-thirds of the way through our voyage to the Pacific Northwest, and enjoying a much-needed break on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands.
We could summarize our voyage to date with the single word: Contrary. Nothing has been quite as we expected, or as the pilot charts predicted. Our biggest challenge has been getting north as almost all of our winds for the past two months have come from the northerly quarter. Instead of running before a consistent, light to moderate westerly winds in the roaring forties, we had to make headway into a series of northeasterly gales, the last with sustained winds over 40 knots and gale force winds for almost 48 hours. Instead of making fast northing running in front of the southeast trades from 20°S to north of the equator, we had over two weeks of westerly winds, and for the entire four-day passage from Raivavae to Makemo we were close-reaching into northwest winds. When we finally did find some tradewinds south of the equator, they were northeasterly. After passing through the 300-mile wide doldrums belt, we found ourselves close reaching into reinforced northeast trades of 25-30 knots, and we were grateful for every mile of easting we had made.
All of that northerly wind meant that we spent over thirty of those forty days with the apparent wind forward of 60 degrees, the boat heeled over at 20-30 degrees, waves washing over the decks, and almost all the ports and hatches closed in 90 degree heat to keep water from getting below. Only on the last day of the passage, sailing down the coast of the “big island” of Hawaii and the smaller islands beyond it, were we able to ease sheets and run dead downwind, the boat flat and fast, and life aboard close to civilized. We spent much of the time when we were heeled over and beating our way to windward sitting in the cockpit and weaving intricate fantasies together of an alternate life in a little cabin in the woods in the mountains of Vermont.
If Evans and I have found the sailing somewhat uncomfortable, HAWK’s been in her element. Over the course of one week, she averaged 179 miles per day, and for the first time she hit 200 miles in a single day reaching in 15 knots of wind in flat seas. We would have had several more 200-mile days if we hadn’t blown out our mainsail a few days after crossing the doldrums. The high-tech sail was a prototype we were beta testing for North Sails. It had four years and 25,000 high latitude miles (reefed 75% of its life) on it so it didn’t owe us a thing, but we had been hoping it would make it to Vancouver. North Sails has been incredibly helpful, and they’re in the process of building us a new sail. We should take delivery in early June, giving us an excuse to spend a month enjoying the Hawaiian Islands. Then we’ll head north again on the last leg of our voyage, bound for British Columbia.
Now we’re tied up on the transient dock in the Ala Wai Yacht Basin just off Waikiki beach in the shadow of Honolulu’s fanciest hotels. We’re paying $10 per day, an incredible bargain compared to any of the hotel rooms we can see from HAWK’s decks. We plan to be in Honolulu (with good internet connections) for a couple of weeks, so feel free to get in touch. We love hearing from all of you, catching up with your lives and learning about your adventures.
Fair winds and safe anchorages,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
March 16, 2005
45?2' S 170?2'E
Dunedin, South Island, New Zealand
Hello everybody!
HAWK is provisioned, her tanks are full, her bottom is clean, and Evans and I are ready for some sea time! We’ll be heading out sometime in the next few days on the first of three legs to reach Vancouver. We’ll leave Dunedin and run east in the Roaring Forties until we get close to the longitude of Tahiti, then we’ll turn north. We’re aiming to make our first landfall at Raevevae in the Austral Islands, reputed to be one of the most beautiful islands in all of the Pacific. While Evans got a brief taste of the tropics last June during his quick trip to Fiji, it has been three and a half years since I’ve been in warm waters. We’re both looking forward to sandy beaches, tropical lagoons, bright sunshine, snorkeling and swimming, and some Polynesian culture. From there, we’re planning to head to Tahiti, Hawaii and then on to Vancouver, arriving at the end of the northern summer.
We’ve very much enjoyed our South Island adventures. In the last HAWK update, I talked a bit about the fiords. We spent almost as much time on Stewart Island, the large island just off the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island. The land was a real contrast to the fiords, low rolling hills covered with scrub and punctuated by bare granite domes of rock that rose to 1,000 feet or more. It reminded us of Newfoundland or the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, and the main town is in fact named Oban in tribute to the other Oban HAWK has visited, in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Two large inlets each with dozens of anchorages project into the east coast of this island, and it is a wildlife paradise. In Port Pegasus, the uninhabited inlet at the bottom of the island, fur seals played tag with me every time I went rowing in the dinghy. Yellow-eyed penguins, the rarest of the penguin species and the largest penguin in New Zealand, and Blue penguins, the little penguins known as Fairy penguins in Australia, swam circles around the boat and fished in the lagoon.
Dunedin is a lovely town full of wonderful stone buildings built by Scottish masons seeking to recreate their beloved homeland. Dunedin is Gaelic for Edinburgh, and the town center has been laid out in reminiscence of the Scottish capital, around a central octagon with the same street names. Once the staging point for the South Island gold rush and the largest city in New Zealand, Dunedin is now a university town of about 120,000. The town sits at the head of a ten-mile long winding estuary bordered by two long peninsulas made up of rocky hills and rolling fields. The highlight of our stay, for me, was a wildlife tour we took to see the Royal albatrosses that breed at Tairoa Head at the seaward end of the southern peninsula. This is one of the only mainland breeding colonies in the world, and the only one within a dozen miles of a large city.
