Day 2: Crossing Hecate Strait

​We had a pretty lazy start to the morning as the taxi was only due to pick us up from the hostel at 9:45am. Breakfast was provided but we had to cook it ourselves so I had a couple of eggs and a bowl of cheerios. I was halfway through my eggs when the taxi driver showed up at 9:35. I wolfed (is that how you spell that?) the rest and hopped in the taxi.

We had about an hour on a forest road to get to Port Moresby Camp and had a pretty good look at some forestry. I don't think Dad would have been very impressed with the pruning and thinning on the forests. At the dock we met the crew: Captain Russ Markel, 1st mate Eric Burton, Russ's brother Dean and Margot Hessing-Lewis. Sohrabh Memon and I made 6. Unfortunately the cook was departing the ship for a spell but I wasn't too worried as I was pretty sure whatever we ate would be better than hash brown sandwiches. The crew had a few things to sort out before we climbed aboard so we were advised to go for a bit of a walk. We were informed that there should be a pretty good chance of a bear sighting and the bears on Haida Gwaii don't really attack people so I was pretty excited. Needless to say th​​at we didn't see bear. I am beginning to suspect that this Canadian bear theory is just a myth.

A quick shot of our vessel from the dock at Port Moresby Camp:

We zipped over and climbed aboard the Passing Cloud. We headed straight out to cross Hecate Straight as the weather was forecast to kick up in the next couple of days. Allegedly, the straight is the fourth most dangerous straight in the world. It is fairly shallow (~60ft) and in winter the swell can expose parts of the seabed and cause crazy waves to break randomly all over the shop. Needless to say we were hoping to avoid that. On the way we spotted a collection of birds, a rock of Sea Lions:

A pod of Dalls Porpoises and a whale that was either a Fin whale, Sei whale or Minke whale (I didn't tell anyone that I had eaten Minke when I was in Iceland!). We also had a super yacht cross our stern:

Most of the crossing was fairly uneventful though. We put the main sail up but only to stabilize the boat a bit and motored the whole way. We got to the other side and headed into Camano sound at about 1am. We were intending to anchor in Pemberton Bay but there was a fair bit of swell and wind from the South which would have been blowing directly into the bay so we decided to push on into Lorado Channel. At about 3am we were all getting a bit tired so we switched off the engine and I put my head down for some kip. I found out later everyone else that stayed up just bobbed around for a while in a daze before starting off again about 2am or so. Its always good fun when you abandon plan A!