August 12, 2022 Friday Day 77: Prince Rupert to Lowe Inlet 79 miles- 3489 total miles
Today is my Oma’s B-day! (Oma is German for Grandma. My oma is my mom’s mom. Ellen’s middle name is after my oma, and they are birthday buddies, just one day apart. My oma has a love for traveling and learning from others. I like to think I got my wanderlust from her!) Happy birthday Oma!
Everyone slept in this morning and Ellen slept great. It’s the best she’s slept in a long while. We actually tied up to the Prince Rupert Yacht Club. We woke up to two workers outside our boat talking. Chris went and talked to them. They were curious who we were and told us to go in and talk to the harbormaster. They weren’t rude or anything and understood we got in late. Chris came back and told us that we were OK to dock there, but only for an hour and a half, as a big boat was coming in and we needed to move to make space for them. We did need to go get groceries, but we figured we’d have enough time.
We headed for Safeway to get our supplies for the trip home. Chris took the kids potty while I started shopping. When they were finished Lillian came with me to help me, and Chris, Ryan, and Ellen went together to get a few things on the list. Chris checked out while I went potty and we made it back to the boat in record time.
We got gas at Prince Rupert and when we were pulling out we saw Northern Sunrise, a boat that was on the dock with us at Meyers Chuck. We messaged them to see how their crossing of Dixon Entrance was and to wish them well on their trip to Washington. (They are from Alaska, but are getting work done on their American Tug at LaConner.)
We came into some pretty thick fog, but it did clear as the day went on.
We heard some boats talking about going into Baker Inlet. We decided it sounded like a nice place, and a very small detour so we wanted to check it out. Baker Inlet is a small fjord with mountains on all sides. At the end of the fjord there are snow capped mountains and a small grassy meadow. Getting into Baker Inlet were some tidal rapids and strong currents. It wasn’t too bad for us and it made for an exciting entrance and exit. That was actually our favorite part of the whole thing. This would be a great place to anchor for the night. It was a little too early for us and we wanted to get in some more miles for the day, so we headed out.
We went into Lowe Inlet. It’s where we saw our first bears of the trip. I was really hoping we would see 50 bears on the trip, we were currently at 48, so we needed 2 more. Since we saw bears here early June we were optimistic we would see some here. Luckily we did see a bear at the waterfall! (We also saw quite a few salmon trying to get up.) We watched the bear for a bit, and then it headed off. Throughout our time we saw 4 bears here. Each time they would check out the waterfall for Salmon and then move on. We were there at low tide, which is normally a great time to see bears on the beach. We think that low tide at the waterfall made it so the salmon couldn’t get up the falls as easily. We were hoping at high tide there would be more bears, sadly high tide was at 2 AM and too dark to see any bears.
We did talk to a couple that were sailing all over. They are from Tucson, which is near where Chris and I grew up. They even knew our hometown! (It is surprising since we are from a small town.) They sailed from California to Mexico. Mexico to Hawaii, Hawaii to Alaska, and now they are headed to Washington. It was fun chatting with them. We were impressed with their trip, and they were impressed with ours-doing it with 3 young kids in such a small boat.
Bear Count: Today: 4 bears Total: 52 bears
Ryan’s Thoughts: We saw bears on a waterfall catching fish, cool!
Lillian’s Thoughts: We went grocery shopping and we saw bears.