The Royal Albatross Observatory has been working to maximize the number of fledglings the colony produces since its inception in the 1930s. About ten years before that, a few adolescent albatrosses missed the Chatham Islands and ended up here. They were having no success breeding, for this area is far less isolated, much further north and much warmer than any other breeding colony. Predators were taking eggs and chicks, blowflies were causing infections, and the heat was overcoming many adults. With a great deal of intervention, the colony now consists of 50-60 breeding adults, and this year they will fledge 20 chicks. It seems right and fitting to me that these birds should serve as ambassadors for their kind, for the colony would not exist today if man had not intervened. We have been fortunate enough to spend almost unlimited amounts of time with albatrosses at sea, but most people never get the chance to see them. I was so gratified to see the reactions of the visitors, who gasped as a Royal albatross crested the hill twenty feet over our heads and pointed excitedly as it turned and glided down toward the sea.
On the same tour, we visited a Yellow-eyed penguin colony on private land. The farmer who owns the land has learned that penguins are better business than cattle and sheep, and has begun fencing in large areas and replanting native vegetation to increase the population. Visitors are limited to those who come on tours with guides that enforce certain rules and ensure that the animals are not stressed. Since eco-tourism of the penguins started a decade ago, the colony has increased from 60 to 120 breeding adults. I felt uplifted after this tour ?it seems there are so very few success stories when it comes to endangered species.
We’ll be out of e-mail contact for the next couple of months, probably until we reach Hawaii. But know we’re thinking of you as we make our way north and looking forward to seeing some of you in the next year when we’ll be spending some time in the States.
Fair winds and safe anchorages,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
February 25, 2005
45°52' S 170°32'E
Dunedin, South Island, New Zealand
Hello everybody!
We arrived in Dunedin on the southeast corner of the South Island of New Zealand on Monday morning after a fast, downwind run from Stewart Island in 30-40 knots of southwest wind. Under the double-reefed main and poled out jib, we were surfing down the wave faces at 12-14 knots and averaged close to 10 knots for most of the 150-mile passage. After something over 1,000 miles of windward work, all three of us were punch drunk on the exhilarating speed, reveling in sailing free and racing with the waves instead of pounding our way into them. When we arrived at the Otago Yacht Club, the Commodore told us that we’d been reported the day before by the VHF station at the Nuggets, a rocky point fifty miles south of here. “There’s a yacht out there just flyin’ along. Goin’ like a bat outta hell!”
Since our last update, HAWK passed south of Southwest Cape on Stewart Island, the large island off the southern end of the South Island, putting the last of the five great capes in her wake. We spent a month in four of the thirteen fjords and another three weeks in Stewart Island.
Depending on how you count them, there are a total of from ten to twenty fjords in the southwest corner of New Zealand. Unlike in Chile, where the subsidence of one mountain range and the upthrust of another have created several drowned valleys between the two, here in fjordland the terrain results from glacial activity. The glaciers extended westward from an ice cap that used to cover all of the Southern Alps. They cut and carved these chasms out to the sea, most more than 500 feet deep over much of their length. From north to south, the fjords gradually get lower and less rugged. Milford, the furthest north of the sounds, is a huge tourist attraction in part because it is the highest, steepest and most canyon-like of the fjords. Steep hills rather than mountains surround the southernmost fjords, Chalky and Preservation, and these are neither so deep nor so rugged as their northern neighbors.
Three days after leaving Nelson, we arrived in Thompson Sound midway between Milford and Preservation just in front of a northwest gale. We found ourselves running down the channel in front of 35-40 knots if wind in bright sunshine and almost unlimited visibility. Knife-like ridges rose straight from the water to rocky crags some 3,000 to 4,000 feet high on either side of the narrow channel. These rugged peaks were clad in a dense tangle of rain forest broken in many places by white slashes against the darker green – the raw rock of landslides and broad seams of granite on which nothing could grow.
The wind followed us for six miles right around two right angle turns, though it did ease off to 25 knots or so with higher gusts. At the head of Thompson Sound, we tucked in behind a small island and the wind died away, leaving us floating in a calm pool only occasionally ruffled by a gust. It took us several hours to get ourselves situated with two stern lines. We were confused by the fisherman’s solution down here – a line right across the cove we would have backed up into – and couldn’t figure out exactly how they used it. As we were getting the second stern line set up, a boat came in and tied alongside this line, so that answered that question. One of the people from the boat rowed over with fresh crayfish (lobster) and invited us for a drink. A true Fiordland welcome!
