[Photo from our shower window in Kynoch Inlet]

Our route and current location:
https://share.garmin.com/RonRisden
For those following along at home - and at work - the Sail Blog app is just a straight line, giving our anchored locations - where we end for the day. The Garmin track linked above, which starts in Powell River, gives a fairly continuous track of our travels; showing the ins and outs (and backtracking) we are doing. Also you will notice that the dates of the writing may seem a little off. Entries get written when there is a good internet connection and may reflect that date. We will try to start putting the date(s) into the heading.

We headed out of Shearwater after some repairs; confessions are tough. We had hit a rock in Echo Bay and needed to get the boat hauled out to inspect it. Shearwater was the closest place that could accommodate us, so off we went. Upon hauling us out, the inspection proved to be as we thought; pride was hurt more than the boat - so back into the water we went. We had only planned to stay one more day and wanted to come in to the dock from our anchorage for shopping, but upon trying to raise the anchor, it failed. We had to resort to manually raising it by hand; quite the morning workout. Fortunately, our windless can be utilized in a manual mode so I spent a while with a winch handle cranking it up. Short story, we got the part in from Vancouver in two days and another day to repair it with help from the machine shop in Shearwater Marina and we were off. A little longer stop than planned, but hey, we have no schedule. Our thanks to the great crew at Shearwater Marina for all their help.

We were headed towards Kynoch Inlet to try to spot wildlife; after all we were now in the Great Bear Rainforest. We were going via Rescue Bay as a stopping point, to break up the @ 65 nautical mile trip. We opted to travel to Rescue Bay by going out into Millbanke Sound, which has a similar exposure to Cape Caution in that Japan is the land mass to the west. It was a very small swell and we had no issues and were anchored in Rescue Bay that afternoon.

The next day we were anxious to get to Kynoch Inlet as the scenery is said to rival none on the BC coast. We were not disappointed. The rock faces that rose up out of the inlet surpassed those of Princess Louisa with ease, some rising to well over 3000 ft directly out of the water. It reminded me of an older Yosemite; the rock faces were split with deep gorges and trees growing on incredibly steep sides. Just spectacular beauty with no one else around. We dropped the anchor at the very end of the inlet in moderate depths, but set a stern anchor to prevent swinging into the side wall and had a great nights sleep.

In the morning we got up and looked around and we were rewarded with our first good wildlife views. We saw a mother brown bear (grizzly to some folks) with 2 cubs from the previous year. They were eating food on the shoreline quite a ways away from us, but still provided a wonderful look at a some great animals. Shortly thereafter, Kirsten spotted another large brown bear on the shore much closer to our boat. This was also a female with two little cubs; one a darker brown and one a very light golden brown. It was low tide and mom appeared to be teaching the little ones how to look for clams and other shellfish in the tidal area. Mom would take one or two swipes at the hard sand and then the cubs would dart into the hole she had just dug and eat what she was eating. To say the least, it was impressive to see how far down she could dig with just one or two swipes of the paw. Definitely someone you want on your side in a street fight!


NOTE: best watched by going actually to YouTube and viewing on full screen

After watching the bears for a while, we saw a boat leaving Cullpepper Lagoon which is attached to the head of the inlet via a small passage. We had seen the passage and the Lagoon on the charts but it is very narrow and ebbs at over 7 knots; not something you want to transit unless the tide is slack. We took the dinghy in for a look around the big Lagoon. It had quite a few birds in it, but we saw no other signs of wildlife. The next day we saw 3 smaller trawler type power boats line up and all wait for slack time. They then proceeded to race through the passage and into the lagoon. We left ahead of them the next day so have no idea if they went for a quick ride on the way out!