A Breath of Fresh Air

I awoke the night before last to the dinghy banging on the hull: bambam...bam     bambam...bam. Competing impulses fought within me: ignore it or deal with it. Deal with it eventually wins of course, but it might not have if I'd known what was waiting for me as I crawled out the hatch in my tighty-whities. Rain. It was the first in our two weeks of travel.  But while it didn't do much for my mood in the moment, it, and the corresponding wind, did wonders for clearing the atmosphere.

So yesterday started calm and rain soaked, then cleared with a fresh breeze out of the northwest. We made the best of it and sailed in an open sound in the sunshine - tacking and gybing for the fun of it rather than to take us where we needed to go.  The wind finally exhausted its self, so we furled and motored on.  

Within a few minutes the wind was back up, but we weren't tempted to pull out the sails again because the wind was in our faces and building. It topped 30 knots before we pulled into our cove for the night and we were pushed around all evening. Two more boats joined us and a third poked his nose in the cove and made a hasty retreat. He apparently didn't like his chances of avoiding damage with three boats already dancing around at the ends of their anchor chains.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to include photos with these posts. Wi-Fi is hard to come by out here and when we do find it, there isn't throughput for anything more than text. Maybe we'll have better luck when we reach Port McNeill in a few days.