August 6th Tom's Bay to Namu

                                                  We brought up an old logging cable



August 6^th  Tom’s Bay to Namu

9:30 departure    61 degrees   sunny but changed to cloudy

A discovery of even more evidence of a once active logging operation in Tom’s Bay was made this morning when we hauled up our anchor. Wrapped around the anchor was a thick, extremely heavy old logging cable. There was no way to lift it off the anchor. With our anchor dangling off the bow, David grabbed his “zippy” and went to work. The big worry was once the cable was cut, where would it snap. You don’t want it whipping toward the skipper or causing damage to the boat. David picked the right spot to saw through, and the cable slipped back into the water. There were layers of rust and corrosion on the cable, but David said that once he hit the center of the cable, it was bright shiny steel.

In spite of our morning surprise,  Tom’s Bay was a very pleasant anchorage. With the calm evening, we were able to spend a great deal of time outside enjoying our lovely surroundings. Once again, we were the only boat in the bay. We are certain that will change once we return to the busy Broughtons.

 The rocky mouth leading out of Mathieson Channel had us on high alert especially with the low visibility this morning. David likes to call it “mist”…no, it’s fog. We entered a portion of Milbanke Sound which David heard could be “an ugly piece of water” so we put down the fish for better stability, which saved us from a lot of rocking and rolling in that patch of open water.  Turning into Seaforth Channel, we smiled at the sun.

Seaforth Channel lead us to Hunter Channel past New Bella Bella, a major native village, which was our original destination.  Once again, we felt fine so kept moving. We entered Lama Passage and cruised on to Fisher Channel. We had several turns today around rocky points and lighthouses.

David had wanted to explore Namu on our trip north, but we ran out of time. Namu is where we headed and Rock Inlet was our anchorage choice. Once in the inlet, our attempt to anchor was hindered by currents pushing the Belle in the wrong direction. After a bit of a struggle, we finally secured our hook. Our bow was facing the Channel, and we knew that if the westerlies kicked up, we were right in their path.

Soon after we were hooked, two men came along the Belle in a small fishing boat and talked with David about moving our boat to the inner bay where we would have more protection. When David explained that we didn’t go that far because we did not know what the depths would be at the entrance, they took off to measure the depths for us. When they returned, they reported that the shallowest spot was 25 feet and told us there was plenty of room for our boat…another example (among many during our trip)  of the kindness of strangers.

We took their advice and found a perfect spot in 50 feet with plenty of protection and surrounding beauty. Later that evening, David took some beer over to the kind gentlemen’s boat as a thank you for their help.

It had been 9 hours of boating for us so having a peaceful refuge was something to celebrate. Ahh, more crab! Why not!