June 12, 2017

It was lovely and glassy leaving Shearwater at about 7:00am. We headed out to Seaforth Channel towards the open water and for the first time, into "virgin" territory for us and Spellbound.

Greg turned the watermaker on as usual once we got out into "clear" water. After awhile though, the amount of water in the tank had still not increased. We look at everything and the water maker reports that everything is great and it's making water without any issues! So Greg takes the front berth apart and starts to poke around - everything is fine except the water is not coming out. Out comes the manual and it says that the diverter valve might be stuck or broken. Essentially, at the last minute it does a check of the water and if it's not the right salinity or it's not happy, it just "diverts" the water overboard. The manual also tells you how to "hardwire it" to bypass the diverter valve which Greg does. We check the water using the "manual salinity method" and it's great. So we leave it that way to fill up the tank on our way.

We snake through Reid Passage which bypasses the open ocean swell that comes in at the end of Seaforth Channel. It's very scenic and we follow a well traveled, but strict route through the area. We travel through Perceval Narrows which was a none issue, and up into Mathieson Channel. Our original plan was to stop in Rescue Bay, or to go through Jackson Narrows and then up into Bottleneck Inlet. But it turns out that Jackson Narrows appears to be one of the narrows that should be transmitted at slack, and we were there at max. So we "could" hang out in Rescue Bay until slack and then go through, but that would be quite late. Or we could stay the night in popular Rescue Bay and go through the next morning, but we decided to try and make it further north. So we went all the way up Mathieson to Windy Bay. It was a long but calm and quiet passage. As we were about to go through Mathieson Narrows, we saw 2 humpbacks hanging out in the current there very close to shore and our boat. We also surprised a river otter who was swimming around in mid channel for some reason. It's very deep and not an issue at all to transit. Two Bald Eagles hanging out on a dead tree screeched at us as we went through too - it was quite lovely.

As we entered Windy Bay, there was one other boat there. It's a huge bay but quite deep so we tucked around and got as close to shore as we could so that we were in shallow enough water. As soon as we shut the engines off, we heard the distinctive south of a "whale breath" and saw a humpback leaving the bay.