Thursday-Friday, September 17-18, 2026
After a refreshingly restful night, another still, warm, sapphire-shiny day greeted us, and we spent it on enjoyable projects on Braesail. Walt got out his drone, charged its batteries, refreshed his memory concerning its operation, and sent it off from the boat’s stern to circle Waddington Harbour and produce a video of the boat in its magnificent surroundings. The drone’s battery didn’t last as long as expected, but Walt was able to capture a very lovely “over-view” of our anchorage that showed the impressive size of the harbor and our tiny spot in it. I had quite a lot of blog-post writing on which to catch up, and a great many photos to process, label, sort, and store on my laptop.
During the lazy, sun-saturated afternoon, I enjoyed looking at the changing colors of the water around the boat,
had a good phone-visit with a church friend, and left a message for another, and Walt prepared dough out of which to make bread on Friday. The wind remained absent, and, for the most part, the silence was complete apart from occasional bird calls and the continuous soporific “hush-sh-sh” of a stream that remained hidden in the shoreline forest at the base of the gigantic rock face to our north. Every now and again, however, our ears were assaulted by the buzzing of chainsaws in use at the logging camp near the mouth of the Southgate River at quite a distance to the east,
and the silence was shattered even more cruelly by the roar of fighter jets that occasionally blasted up and down the inlet and over the mountains on some mission or another.
With our usual activities completed, Walt prepared a wonderful supper, as he always does, and we watched The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, an excellent, thought-provoking documentary film about the nature, development, potentials, and perils of artificial intelligence. Walt slipped into bed at about 11 pm, and I enjoyed a stroll on Braesail’s deck on a surprisingly clement night, where, with the moon having retired about an hour earlier
and with no ambient light whatsoever, I could be enveloped in the splendor of a cloudless sky teeming with stars. I could pick out a number of the constellations that had become my friends when I was a child living in a small mountain community in southern California where the air was clear and we could easily escape the lights from the windows of neighborhood houses in a remote spot called Inspiration Point that provided a 360-degree view of the sky. I was able to observe the creamy sweep of the Milky Way, a splendid sight I had not seen for many, many years, as it poured down the sky in billows of astral froth from one side of the harbor to the other, and I could look below the boat and see an inky liquid sky in which floated watery stars gazing upward at me—breathtaking! I finally trailed off to bed, and what a great gift of beauty and wonder I had been given for which to thank God!
The plan for the Friday involved setting out down Bute Inlet at around 9 am,
anchoring in Leask Cove (which we had explored on our northward trip on Tuesday) and spending the night there, and then continuing to the mouth of the fjord on Saturday and going on into the Octopus Islands. The day began with clear skies and no wind, but as we motored between the mountains, small breezes began to drop by and bounce over Braesail’s bow, and cottony cloud-scarves began to wrap themselves around the mountain peaks.
Walt had been thinking of writing an article about our Bute Inlet journey for Compass Magazine (primarily by and for owners of Moody sailboats such as ours), approached the magazine about the idea, and was given a very positive response. The 2024 article I’d written about our winter sail to Princess Louisa Inlet, they told us, had been one of their best-received items, and they’d welcome another article about a journey to and from another British Columbia fjord. So Walt decided to send up our drone at some point during our journey where the clouds and snow-topped summits would provide a good backdrop for an aerial view of Braesail to accompany an article he’d write that would incorporate some information from these blog posts. We stopped the boat and let her drift when we selected a likely spot, Walt sent up the drone from the stern, and it returned with a very nice photo—hooray! Between the two of us, we have some 50 photos from which to choose several to send to the magazine editors.
As we moved down the inlet, Walt and I took turns being on watch at the helm. With the boat being guided by “St. Brendan,” our autopilot, there wasn’t much to do but watch the water’s surface and enjoy the wondrously fresh air and the glorious scenery—during this trip, I noticed some thin threads of waterfalls spooling their way down the rock faces here and there. Walt made some repairs to our ancient binoculars, and he put his bread dough into the engine room to rise (the room’s warmth makes it an excellent “proofing box”!). Looking at his tides-and-currents tables, he noticed that, if we did NOT stop for the night at Leask Cove but continued toward the Octopus Islands on the shore of Quadra Island, we would arrive at the rapids at the end of a narrow channel called “Hole in the Wall” just at slack tide when the rapids would be easiest to cross, and we could easily continue on into the islands (Walt read somewhere that this cluster of islands used to be home to a great many octopuses, and thus received their name). So after motoring for about six hours, we decided to continue for another two, transit the rapids (thanks to my sister-in-law, Glenna, for her idea for a tile for this post!) and find a good spot in which to anchor among the numerous islands. While we traveled down the pretty channel, I visited with my brother and sister-in-law in Springfield, IL, via Zoom, and I was able to hold up my laptop so that they could see the channel’s forested shores as well—a nice “change of scene” for them!
Once through the placid “rapids,” we wandered around the islands, saw a boat or two in the complex maze of waterways, and picked a fine spot, with no other vessels in sight, in which to anchor. After a little over eight hours of running, Braesail’s engine had generated plenty of hot water for showers (which felt wonderful!). Walt had baked his loaf of bread during the last portion of our journey, and we ate some of it with tomato soup for supper; I cleaned up the galley and began work on this post; Walt did some reading; and we looked forward to a completely silent night uninterrupted by chainsaws or jet planes!
Braesail - A grand yacht in the Salish Sea 