It's a funny fact of recreational life that the better you prepare for slaying dragons, the fewer dragons there will be to slay. I guess that's another way of saying that the best way to beat dragons is to avoid them.
Reading about the lives that have been lost in Johnstone Straight, it's hard not to be intimidated by the idea of navigating through it. We're told to avoid large currents, large tidal exchanges, shoals, tugs, barges, heavy weather, spring tides, opposing wind and current, turbulence, and sea monsters. In crossing Seymour Narrows yesterday and Johnstone Straight for seven hours today, we avoided all of it - partly by luck and partly by doing our homework.
The first point of luck was high tide, 7am at Chatham Point on a day with relatively small tidal exchanges. Granted we might have chosen a different day if things had not been aligned so nicely. High tide allowed us to drag our buts out of bed at 6am and put ourselves in position to ride the ebb all the way to anchorage.
The second stroke of luck was a light to moderate SE wind that flowed in the same direction as the current. We even had the sails cranked out for a while.
We started the day in heavy rain and ended it in sunshine, at times fished through choppy turbulence and then glided across glassy water. We gave way to three tug and barge combos steaming down the straight in tandem, and later had the passage to ourselves. We motored and sailed, shivered and baked, ate well and socialized.
All the while we kept eyes out for dragons where none appeared. Yay verily.
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