29 Jun 23

The alarm jolted me out of a warm bed at 05:50.  Annnnnd, we’re off. Nah, just kidding. Although, I immediately got dressed and went forward to hoist the anchor. We were off the hook at 06:13. Although cool, it was a dry, calm morning; pleasant change from yesterday. We motored out of Portage Bay and west into Frederick Sound. By 09:00, the wind was up to S19 and we no longer needed the engine to help us along at 7.5 Kn+. That lasted for exactly 10 minutes, then we motor-sailed until 10:00, sailed to 11:00, then motor-sailed until 12:00, then sailed until 13:00. Oh, I forgot to mention that about 3 miles before we got around Point Gardner, we GOT F*@)%*ing HAMMERED by a very unpleasant wind, wave combination, where it shoaled up between Yasha Island and Point Gardner; when will I ever learn to avoid going over banks in foul-ish weather and go around the long way, outside the 100 m contour? Fortunately, it only lasted for about 25 minutes, but that was enough to shorten my prospective married life. After we got around the point and freed off a bit, we had a grand sail, arriving at the entry to Warm Springs Bay 13:43. We were tied up at the half-empty dock at 14:10. Jake and I immediately set off to check out the scene. We completely missed the hot spring and walked all the way to the lake, then back to the dock before we found someone to tell us where to go, which turned out to be about half way along the boardwalk. Anyway, we came on back to the boat to collect Terri, grabbed our towels, etc, and headed back up the trail. This time, we found it and it was empty when we got there. There are 3 pools: HOTTEST, HOTTER, and HOT in descending order, and we managed to hang out for about 1.5 hours, in a pretty good rain half the time, finally getting back to the boat just in time for Captain’s hour. Jake went back up for another short stay in one of the bath house tubs, then we had dinner. The sun actually poked out about 17:30. We helped a couple of other boats get up to the dock, which was completely full by 19:30, including 3 commercial fishing boats, one charter fishing boat (“Adventurous”, who gave us a shot of Tequila by way of thanks, along with Alaska Whale. After dinner, I went up for a quick soak in the bath house (very nice), because I just realized that we have to depart tomorrow at 06:00 to catch the flood tide up Chatham Strait. Jake went up for a long soak up in the hot spring; we were long in bed before he got back in.

57-05.327’N, 134-50.000’W;   Log = 54.8; Sum = 1230.3 N-m; Eng. hrs = 5.8, Sum = 3303.5