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6/23/2018

Princess Louisa Inlet

The trip exceeded our expectations by about a thousand.
It was amazing, and I’m not sure I can explain it.

First, the trip went well, and as planed.
It wasn’t exactly a Disney cruse. During the summer, the wind through these fjords blow inland in the afternoon, and we certainly experienced that. Given 20 straight miles of water with 2-3 thousand foot mountains on either side and 15 knot winds, and you are bound to have a bumpy ride. Odyssey handled it like the ocean boat she was designed to be.

Hour after hour we followed Jarvis Inlet, carved by glacier thousands of years ago, at times with 2000 feet of water under our keel. By late afternoon we reached Malibu Rapids, the entrance to Princess Louise Inlet.

When a water way is named, the descriptive can give a sense of just what type of water it is.
Puget Sound. Sound..that sounds pleasant.
Georgia Straight. Not too bad.
Captain Pass. Pass? Like over a mountain?
Dodd Narrows. Ok, narrows. Now that sounds a bit scary.
Malibu Rapids. Yup. Rapids. White water, whirlpools, all the scary stuff. This is like the the 11 on a scale of one to ten.
But, time it right, and it is just as calm as you could hope for.

Our timing for Malibu Rapids was spot on. It was easy. Not even a little whirlpool.

You would think the 10 hour sail deep into the Canadian Rockies would prepare you for Princess Louise, but it didn’t.

Five miles long and half a mile wide, it really isn’t a waterway as it is a cathedral. Shear granite rock climbs thousands of vertical feet, right from the waters edge. Twenty feet from shore the water can be 300 feet deep.

And the waterfalls. A thousand feet tall. Taller. And I counted at least 15 that I could see. The main waterfall at the head of the inlet, Chatterbox Falls, plunges thousands of feet from mountaintop snowfields. We stayed there, only several hundred yards form it, for ten days.

There was no electricity, no potable water, no internet, no cell coverage.

This is one of the most beautiful and pristine places in the world.

I needed to post this, to tell you of what we found. Maybe someday I’ll find the words to do it justice.

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Princess Louisa Inlet

6/10/2018

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Princess Louisa Inlet

Tomorrow is a big day. Not out of fear or nervous worry over weather and tides, but because of where we are going, and how long it will take. Tomorrow we head from Secret Cove, up to Agamemnon Channel, then North following a glacial cut fjord that stretches 46 miles into the heart of the Canadian Rockies. It will take us 10 hours.

We are heading to fabled Princess Louisa Inlet. The crown jewel that boaters from all over the world come to visit. The American author Erle Stanley Gardner is quoted: “It is more then beautiful, it is sacred.”

The trip is long because, after Agamemnon Channel, there is nowhere to stop. The mountain cliffs are said to plunge from glacial steps to deeper then 2000 feet of water, right at the shoreline, leaving not a single spot for a boat like ours to anchor.

We go all the way, or not at all.

To complicate things, at the entrance of this amazing inlet, is a nasty bit of water, Malibu Rapids. You must enter at slack tide to be safe. Mess up the timing and you have to wait 6 hours to try again.

Tomorrow, Malibu Rapids will be slack at 7:40 pm. It’s better to be early then late, so we’ll be leaving Secret Cove by 8:30 am after fueling up at the dock.

So many of our adventures seem to be in the big and important category. They are. Every destination is new, all routes are new, charted for the first time. We are relying on other’s information.

It should be a wonderful day of travel, filled with snow capped mountains, waterfalls, and wildlife.

Tomorrow, one of my dreams come true, we will be sailing up a fjord. I can’t wait!

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