Day 421 A long slog!

We left this morning at 0400, getting up at 0330. Yes, that's right, were living the dream. When is the last time you got out of bed at that hour?

It was raining as it had all night and it would continue for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon before finally stopping about 1300. It just sprinkled off and on after that. It did finally stop just after we put the anchor down in Meyer's Chuck(55 44.441N 132 15.499W) at 1515 hours. An eleven hour plus day of a long slog to get here.

As I said, it was raining when we left but we had the tide with us to help push us the first part of the trip to Snow Passage. We got up to 8.7 knots through that portion of the trip. After that, it was all up hill from there. The winds came barreling up Clarence Strait at speed of 42 knots that we saw on our gauge. Add in that the tide changed and was suddenly against us to the tune of 2.5 to 3 knots and Zephyr slowed to a crawl. Toss in 4 to 5 foot swells and we were just having a great time. To really understand what it was like, go to some cowboy bar and climb on the mechanized fake bull that they always have and start it up. You'll under stand the fun we were having. Add someone with a fire hose and a wind machine and there you go. At least we didn't hit any stray dead heads this time. At times, we were down to 1.2 knots and that was with the engine doing 1800 rpms. A bit faster than we normally run her just to try and make some headway. There were times we would get up to over 6 knots only to be suddenly slowed back to 4.3 for some unknown reason. Up and down all day long. As I said, it took us over eleven hours to cover the 55.9 nautical miles we went today. We were just above crawling, but we did make it. We've now covered 202.4 miles in the last four days.

It brought back some memories of our trip up from Newport back in July of last year. No where as steep a wave, but just as big a wind. The kids were not impressed. Blue was drooling and Snowshoe was just ticked. Shadow buried himself under pillows on the settees and stayed there. I spent some time in the main salon just petting poor Blue. She was not a happy camper by any means.

Myer's Chuck is quite the group of houses. It's one of the largest non-towns we have seen since we got to Alaska. There is even a dock, though we chose to anchor out again. It's much easier and we have more privacy and since we tend to leave earlier than most, we won't disturb the other boaters. An 82 foot power cruiser(Pastime) just came in(several hours after us)and dropped their anchor just off our stern. It has crowed the anchorage a bit(hope they have good insurance). A sailboat(Pipe Dream IX) came in about 20 minutes after us and took the last space at the dock. They are welcome to it. We have come to prefer staying out on the hook so to speak. The kids can't go any where.

Tomorrow, we have set our sights on making it to Foggy Bay just North of Prince Rupert, BC. It's almost a 70 mile trip so we will again be off early in the morning. We expect by 0500 to make the best tides to get us where we need to go and avoid the cruise liners that ply these water. We just saw Norwegian Sun pass Meyer's Chuck a few minutes ago.