Onward to Eucott Bay

September 11th (Wednesday)
We were up at 06:30 and left Forit Bay just after 07:00. We headed up Dean Channel with the flood current, but there was no wind. The forecast had been for SE 10-15 knots, becoming 15-25 knots later in the morning and then 25-35 knots in the afternoon. We had been hoping to sail up Dean Channel, but instead we motored over glassy water. 

It was a beautiful cloudy morning, and for the most part the clouds were high around the mountains and we got to enjoy the vistas all around us.  As we worked our way deeper up the channel the mountains got higher and more rugged. Many parts of the mountains were bare rock slabs, shear cliffs, or jagged ridgelines. In the area close to Eucott Bay the waterfalls thundered down the rocky cliffs, often visible from way up the mountain.  

The further we went up Dean Channel the more the colour of the water started to change to that of a turquoise glacier blue/green. Approaching the entrance to Eucott Bay it looked like a small bay fringed with green grass. As we got further in, however, the entrance became visible around the corner of a rocky knoll. We entered into the very shallow anchorage of Eucott Bay and anchored. As we were coming in there was a sailboat leaving and there was still one small powerboat in the bay, but the place was quiet and peaceful. 

The shore was grassy and marshy, the water was jumping with live salmon, and also littered with zombie corpses. There were many eagles and gulls around, but no bears. 

Zombie salmon.

Each of the three distinctly separate mountain peaks that surround the bay reaches up thousands of feet into the sky, with sections of shear rock and jagged edges. It's a very beautiful spot. 

When we were at Shearwater, the grocery store was giving away free over-ripe bananas. We grabbed a bunch of them, but they were in serious need of being used. As soon as I saw them, I thought to myself, “banana-bread would be great, but I must remember to look up a recipe while we have service,” since I didn't have a recipe. Unfortunately we got back to our anchorage, where there was no service, and I realized that I had not looked one up. 

So in the morning, as we headed out of Forit Bay, I watched my phone closely, hoping for a blip of service that would be just long enough to get a banana-bread recipe. Sure enough we got one bar, and I hit search. As my chosen recipe loaded, I skimmed the recipe and realized, as I read eggs in the ingredient list, that we had forgotten to get eggs at Shearwater. I quickly searched again for an eggless recipe and got one loaded just before loosing service.  

In the afternoon we used nine of our very ripe bananas to make a triple batch of eggless banana-bread, one loaf of which we put chocolate chips in. It turned out perfectly! You would not know it did not have eggs in it. Yummy!!
While motoring our way up Dean Channel we also made water with our new low-pressure pump plumbed into the system. It worked great. In fact, not only did it work, it exceeded our expectations and made us an extra ten plus gallons per hour. With our old low-pressure pump we were making between 25-30 gph, but with this new pump we were producing 40 gph! That’s about 150 liters an hour, that’s a lot of water. Yay!