June 14, 2017

Ugh. Long Day. We left Windy Bay at 7:00am with not an exact plan because we weren't sure how it would go. Our original plan was to go to Hartley Bay as they have a cell signal there - internet! We wanted to be able to get a recent weather report and to download some GRIB files to see what the weather would be where *we* are. Oh, and OK, download email too to make sure there was nothing we needed to deal with. But the real question for us was what to do with the Gale warning starting tomorrow, Wednesday. As I said, we have all this information but not enough knowledge to know what effect high winds outside in Hecate Straight might mean for here inside the protection of all those islands. We were thinking about spending the night at Hartley Bay, however there is no marina there, just a free public dock. Which means that you know there will be a ton of boats there, there will be fishing boats rafting up to us, and Hartley Bay is at the crossroads in Douglas Channel where the "inflows" and "outflows" are. So would we be able to get out comfortably and continue heading north? Or should we just stay there for 3 days ? (we can work on the computers and get stuff done if we have internet)

In the end, we knew that Grenville Channel would be fine, and the anchorages just off of Grenville Channel are supposed to be "bomb proof", so we decided to push on through even further to Lowe Inlet. But we did get close to Hartley Bay and turned on the cell phone amp and got a lovely Telus signal. So we downloaded all the weather related things we wanted to, Greg processed his email, I processed mine and confirmed that Cow Marina in Prince Rupert has room for us on Friday and Saturday, turned around and went back to where we came from when we *lost* the signal, downloaded a few more things for work, sent a text, and turned around and headed north again. We pulled a crazy Ivan - maybe nobody noticed.

It was 16:30 before we pulled into Lowe, and there were 4 boats here already. One of them was Alaskan Dream, which is owned by a friend of ours in Bellingham and also used to be in the NWE fleet. NWE "borrowed it" for their Leg 1 to Alaska, and now someone, we don't know who yet, is bringing it back to Bellingham. We might go over in the morning to say hello.

We were able to anchor right in front of Verney Falls. We got close enough to them so that the fresh water coming into the inlet keeps Spellbound in the same direction and we don't have to worry about the boat swinging around in a circle. We should stay in the same direction all night. (Better check tomorrow's Blog entry to see if it worked!). Time for an anchor steam on the flybridge.