Posted by: pat 10 years, 9 months ago
We steamed north with a destination of Tenedos Bay. Tenedos would turn out to be our favorite anchorage of the trip. It was spectacular and very rewarding to pull around the corner of Sarah Point and into the entrance of Desolation Sound. The mountains were beautiful, rising straight up from the water and revealing peaks like we see on the North Cascades Highway.
Tenedos has several spots where you can anchor, but much of it is quite deep. I knew we wanted to avail ourselves of the excellent swimming in Lake Unwin so sought out a spot near the trailhead. The prime spots right by the trailhead were taken and I ended up trying to anchor on the south side of the bay. The Rocna bit in and set well in about 100 feet of depth only about 75 feet off shore. We backed down on the short scope and I paddled in to shore to attach the stern tie. The water was quite clear and packed with jelly fish. I sliced my foot a bit climbing up over the hordes of 8 – 10 inch oysters caking the rocky shoreline.
There was a bit of a breeze so we hung out to make sure the anchor was solidly holding us while we swam and enjoyed lunch. The water temperature was a very pleasant 72 degrees F. We were entertained by a small hobie cat that zipped around the bay in the breeze and planned our trip to the lake.
Lake Unwin is a huge and excellent swimming lake. There are many spots where you can clamber down from the trail that goes along the shoreline and find a private rock or beach to enter the water. It is very warm and clear, and with the ability to spread out it does not feel crowded at all. Despite the fact that there were always half a dozen dinghies at the trailhead, we never had to share our space with anyone except when we were lazy and took the first prime rock right at the point where the trailhead hits the lake. Don’t try swimming near the big log jam where the trail hits the lake: take the trail to the left and make your way to a sunny rock where you can swim.
The one thing to be aware of that I did not see on our first excursion to the lake is a sign advising that the use of soap in the lake is forbidden. There are a few bathing holes in the stream that spills from the lake into the bay where you can bath, but they are tricky to get to.
The girls nicknamed Tenedos Bay “Jellyfish City” due to the thousands of white jellies floating all around us during the day. Strangely, in the morning they were all gone. Maybe it is a tidal thing. They were benign and politely remained at about 12 feet and deeper, below our normal swimming range.
We spent the day swimming. That was pretty much it. And it was very good. We probably all clocked several hours in the water.
One piece of marine excitement was the failure of the electric water pump while I was doing the dinner dishes. This is the pump that drives the water pressure for the galley and head sink. But like a good Eagle Scout, I was PREPARED! Several years ago I had purchased a spare pump which had sat quietly waiting at the ready for this moment. After about 30 minutes I had the swap complete and we were back in business. Then I just had that uneasy feeling when the department of redundancy department is empty…what if the new pump should fail now? The galley does have a decommissioned manual foot pump that I have ignored to date but which occurred to me might make a viable last-ditch backup option.
Of course gloating over this has jinxed it. The day after I wrote this blog post I was at the boat working on the holding tank when the water pump went haywire. I wasn’t sure it was the pump. It just ran slowly non-stop. It could have been a leak but I couldn’t find one, so I tried swapping it with my newly procured spare which worked perfectly. Maybe the o rings in the spare pump had dried out while in storage, or maybe something cracked in this last bout of hard freeze weather. It does seem uncanny that it gave up the day after I put into words my hubris for spare parts provisioning. I won’t even mention the other spares I have on board for fear of a similar curse. I do now have three of these water pumps in different states of working and not working, so I console myself with the thought that I am now in a perfect position to disassemble and bench test the broken ones to determine if they are fixable.
Kim also observed that the fridge didn’t seem as cold as it should be or had been in the past. She has a bit of a thing with the fridge. Food safety is one of her hot buttons, as is having a disciplined system of food storage. It was still operating but I agreed it seemed to be having trouble keeping pace with the hot weather. I assured her that this didn’t need to threaten the trip and we could just supplement it with block ice at our next stop, Refuge Cove.
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