It's always a little disappointing to see so little fanfare when you time your rapids properly. When you run rapids at slack, it has the feel of motoring across a lake. It's satisfying, if underwhelming.
After "running" the Hole-in-the-Wall rapids at slack current, we anchored around the corner and returned to the scene by foot to see the rapids at max current.
While we were watching the rapids build to over 5 knots, a small sailboat inched toward the rapids at a crawl with its engine going full tilt. A couple of times it appeared the little-engine-that-could would never make it. Forward progress ceased and the engine was just keeping up with the water velocity and no more. Then it slowly started to inch it's way forward again. It started to turn one way and righted itself, then slewed the other way and corrected, before slowly starting to make progress again. Eventually it was through the worst of it and plodded up the channel no apparent worse for the wear.
Today we had two sets of rapids to get through. Running the Okisolo rapids at slack meant getting up at O'dark thirty. Then we had to kill some time to hit the Blind Channel rapids around mid-day. That put us into Cordero Cove with plenty of time for lunch and a little shore exploration.
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