Day 54 - Current Events; Rod

We decide to make an early break out of Kimshan Cove this morning and give ourselves as much depth as possible. High tide was at 3am, but while there was probably enough light at that hour (does it ever get dark around here?) a 3am start sounded a little extreme; we settled on 5am. At 4am though, Kay shouted something, so I assumed she was eager to get going and I got dressed. It turns out she was talking in her sleep. Still 4am was a great time to get underway and we appreciated the extra feet under the keel as we wound our way through kelp fields and submerged rocks in the circuitous Piehle Passage.

The problem with such an early start was that we arrived at Sergius Narrows four hours before slack, so we had to anchor and wait. We napped and cooked lunch on the BBQ. Our final destination for the evening was Baby Bear Cove, just a few miles beyond the narrows - another stunning pocket cove with a shallow entry.

It's been a tide table intensive couple of days. Tomorrow, for example, we'll want to leave early to give us enough depth to get out of the cove and late enough that the current out in the channel won't be too fast. Getting that trade-off right involves a lot of back of the envelope figuring. Most of the tide and current stations are secondary, meaning we have to look up the tide height or current for some other primary station and then adjust the timing and amplitude for our location of interest. It takes a certain amount of exploration just to figure out what is available and applicable, but it's straight forward once you get the hang of it.

Usually it's enough to know when high or low tides will be or when slack current will be. Occasionally it's a bit more complicated. Since the tide gets lower tomorrow morning as time passes, I calculated the heights at 7:00, 8:00 and 9:00am. Then I calculated the currents in the channel at the same times. I've decided we can live with the 1.5 knot current in the channel at 7am more comfortably than we can the minus tide out of the cove at 9am, so we'll go at 7am.

The next few days into Petersburg should present us with more typical hazards than we've seen in this leg so far. It will be nice to relax a little.