Friday, August 26, 2011

August 25-26 - Thorne Bay to Prince Rupert (aka “Escape from Alaska”)

The weather on Thursday, August 25 was a 180 degree change from the recent weather. We left before dawn to calm winds and flat seas in Clarence Strait. We decided to take as much advantage of it as possible by going as far as we could.

We blew by Ketchikan, intending to get into a good position to reach Prince Rupert with the next available weather window. We next passed by our original destination, Foggy Bay, because we still had several hours of daylight. We ultimately anchor in Port Tongass after nearly 14-1/2 hours of running and with 90.1 miles under our belts.

Fair weather (or at least winds and seas) hold together one more day on August 26  and we cover the last 37.8 miles to Prince Rupert more leisurely. By using Port Tongass, we split the crossing of Dixon Entrance into two smaller sections. The exposed portion of today’s crossing was only 10 miles.

From here, we have generally protected cruising until we reach Cape Caution, the exposed area north of Vancouver Island. That will probably take a week or so. We hope the weather will improve as we head south.

The distance traveled this leg was 127.9 bringing the total to 2713.2 miles.

No comments:

Post a Comment