Cape Kuper to Kootenay Inlet. July 25.
17 August 2009
Photo: Entering Kootenay Inlet
Thick fog obscured the nearby shores of Kuper Cove the morning we planned to run down the coast to Kootenay Inlet. We'd come to Kuper Cove, a small bay near Cape Kuper outside Englefield Bay the evening before, thinking an anchorage near the ocean would be more scenic as well as closer to the ocean for departure. But although we had passed sea caves and sea stacks on our way into the cove, now we saw nothing but gray. We waited until 9 o'clock for the outlines of rocks and trees to emerge from the fog so we could leave. Once we were in the ocean, fog closed in again and Northwest winds came up strong. Soon we were sailing under main and small jib, Osprey surfing down the waves in a gray world of fog.
I was sitting behind the wheel, making small corrections to our course on the autopilot when I heard a clunk underneath the seat. Immediately, the boat rounded up into the wind. I jiggled the controls but nothing happened and finally had to turn off the autopilot and steer by hand. Steve took over, but couldn't get it to work either. I tried not to think about what the rest of our trip would be like without an autopilot if we couldn't fix it. Although we can certainly hand steer, no autopilot means only one person to raise, lower, and reef sails -- a hard chore in strong winds.
We caught only glimpses of the land through the fog as we sailed south -- the peaks of mountains looming out of the fog. As we neared Kootenay, Steve adjusted with the radar and announced, "If we can see land when the one mile ring on the radar touches it, we can go in. Otherwise, we'll have to go on to Tasu Sound." Kootenay is an uncharted Inlet with rocks at its entrance and we needed to see the rocks to enter it while Tasu Sound is charted with an easier entrance. Fortunately, the fog cleared just in time to reveal mountains rising out of the sea at the Inlet's entrance and we headed in.
I thought it was insane to sail in strong winds into an uncharted inlet among rocks and reefs so Steve rounded the boat up so I could take down the sails to let us motor in. Osprey plunged and rolled as I struggled to bring the sails down in 35 knot winds. I finally got them down and more or less stowed and we motored through rough seas, putting two small islands to port and a reef to starboard. The seas flattened and the wind diminished as soon as we rounded the first island and I realized it would have been better to have sailed in and taken the sails down in protected waters. Sheer cliffs towered above us with mountains behind, warm air flowed out to meet us and blue skies were visible above. In just a few minutes we had gone from frightening fog and chaos of seas and rocks to this amazing summer paradise. We anchored in the North Arm of the Inlet in one of the most beautiful settings we had seen in the northwest.
The definition of cruising is doing boat repairs in exotic places and that's what we did for the rest of the day. We emptied everything from the port seat locker so Steve could crawl in and look at the steering and autopilot. To our dismay he found that the 5/8" bolt that connects the tiller arm to the hydraulic steering ram had sheared off. Naturally, we had no spare for a bolt we couldn't imagine breaking. Our only hope was to file the broken threads, reconnect and pray there was enough of the bolt left to hold things together. Steve did that, then discovered that when the bolt sheered, an internal fuse had blown. That meant taking everything out of the quarter berth to get at the electronic unit. When Steve opened the unit up, he found corrosion inside. We cleaned it up, replaced the fuse, fussed some more, and finally it worked. We would have to wait to find out how well.
"You're on your own out there," a fisherman in Rose Harbour had told us. Now we understood what he meant. If we hadn't been able to repair the autopilot ourselves, we would have had to do without; there was no one to help us.