30 days, 500 miles... back in Queen Charlotte! Saturday, August 04, 2007

SMILES ON THE LAST EVENING OUT


THE LAST SUPPER LAST NIGHT

We MADE IT!! Yeah! And what a fantastic trip in beautiful islands. This morning, we woke up to wonderful sunshine with clear views of the snow patches on the mountain tops. We could tell we were close to town because a steady stream of fishing boats started buzzing past us from about 7am, all heading for the west coast. Their engine noise mixed with the sound of 3 different eagles calling in the trees above. We ate well to the very end and our last breakfast was cheese and onion quesadillas, with the very last of the powered milk in Shawna & Leon’s coffee. We launched around 10am and for once we had wind and tide behind us for almost the whole journey. It was a pleasure to wizz through the ‘East Narrows’ at up to 9 knots having fought against 4 or 5 knots of current last time. At low tide it looked very different from last time when the channel was 5 or 6 times as wide. The sun shone all day and the wind pushed us along between tree-covered islands.
We paddled a touch over 14 nautical miles to arrive back at Queen Charlotte City in three and a half hours. That brings our total mileage for the whole trip to exactly 500.5 nautical miles!!! I think we can round it down to 500 without worrying too much about the extra half! Strictly speaking, we should paddle the last 3 miles to the Skidegate ferry terminal to complete the figure of eight but we’ll save that until the day we catch the ferry home. We were out for 30 days and I felt relaxed and happy for most of it. It’s very peaceful here surrounded by 1,000 metre high mountains with no traffic noise, no street lights, no construction.

SETTING OFF THIS MORNING



A FOLLOWING SEA UP THE EAST NARROWS

It’s 7pm now and I’m sitting in the ‘Premiere Lodge’ hostel now feeling refreshed and happy after a wonderful hot shower (my first wash for 10 days!), and a tasty hot meal in a restaurant (with a cold beer for Shawna and Leon & a margharitta for me!) That was a late lunch… it’s nearly time for dinner! I’ll write more tomorrow and post more photos from the last 18 days around Moresby. Shawna & Leon will also write their impressions of the trip in the next day or two.

Thank you very much to Mike DuPas for writing the blog updates and putting up the photos and maps. Mike told Leon yesterday that we couldn’t thank him because we hadn’t seen what he’d written.. well, we have now so thanks a lot for doing a great job! Thanks also to Kokatat for paying for rental of the sat phone so we could update this, and to Kokatat, the North Face, Snapdragon, Lendal, Werner, Seakayaking UK & Native sunglasses, for sponsoring us with great kit.

A few people have asked me if I’ll be making a DVD of this expedition – YES I will…. But it probably won’t be available for about a year.


9 KNOTS!!!


SHAWNA & LEON AT THE END!!