Day 92 - Back Around

We can't say we didn't have our choice of conditions for getting around Cape Caution. At the north end of Vancouver Island, it's the most exposed part of the trip, so the timing of it has been on my mind for several days. Hitting it at a sprint or lallygagging offers some control in the timing.

There are (for me) four things to consider: wind, wind waves (affected by the relative directions of wind and current), ocean swell, and fog. When we came north we were lucky (by sprinting) to find a window without any of the four. This time we were lucky again, but not that lucky.

Going yesterday would have dealt us an afternoon of big seas (wind waves on top of swell). Going today was much more peaceful: no wind waves, but plenty of ocean swell and fog.

The ocean swell can be kind of fun on a calm day as long as the direction isn't too objectionable. The more out of line the directions of the boat movement and the wave movement are, the more objectionable it can be. The ocean swell today was initially not substantial, but the direction of it rolled us around for a while. After we turned the corner and started down into the Queen Charlotte Strait, the swell increased to a couple of meters, but by then we were in line with it so it wasn't so bad.

While the ride was more comfortable than it would have been yesterday, the visibility was worse. We were in thick fog and blind for most of the day, had to rely on our electronics to see for us. The radar and the AIS system got a good workout. AIS is an identification system that commercial traffic is equipped with. It transmits position, speed, course and boat data, much like airplane transponders do. It's pretty essential equipment for dodging fishing boats and tugs with barges.

As is the case with most recreational boats, Quijote doesn't transmit AIS (yet,) but it does receive the data and displays the traffic on the chart plotter. That allows us to see the position of most of the important traffic - the boats that are large or fast, but not most of the other recreational traffic. To see the non-AIS equipped vessels requires radar.

I did some experimenting with different display modes today, overlaying the radar image onto the chart image, then displaying the radar image and the chart image side by side. I found the modes useful in different circumstances. Overlaying works well in cases where boats and small islands can be confused. Separate windows was useful for cases where one might want the navigation to be done at one chart range while the radar is set to a wider range to cover more area. Cool stuff.

I find that some boats, especially fiberglass motor-cruisers are difficult to see on radar, because they don't have a lot of reflective metal well off the water. Seeing poor targets in less than 100 yards of visibility requires vigilance of two kinds: one person seeing through the fog and one person seeing a flickering blip on the radar that comes and goes amid the clutter of wave reflections.

While that might sound a little dubious, even risky, it's not as bad as it sounds because no boater in their right mind would be plowing through that fog without radar and Quijote has an excellent target signature. High on the mast is a good quality radar reflector, so even when I can't see them very well, they can see us. If they're paying attention.