Shortly into our passage, Kyle decided to take a swim to fix the speedwheel that wasn't registering any progress
The main drawback was that the area is not particularly well charted, so it was necessary to slow way down and feel our way in. It didn't turn out to be quite as quiet as we expected, since it's the main throughfare providing access to the dozens of cottages that occupy the myriad islands in the shallows beyond. That made being anchored there like being parked on the side of a country road. It's mostly quiet, but every ten or twenty minutes something goes whizzing by, then fades into the distance.
Kyle cooks up dinner (a nice treat) in time for sunset on an otherwise rainy day
Once the day of blustery weather passed, we woke to a bright, clear, calm morning. It was just nippy enough that I thought I would take the chill out of the air with a few minutes of cabin heat. A few seconds after starting the unit, it failed and went into auto shutdown. This happens occasionally. Usually, the problem is an overvoltage caused by a slightly too-slow shutdown of the wind turbine after it reaches its set voltage when the batteries are close to full. The second most common culprit is flameout caused by fuel starvation after I forgot to open the fuel valve. This time, the error code it was flashing was a new one: premature flame recognition. This can happen if the fuel metering valve fails and allows fuel to be admitted before it is opened by the controller, but mostly it's when the glow plug "burns out".
After a few tests, we determined the problem was the last one. That is bad because, unlike the usual errors, it's not easily rectified without ordering spare parts. The glow plug is buried in the very middle of the heater and cannot be replaced casually without pretty much disassembling the entire unit. There's a small chance that a chafed wire or a corroded connector is causing the part to act broken when it's not, but if it is, we will have to go without heat until we can get a replacement and find the time to do a little overhaul on the heater to install it. It's no big deal now, but by the end of the season, we may really be missing it.
For now, we had enough sunshine to warm the cabin within an hour or so of sunrise anyway. Once we were sufficiently fed, caffeinated and warm, we got in the kayak for a circuit of the area. In this instance, the dozens and dozens of islands and intervening channels provided more to see than we could possibly manage within the six or seven miles that typically marks the end of our endurance for being seated in one position without a break. We decided this time to do a circuit of the narrow, shallow channels on the perimeter of the inlet. This kept us almost entirely in flat water, well away from any boat traffic.
Wildlife
Scenery
The scenery, with multicolored, striated rock foregrounds that recede through a generous scattering of islands into pine-covered hills beyond, is beautiful, calming, life-affirming. It makes you breathe a little deeper to get more of that sweet, scented air into your lungs. It is a lovely thing in which to be enveloped.
Back at the boat, as the shadows grew longer and then blended into a darkening sky, the boat traffic dwindled and then stopped, leaving just us and a handful of cottage lights in the distance as the only signs of humanity.
Anchorage location On google maps
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