Day 49 ~ Lowe Inlet, Grenville Channel to Khutz Inlet

A full hour before our scheduled early morning departure, Eileen whispered “Can I wake you up now?”  My initial response to her was no because I knew that Dad hadn’t gotten up yet and I didn’t want to wake him. A few minutes later I decided that after 48 days of captaining the boat that the crew and I were capable of hoisting a single anchor in 100 feet of water without Dad’s supervision. I also figured Dad would agree with me. So I got dressed, Eileen happily rousted Derek and I instructed Becca that she was on flaking duty. Derek was out on the bow preparing to jump into action when Dad came up to the galley rubbing his sleeping eyes negotiating for a later wake up time. I tried to convince him that we would be fine and he could go back to bed, but sadly the fog was a little too spooky for him. He went back to his state room and I fired up the boat to warm it up. I didn’t realize that Dad had actually gone to take a shower. But when he heard the engines fire, he did an about face, jumped into his clothes and came up to find us unbuttoning the anchor bridle.

We worked our way through Grenville channel in the fog and the rain, and eventually made it to our special fishing hole just outside of Hartley Bay. Shortly thereafter, we had all poles in the water. Eileen was at the helm and the kids were watching the poles, so Dad and I sat down to jump on Hartley Bay’s technology. Unfortunately, nothing would hold. About that time a pole started wiggling around; we had our first bite of the day and successfully landed a nice silver salmon. Moments later we had our second salmon in the cooler. We were all excited when the kids each had a salmon on, unfortunately they both lost them. Convinced that we had found our fishing hole we circled back around. Then it was Eileen’s turn to reel one in and she fought it for some time before it fouled itself under the boat and snapped the line. I rounded out the final four with losing one in the process of setting the hook.

At that point, Dad decided to take charge of the situation and the next one was in the boat…our luck was changed. Soon we had 5 salmon in the cooler; we were catching them so fast that we couldn’t get all the poles in the water before someone was yelling fish on!  Becca and Derek even managed to land a double. Finally, we decided we had enough fish and departed for an ice cream and an adventure in Butedale.

At the entrance to Butedale a beautiful wide waterfall raged down the hill side. The waterfall would most likely be the only thing classified as beautiful in Butedale, which was once a bustling fish packing camp and now collapsing and falling into the water. I didn’t think that it was safe enough for us to stop but Eileen was on a mission. We finally compromised that I would slide the boat up to the dock and then Eileen and Derek would jump off and run up the hill and get us an ice cream cone.

As we approached the dock, Lou the caretaker along with Tiger the cat and Bert the dog came bounding down the dilapidated ramp to greet us. He was confident that the dock would hold us so we all went ashore. As I weaved my way from one rotten dock to another to get to the ramp, I was less and less comfortable with our decision. Dad was waiting for me at the top of the ramp. Together we gazed around at the unbelievable mess of buildings falling down everywhere. The Waggoner’s book talked about teams of folks trying to save the place but in my opinion it was difficult to see any impact that anyone had accomplished.

About then I had this vision of the five of us walking down the ramp with our ice cream looking down and finding the Simbalaut floating away with the dock tied to her……I went back to monitor the situation. Dad came back with a handmade piece of art and his ice cream. Eileen and the kids were about 20 minutes behind him. It seems that they got an art lesson and they watched a video that he had taken of a local white bear.

As we approached Khutz Inlet, the sun poked out for just a bit and then we were back to rain. Our initial plan of anchoring behind a spit near the entrance was altered when we arrived and found it full of boats. We moved on towards the back of the inlet where we found an amazing waterfall and another SYC yacht. There was a large drying mud flat and a milky haze in the water so we set our anchor near the base of the waterfall in 100 feet of water.

After we got settled we set up a fish processing assembly line and cleaned and packed the fish. For dinner we had crab melts and salmon. We all got our tummies full and then snuggled down for home movie night. We’ve had a home movie night with each group of guests and the night just keeps getting longer and longer.