Jul 9th

We up anchored early in the morning. The wind had died down so we motored out of Hot Springs Cove into the Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t choppy, just some mild swell. A few miles out and we entered fog, so we turned on the AIS (automatic identification system – identifies all commercial boats and some pleasure craft who have one) and the radar and sounded the fog horn.

We motored carefully in the fog, which was not as thick as the fog we had last year in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. It dispersed after about 30 mins and the wind picked up a little. Jim slowed the boat down to try his luck at fishing. It’s funny that Jim didn’t want to put the sails up as he was having too much fun fishing. It’s hard to fish with the sails up because we troll around at 3 knots speed and when we get a bite, we stop the boat to reel in the fish. It’s hard to stop the boat with it’s sails up as the sails flap around and we still travel at some speed so the fish is hard to reel in. So this afternoon, Fisherman-Jim won over Sailor-Jim! We caught a couple of salmon which I then had to fillet. I hate stinking of fish! Then a big one bit and the line snapped taking with it his flashy thingy, diver and lure! That was the end of our fishing that day! Jim was a little upset by the taught of some poor fish who got away dragging around his flashy thingy and diver thingy!

Another Coho!

Salmon for another day!

The wind picked up from behind so we put up the sails and turned off the motor. We had a nice pleasant sail. Just outside of Ucluelet we turned on the motor and took the sails down. We noticed that our alternator wasn’t charging the batteries. The batteries had run down to -150 amp-hours at Hot Springs Cove and had charged back to 0 earlier when we had the motor on but since we had sailed, we had run the batteries down a little using the electric self-steering, running the inverter to power our AC outlets and having our instruments like AIS, VHS and GPS on. Jim tried a few things to diagnose the problem while I steered the boat into Ucluelet inlet. We shut down all the electrical things that weren’t necessary to conserve power. We wanted to moor at the public dock where we had landed the first time so we could troubleshoot things a little more, but it was full. So we headed up the inlet, past the marina which looked full and put out our anchor in the harbor.

I baked some more salmon for dinner while Jim tried to troubleshoot the problem with the batteries and charger. In the end we decided our starter battery was failing. We have a starter battery that’s just dedicated to starting the engine and another set of batteries called the “house” bank which is what we use to power everything else on the boat. The starter battery is isolated from the house bank so we don’t drain it and are then unable to start the engine which is used to charge all the batteries. When the motor is on, it charges the started battery first, as it is the most important then will charge the house bank after. Well, ours wasn’t which was a BIG deal!

Anyway, after fiddling for a while, we decided to sleep and revisit the problem in the morning.

Jul 10th

Woke up and had a quick brekkie. We called the marine store in Ucluelet but as it was Sunday, they were closed. We up anchored and motored to the marina where we hooked up to shore power and the batteries started to charge.

Since it was a nice sunny day, we went for a walk into town. We had lunch at a nearby bistro, burgers and fish and chips. The food was good. Then we took a walk to Big Beach on the Pacific Ocean side of town. It was low tide so there were a lot of rock pools to explore. We saw lots of little fish and hermit crabs in the pools with kelp and other sea grasses. Jacintha found an old plank on the beach and made a see-saw for us to use! It was a lot of fun. We put our toes into the ocean and pulled them out quickly, it was cold! We even found an old shoe, a right side, and Adidas. Luckily there was no foot inside it!

Looking for pretty shells

Look a big leaf

A hermit crab

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Look, I’m on an island

Home made see-saw

Size 10 Adidas, right side!

Taking in the view

Big Beach, Ucluelet

We walked a short way up the Pacific Rim trail, apparently it was set up to aid shipwrecked sailors in the past, with cabins for shelter along it’s length up the coast of Vancouver Island. Then we headed back to town and had ice creams.

On the Pacific Rim trail

Ice Cream. The Butter Pecan was good!

Back at the marina, there were a few fishing boats that had arrived back from fishing. A guy was filleting his salmon, which was a lot larger than ours and I learnt a few tricks by watching him. Another couple live on the other side of the island and keep their boat and a motorhome here. They come here, every day off they have, to fish in the summer. Nice life! They showed up the salmon they caught, Chinooks, that were at least 3 feet long. Wow! I had fish envy, although one of those big salmon would be all we need to fill up our freezer. They were using “down riggers” which takes the line down to greater depths than our little rod and pole. Plus we only had 30lb line which would break with those big fish, perhaps that is what broke our line!

We decided not to replace our battery until we figured out why we weren’t charging our house bank as we could go into a marina every other day to charge up and it was at the tail end of our trip. We had fish tacos that night as I was sick of baked salmon! Jim washed the boat, then it rained!