Stillness and sunshine and too much light for star gazing

Today is Friday, June 24, and we will soon begin motoring from our current position in a large and lovely anchorage, Kelp Passage Cove, to another anchorage near Prince Rupert, B.C. We’d arrived in a placid, island-ringed anchorage on Spicer Island on Tuesday evening after our Hecate Straight crossing,

and enjoyed some rest, relaxation, and reading on Wednesday. I spent a good part of the day reading cruising guides, learning about southeast Alaska, and making a tentative “float plan” for our travels from Prince Rupert, to Ketchikan, AK. After showers rinsed Braesail on Wednesday morning, we welcomed increasing sunshine throughout the day and very late into the evening.

It was even sunnier on Thursday morning as we motored to Kelp Passage, and highs must have climbed into the 60s! SUCH a weather change! There was almost no wind, and the glassy sea surfaces reflected a shimmering kaleidoscope of blues, grays, greens and white as the colors of the wooded shores, the snow streaked mountain peaks, and the lazily drifting clouds shifted constantly.

Walt did some reading and made a marvelous pepperoni pizza, while updating blog posts and editing and adding both texts and photos occupied most of my afternoon and evening on Thursday (connectivity is sufficient here to make that work possible). You can now look back to the end of May and browse through the blog entries to see what’s “new and improved!”

Just after 10 pm, I took my smartphone out onto Braesail’s deck at the bow as a sunset began to paint the northwestern sky.

I took one photo, went back to working on blog updates, and then shot a second one just before 11 pm. I then walked around to the stern deck and took the photo below of a snowy mountain ridge peering over the forested hills on the shore.

By the time I was crawling into bed in the aft cabin shortly before midnight, it was still sufficiently light outside to allow me to see the water, the trees on the shores, the three sailboats sharing the cove, and the islands against the sky, and when I got up at 2 am to use the head, I couldn’t see any stars in the skies outside–there was simply too much light!