SIMOON SOUND
We anchored at the mouth of
Simoon Sound in O’Brien Bay yesterday and decided to stay another day. Guess we
just needed the solitude after the activity at Sullivan Bay.
Simoon Bay has some history attached to it. Captain Vancouver in
HMS Discovery and Chatham
anchored here extensively during his voyages of exploration during the summer
of 1792. Anita told us that she had read
that Captain Vancouver suffered from chronic depression. This place had to have
lifted his spirits. When I look at our charts and see all the islands, inlets,
sounds, bays, channels, etc, I can’t imagine the challenges Vancouver’s chart makers faced.
We are here.
Like so many of the bays and
coves we have anchored in along the way, this one is again surrounded by
mountains boasting of trees. You can definitely see some of the scars of
logging on several of the mountainsides. Most clear cut areas are hidden behind
a screen of trees along the shoreline. We have spent our time dropping crab and
prawn traps, touring the area in our dinghy, staining, sanding, painting and
reading. This boat is like the Golden
Gate Bridge…you
start painting at one end and when you reach the other end; you have to start
all over again! But most of all, we just
sit out on the bow or on top of the boat deck and just marvel at the beauty
that nourishes us. How lucky we are. Incredible!
Unfortunately, we are being
challenged by our navigational system. It is not operating correctly, and David
has spent a great deal of time trying to figure out the problem. Reading the
manual is like trying to decipher some kind of code. Frustration is too soft a
word to describe how we are feeling at this point. We will give it another try
this morning and if we cannot remedy the problem, hopefully, Dennis can help us
when we see him in two days. There’s always something.
We ended up being crabless
and prawnless in Simoon. We believe it might have something to do with the Fish
Farm at the mouth of this Sound. To add insult to injury, when I was rewinding
the line from the empty prawn pot back into the bucket, my headset radio fell
out of my back pocket and into 200 feet of water! That’s the second radio we have lost on this
trip. My “inner voice” told me to put
the radio in a zippered pocket as I always do to be safe. Obviously, I ignored
it and paid the price. It has been a rugged two days for us with a lost radio,
a marine mishap, zero crab and navigation nonsense so it was time to move on.
We motored on over to Laura
Bay only about an hour away and found a very sweet spot to anchor. A crab boat
came by and picked up its string of pots and it looked like they had quite a
successful haul. We were encouraged to drop our pots once again.
When I woke up at 7 a.m. and
looked out the window I commented, “Looks like a whole lot more rocks are
around us than when we went to bed.” The
tide had gone out and our stern was aground. We thought we were in good shape
in 19 feet of water…it had to have dropped 12 feet at low tide which was
unexpected. We waited for the tide to
flow back in and in a little over 3 hours later, we were afloat once again and
moved on.
Got a bit too shallow for the Belle
We left for Echo Bay and
it was a short jaunt to the docks at Pierre’s
Resort. Three other boats were coming in at the same time and those in charge
were scurrying from dock to dock to guide boats in. They were fun to watch…Mad
Dog Mike, who helped bring us in, saw me poised to step off on to the dock and
do my thing and said, “Don’t get off the boat, Ma’am.” I was more than happy to throw him our line. This is a very popular destination. We’ve got
a good feeling about this place.
That crab boat brought us
good luck because there were 10 crabs in one of our pots in Laura Bay. Seven of them were keepers but our limit is
four, and they were the biggest ones yet!
We're having crab tonight!
As I read these posts, I silently root for more crab/prawn success stories.
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