Due to the fact that we have had very limited access to the Internet over the past week, it has been difficult to regularly update this blog.

While we may not mention every location where we stop, we would like to catch up on the highlights. We have been traveling throughout the Broughton Islands.

We spent the 4th of July at Echo Bay, a small marina on a tiny island with a population of eight. The owners served a special prime rib dinner at their banquet/roasting facility in honor of visiting American boaters. These people also host several pig roasts, prime rib dinners, and fish 'n chips nights throughout the summer. They are extremely hospitable and work hard as the summer months are pretty much their bread and butter for the entire year.

We next traveled to Laura Bay on Broughton Island where we watched two black bear cubs and their mother foraging for food on the beach behind our boat.

We then found an unnamed (per the charts) treasure of an anchorage on the east side of Eden Island. Upon consulting our cruising guides, we discovered they named the cove Lady Boot Cove (the cove and adjoining smaller cove really do look like a lady's boot on the chart). Finally caught some crab...helps to use enticing bait. Kirk was successful in catching some flounder and a few rockfish so the inedible parts became bait.

We are now at Port McNeil on the northeast corner of Vancouver Island, provisioning, fueling, etc. in preparation for a trip across Queen Charlotte Strait and on into Fitz Hugh Sound north of Vancouver Island on the BC coast. On the way here we saw the first of what we expect to be many whales. We docked next to a research vessel from the Vancouver Aquarium. The subject of their research is marine mammals. They told us that the populations of sea otters, orcas and humpback whales are in reasonably good shape. Sea otters were reintroduced to the northwest only a decade or two ago after being wiped out by the fur traders during the early of days of settling in this area. The researches said we should see all of these marine mammals during our time up here.

We will most likely be out of communication for the next couple of weeks, but you never know. We sometimes get cell signals in weird places.