July 22nd Windy Bay to Swanson

July 22^nd          Windy Bay to Swanson.  This morning we awake to wind in our appropriately named “Windy Bay” anchorage.  Weather for the “outside” Central Coast McGinnis to Pine Island calls for gale force warning SE winds 25-35 knots.  Our inside winds are around 15 knots plus so we enjoy our coffee while on anchor watch.  If we need to we will cast the lines off of B Mondo and set our own anchor.  We stow all the dinghy and fishing gear, waiting for a lull in the wind to hoist ET aboard.  With ET safely lashed we now simply wait out the storm puttering around the boats. 

I continue my reading journey with Jonathon Raban on his “Passage to Juneau.”  He in turn is journeying through time dipping back and forth between Captain George Vancouver’s 1792 voyage on her Majesty’s ship Discovery and Jonathon’s personal, present day solo sail from Seattle to Alaska aboard his 35 foot sailboat.   We coast and glide together from Sydney up to Desolation Sound.  He paints a much brighter canvas than I have as he describes both his journey and that of Vancouver and his crew as they grow ever more disenfranchised with their captain.  As Jonathon puts it “Menzies and Vancouver aboard the same ship at the same time in the same place, were on separate journeys through two landscapes.”  Menzies saw the landscape through the lens of the botanist happily botanizing and potting new found plants (whereby we have the plants with Latin species names of menziesii ) while Vancouver saw it through the lens of a captain who might not ever achieve the status that he felt he should.  

Seals in the rain

With a good photo in hand of the delightful small brown water birds we keep seeing we key it out to a Marbled Murrelet which had been Walt’s guess.  We have yet to definitively identify the plant Odile found but we think it is a false huckleberry.  This is what happens when you turn quasi scientist naturalists loose in the wilds!

Marbled Murrelet

We listen to the 10:30 weather and decide to head out.  We do not find adequate anchorage in Green Inlet so we press on to Swanson Bay.  As we enter Swanson we have a way too close encounter with a humpback whale.  This was not “whale off the starboard bow.”  This was whale AT the starboard bow.  We see the head, the center hump and by the time the 40’ or so long whale decides to dive Pam has just enough time to say “holy crap” and grab the camera.  The whale has glided past the boat and all Pam captures is the swirling water as the tail disappears.  Needless to say it is good that we were going slow as we approached the bay!

White Swirl is the Whale Tail