June 5, 2017

We left at 7:00am so that we could get up Johnstone Straight before the wind came up. It wasn't supposed to come up until "late afternoon", but everyone has fallen for that old joke before!

Leaving Owen Bay was a bit squirrelly but not too bad. But arriving in Johnstone Straight shortly afterwards, we found it "like glass". I've never seen it like that and we were amazed and excited.





We started out with '0' knots of wind and ended up with only about 5kts for most of the way. The forecast called for 5-15kts from the NorthWest, but all the wind we got was from the SouthEast. Which was good for us as we rode the Ebb all the way up and made great time. If it *had* been from the NW, we would have had a small amount of wind over tide which would have made it rougher. When we were about an hour away from the Havannah Channel turnoff, the wind picked up a bit to maybe 15kts, and it got choppy with some small white caps, but it wasn't bad at all.

Interestingly, these past few days in Johnstone Straight were ones where there was no flood tide, only ebbing. The floods are so weak, that they don't counteract the natural permanent ebb and so the tide charts don't refer to "slack", it's just a "negligible" ebb.

We thought about going directly to Lagoon Cove, but decided to stop in and have pizza at Port Harvey. There was no one else there when we arrived, and it was just Gail on her own. George was back in Alberta for his mothers's 85th birthday celebration. While we were standing on the dock catching up though, the Port McNeill Explorer arrived unexpectedly. Bruce and Nancy Jackman were bringing their boat back north, and decided to go around and visit the neighbors before returning to Port McNeill.

We all got a tour of the new digs which are not quite ready for prime time, but very close. It was an unbelievably warm and sunny afternoon even with the occasional large gusts. And then around 4:00pm, the wind came in and made it much cooler. About that time, John and Judy, friends of the Jackman's arrived on their Kadey-Krogen, the Stella Maris.

Everyone ordered pizza for dinner and so we all had dinner together out on the deck, and Gail joined us too for a short while. It was pretty cool eventually, but we managed to finish dinner and exchange all of our life histories before too long. Lots of interesting people out on the water. We went back to Port McNeill Explorer for a glass of wine after dinner to take a look at the boat and chat with Bruce and Nancy.