Then one foggy New Year’s Eve

Wednesday, December 31

Yes, first there was dense fog, making our motoring journey out of Tod Inlet and north toward the tip of the Saanich Penninsula a relatively slow, nerve-wracking one. With visibility at less than a quarter-mile and moored boats on both sides of a narrow channel, Walt used the RADAR overlay on his electronic chart and sounded Braesail’s electronic horn every few minutes, and I moved from one side of the cockpit to the other, peering out into into the grayness through open cockpit side-curtains to see if I could discern any shapes—boats, buoys, islands, a shoreline, ? Having left our anchorage at 10 am to avoid a current running against us, we found, by about 11:30, sunbeams drifting down through the mist from a blue sky as we made our way into more open water at the end of the peninsula and began going east—a great relief to encounter VISIBLE surroundings once again!

Second, there were crab-trap floats. By 2 pm, we’d checked in by phone at the Canada/US border and were scouting for a good anchoring spot in Prevost Harbor on Stuart Island, where we’ve stayed on many occasions. There were only a very few other boats in the large bay, but there were many small, colorful buoys tied to, and marking the locations of, underwater crab traps. As Walt was baking up the boat after dropping the anchor in a good spot (based on the contours of the sea bottom and the distance from another sailboat), and the anchor wasn’t yet firmly embedded, I (on deck in the bow to count off 50-ft. lengths of anchor chain for Walt) noticed two trap floats brushing along Braesail’s starboard hull (Walt was unable to see them from the cockpit)! This meant that underwater lines were present and likely to tangle around the boat’s propeller and/or rudder—NOT a good thing! Walt raised the anchor and we both looked for the buoys at Braesail’s stern, spotting one of them and the top length of the attached line just under the lowered bathing platform. Walt tried to catch it with our boat hook, and then lowered Coracle into the water to see what could be done about the buoys, which seemed to be caught somewhere underwater toward our stern. As he climbed into the dinghy, I noticed that the plug in its stern was not in place, and water was gushing in! “PLUG!” I exclaimed, and Walt inserted it before much water could enter. Then, as he was maneuvering the dinghy around, his long boat hook found its way out of Coracle and into the water (it floats—a good thing!). I mentioned this, and Walt was able to grab the pole and bring it back into the dinghy before it had floated very far.

After determining that the line attached to the floats was caught in Braesail’s rudder, Walt used a knife that I’d retrieved from his desk in the main cabin to free us from the entangling line and leave one of the floats in place so that the owners of the trap could find it. As we motored away, the other Styrofoam buoy was chopped into small pieces by our propeller (I’m sorry that they will wash up on a shore somewhere). Walt found another anchoring spot, and we were safely “hooked” for the night by about 3 pm. Walt used our foot-operated pump to add air to Coracle’s slightly-spongy pontoons, raised the little boat into its place just outside and above Braesail’s stern, and used the boat-hook to remove the stern plug so that rain water can drain properly.

After a more “exciting” day than we’d anticipated, we shared chips and dip in the main cabin on a beautifully sunny late-afternoon, I did some line-neatening, window-cleaning, and picture-taking around the boat’s exterior as a waxing gibbous moon rose in the southeast and a fan of gilded cloud puffs spread out to the southwest,

and we both took good naps. We shared an especially-nice late New Year’s Eve dinner with eggnog custard for dessert, saluted the end of a challenging year with champagne our real estate agent had given us when our condo purchase closed nearly ten years ago (it was still drinkable!), watched videos (some episodes of a Masterpiece Mysteries detective series, some amazing musical performances, and even some gloomy analyses of the world situation) until midnight, and snuggled into our aft-cabin bed, thankful that 2025 was over and that we, the boat, and most of our loved ones were safe, at least for the moment!