That first night left us wondering why the area wasn’t overrun with tourists, but we soon had the answer. The fjords have two predominant features – the rain and the sandflies – and if one isn’t getting you then the other one is. We thought we’d seen rain after wintering in Ireland and Chile, but the Sounds took us to a whole new level of experience. In one 30-hour period, it rained so hard that it filled our dinghy almost to overflowing – close to ten inches of water. There was so much runoff that the top several meters of water in the sounds was fresh. Any day when the clouds rose to the tops of the peaks lining the channel and the rain diminished to a steady drizzle counted as “nice.” The sandflies were pervasive but not very hearty and succumbed quickly to any sort of attempt to get rid of them from mosquito coils to repellant. But they still swarmed us whenever you went on deck, and we cleared them away with an impatient swing of the arm which, we were told, is called “the Fiordland wave.” The sandflies only went away completely when it was really pouring…
But then, on our last few days in the channels when we were anchored in Dusky Sound in the same harbor where Captain Cook and his crew spent a month aboard the RESOLUTION 230 years ago, a high pressure system came in over the South Island, and we could see all the way down the fjord to the snow-capped Southern Alps in the interior. Pure magic…
Here’s hoping you’re finding some magic of your own,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
January 8, 2005
45°15' S 173°15'E
Nelson, South Island, New Zealand
Hello everybody!
We are in Nelson after what turned out to be a very easy run down the west coast of the North Island. We waited more than three weeks in Whangaroa at the top of the North Island, checking the weather every few days only to find gale-force southwest winds and 3-5 meter swells from the southwest – not particularly appetizing for our slightly east of south course. We finally saw some decent weather approaching on Christmas Eve and decided to leave on “Boxing Day” –the day after Christmas. But we woke Christmas morning to the news that the Sydney-Hobart race committee, 1,200 miles to the west of us, had issued a weather warning to the competitors calling for southwest winds of 45 knots and seas to 5 meters. We had a three to four day run down to Nelson and five days before that weather would reach us if it didn’t speed up. We decided we’d better take whatever time we could and not wait the extra day. So we stowed the boat, said goodbye to the friends we had made in Whangaroa, and set sail about 1100 on Christmas morning, hoping to beat that weather to Nelson. Being underway at least meant I missed my family a bit less than I would have otherwise on Christmas!
We had a mixed bag of light and variable winds, and a mixture of motoring and sailing to keep our speed over 7 knots so we’d arrive in Nelson before the storm. We got in about 12 hours before the front swept through New Zealand, interestingly enough with storm-force northeast winds. Though that would have been behind us, we were quite happy to be safely snugged into a marina berth before it got here. As it turns out, if we’d waited to leave on Boxing Day, we would have been in some pretty strong winds.
We arrived to the news of the tsunami and several e-mails from worried friends. We did not notice anything at sea, but the New Zealand weather authorities measured several waves of about two feet in Jackson Bay, 300 miles south of Nelson. That the wave was measurable here at all, some 5,000 miles away and on the opposite side of Australia from the epicenter, attests to its power. We have had news from most of our friends cruising Thailand, and they all survived unscathed though with hair-raising stories. Luckily it was not the season for boats to be cruising Indonesia. About half the cruising boats in Sri Lanka were destroyed, according to second-hand reports we have received. All of our friends are utterly numbed by the devastation ashore, hardly able to find words to describe it. Whatever misfortunes the cruisers may have suffered pales in significance to what these countries have lost, and to the incredible task of rebuilding that now faces them. The tsunami serves to remind us that the awesome forces of nature still have power over our species.
Nelson is a small town of 50,000 that caters to the South Island tourist trade. Nestled along the banks of a small river that winds its way around 2,500-foot high, wooded ridges, the ten-square block city center bustles with pedestrian traffic (which has right away over the cars), and hanging baskets of colorful flowers line the narrow streets. We arrived to find the annual jazz festival in full swing, and got to enjoy the Saturday fruit, veggie, and crafts market yesterday, just in time to provision for the next six weeks or so away from civilization. Pouring rain made the market pretty soggy. In fact, since we arrived twelve days ago in “the sunniest place in New Zealand,” we have had two days of sunshine. Everyone assures us that this has so far been the worst summer in memory and promises it will change soon. And it does look as if we have a good weather window to get down to the fjords, so we will be leaving Nelson today.
Our next leg takes us 400 miles to the southwest down the west coast to the 13 fjords projecting like long fingers up to 30 miles into the Southern Alps on the southwest corner of the South Island. Friends have described this cruising area as a “mini-Chile” with thundering waterfalls, precipitous peaks, and wind and rain-scoured chasms. Plus Southern Ocean winds and up to 7.5 meters of rain per year in places! We’re looking forward to seeing for ourselves. After the fjords, we’ll spend some time in Stewart Island off the bottom of the South Island, a gentler environment with many of New Zealand’s nearly extinct native birds still in residence.
We will not be checking e-mail again until we arrive in Dunedin, hopefully in early March, so don’t worry if your correspondence goes unanswered for a bit. We’re out there doing what we enjoy most, and we’ll share it with you when we can.
Fair winds and safe anchorages,
Beth and Evans