Onward to Dawson's Landing and Calvert Island

June 19th  (Wednesday)
This morning we pulled up anchor, and left Fury Cove in the rain. We headed up Rivers Inlet, and rode the 2 meter swells up until the first bend, where they all lost their strength. We came up this way specifically for Dawson’s Landing, which is a small floating place tucked against the steep shoreline of Darby Channel, right where it joins into Rivers Inlet. 

It is a service station for all of the fishing lodges in the area, and therefore was unusually well stocked. We have found that all of the places that we have visited for fuel so far have had next to nothing for supplies. Dawson’s Landing was actually quite well stocked, and we were able to replenish our supply of jigs, which was the main motivation for coming up here. We also stocked up on some other items, and even got some fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as filling up our diesel and gas tanks.  

While waiting to fuel up we saw a humpback whale out in the inlet. 

The owners were a couple that have run the place for 30 years, and the guy’s dad ran it before that. They have raised their two daughters here; pretty neat place to grow up and live.
This was our first time tied up to a dock in 51 days. We made full use of the ease of certain things like laundry. We do have a small hand-washing machine, which we have been using, but it of course takes fresh water, so we tend to collect water either from rain or a stream for that purpose. We also took the opportunity to have a long hot shower. 

It was rainy most of the day, with showers and a few sunny breaks from time to time.
Tomorrow we plan to head to Pruth Bay on Calvert Island, where we hope to get some good beach weather, because the island has some spectacular beaches! 

June 20th (Thursday)

We got to Pruth Bay on Calvert Island, after spending a while sailing. It was a beautiful day for it, and we saw sea otters and a whale (more details will be in a future blog post). 

We went to the main West Beach after setting our prawn traps. It is Beautiful!!! Big and sandy! Yay. 

Tomorrow we are going to have a beach day exploring the many beaches, although so far the weather is not as ideal as we had hoped, but oh well fingers crossed it will clear. 

They do have wifi at the Hakai Institute that we can use, but we cannot get it from where we are anchored, so I will try to send more in a few days.

(Sheya's mom writing: some of you might find the following information interesting. I hope that the screen shot shows up okay in the blog post.)

The past sailing track of the Red Witch going from Fury Cove to Dawson's Landing (on the right) to Calvert Island (on the left) taken from marinetraffic.com. The zigzagging is the track of tacking up the strait into a north-west wind to enter into Pruth Bay. Short black lines with barbed ends show the wind direction and speed -- a short barb is 5 knots, a long barb is 10 knots, and a long and a short together is 15 knots.

Also, for those of you who are interested, here is a link through google maps satellite view of Calvert Island. You can also see Dawson's Landing and the surrounding area. If you zoom in you will see the lovely beaches that Sheya and Jason are hoping to explore on Calvert Island's west coast. If the link does not work for clicking directly, you can copy and paste it into your web browser. Enjoy! 

https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Calvert+Island/@51.5607148,-127.9477704,50405m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x5465156e37a6b519:0xaedfd6ec9ae68c73!8m2!3d51.5558728!4d-128.0365167