We tried to time our arrival into Ire Inlet on Anger Island for high water slack at around 4pm, but we made better progress than expected and needed to kill some time before entering. We cut the engine and drifted for an hour while we ate lunch. It was tough duty on a windy summer day in the sunshine with wild coastline all around. Kay and Wendy put together a delicious spinach salad with tuna salad on crackers. We drifted along at two knots in a stiff, steady breeze, without the benefit of sails.
The further we get from Prince Rupert, the more remote it feels. There are no longer any signs of human presence and we only saw one other vessel all day. We passed Sine, Cosine and Tangent Islands, so named by surveyors who found the islands difficult to record without trigonometric conveniences.
The entrance into the inlet was about as narrow as we've seen on this trip, with rocks on one side and fallen trees encroaching on the other. Threading our way through, we were glad for the high tide.
There's a sidebar in our guidebook by Douglass detailing the misfortune of one sailboat that got their rigging wrapped up in one of the trees on the way in and were forced to extricate themselves with saws, doing considerable damage to the boat in the process. Thankfully we avoided such pitfalls, but we did see the results of their labors fifteen years later.
Tomorrow we'll make our way out the way we came in. Getting out at high tide again will mean a 5am start. Up at 4:50 and out at 5:00; there'll be no waiting around for it.
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