Then I'd wake, remind myself I was in a bed on a solid floor back in my own house, only to drift off again into the land of depth contour and pulsing dots with a visceral fear that I would surely crash into the wrong one and that would be it. Game over.
I've never had these type of PTSD symptoms after a boat trip quite as bad. I'm left thinking it's the way the mind goes about its quiet detox of past harrowing events, in this case, spending three straight days navigating back to the home dock in thick impenetrable fog and having several close calls (collisions with other boats) in the process.
The first half of the trip this year, my youngest daughter Vanessa joined me in the boat . She was, as they say, a real trooper, putting up with lots of windshield time without complaint, as I was trying to put all the tedious motoring time behind us to maximize the time spent in the promised land before her flight out of Bella Bella back to Vancouver in mid July.
First morning of the trip, trying to lay our course across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a big minus ebb with only a hint of wind magically turned the water from a flat velvety duck pond into a maelstrom of breaking seven footers. Blue water heaping over the bow and sluicing across the windshield of my boat first morning of the trip....are you kidding me?
But I had that magic combination of breadcrumbs (a track line on the screen of my Furuno I'd laid down last year in the same place) and the past experience of how to make a proper nav decision on the fly to side-step places like this when things get crappy. We snuck across Partridge Banks into Rosario Strait, hung a right towards the eastern shore of Lopez and Decatur towards Bedwell Harbor to clear Canadian customs and wan't it nice to get back to velvety duck pond again?
After provisioning in Ganges on a glorious July morning, there was that gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach....our Georgia Strait crossing ....and they were calling for wind. I had bad memories from last summer of being stuck in Nanaimo for several days waiting out wind for the crossing to Powell River . There is a relatively small anchorage off Newcastle Island and you're stuck in the middle of 50 other boats, all with way too much scope out so it’s bumper boats on tide swings.....I did not want to get trapped there again. So after an uneventful run though Dodd Narrows ("boring" quoth my daughter after I'd told her we might see some impressive rapids) we arrived at Five Finger Island at 5 PM, not the greatest time to consider crossing the Strait. I could see lots of white out there----a perturbed landscape with lots of exposure . I figured it was blowing 15 , maybe 20, but there was a high slack tide on tap and the wind smelled like it might pull back just a bit.
So we threw caution to the wind and although I had to back off on the RPM's it was still a wet crossing with lots of hull slap. But it sure felt good to get behind Texada Island 45 minutes later and slip back into a velvety duck pond. All the way to Sturt Harbor I drove my daughter a bit nuts by over and over, asking her to agree that hadn't I just made a smashingly sound nav decision by deciding to make the late afternoon crossing and wasn't I just a hell of a dude for delivering her and the dog safe and sound from the jaws of death (etc etc)
