Photo: Pinnacle rocks south of Sunday Inlet

"I just want to get off this coast," I told Steve the next morning when he asked me how far I wanted to go that day. "Northwest gales, 30-40 knots" was still the forecast for the West Coast Queen Charlottes. Was the record stuck at the weather office? We'd learned to sail in the wind and seas but it still made me feel uneasy. And I worried about getting trapped by heavy seas in one of the small inlets.

That day we sailed 40 miles, bypassing Gowgaia Inlet for Flamingo Inlet, 20 miles further. Named for a fishing boat named "Flamingo," rather than the bird, it has the dual advantage of being surveyed and easy to enter. Actual soundings on the chart instead of a blank! Nevermind that they were done with a lead line in 1931.

As we sailed south the mountains became lower, like stairsteps. We rounded the point at the inlet's entrance and sailed into a long narrow bay with rocky shores and green forested hills.

We had read that the beaches in Flamingo are great spots for beachcombing as southern storms blow flotsam and jetsam into the Inlet. We looked for glass balls but all we found was plastic: plastic net floats, nylon fish nets and hundreds of plastic water bottles -- all with their lids screwed on tight. Here on this coast where we hadn't seen another boat or a person for days, the discards of civilization had found us.