Monday July 17th, 2023
We traveled from Prince Rupert to Baker Inlet this morning. We left Prince Rupert harbor about 7:00 am. Shortly thereafter we had our first Carnival Cruise experience—and it wasn’t a good one. The channel out of Prince Rupert is ample but not large. As we turned the corner to work our way out of the harbor we encountered a huge Carnival Cruise Ship. (I’ve included pictures of these hulks before. Just suffice it to say, it’s a floating city). There was no way for us to not go port to port with the cruise ship and avoid their wake. Once they passed we turned into their wake and held on. It created a good 6 foot (if not more) wave. Books flew and it knocked my Starlink modem off its secure pedestal (S***, BOO). We quickly settled back into our cruise and the remainder of the voyage was smooth like glass. Suffice it to say “we are not Carnival fans.”
Baker Inlet is a beautiful bay. It reminds us of Misty Fjord. Deep Green trees climb up the mountains creating a mystic looking place. However what we didn’t do (shame on self) was look carefully at the fine print. There is a very narrow fairway with strong currents and rips as you enter the inlet. We, unfortunately, got it wrong and entered in at a flood tide. It wasn’t a Malibu rapid type of event but still a rapid we needed to pay closer attention to with a lot of turning and surging. As my soon to be 3 year old granddaughter Carmen would say, “It was a little bit scary, but not too scary.”
Like Alaska Northern BC inlets are very deep requiring you to look for shoals where you can find reasonable depth to drop your anchor. You end up being in pretty shallow water (around 35 feet) and close to shore, or what looks like very close to shore. Once we were settled in it reminded us—anchorage-wise—of Lowe inlet.
We spent some time this afternoon looking forward and attempting to plan our re-entry into the Southern Coast of BC and eventually into the familiar waters of Desolation Sound and the Gulf Islands. It gets a bit tricky now because there are still some big “gates” to go through (Cape Caution, Queen Charlotte Sound and Johnstone Straight to name a few) but our new Weather App BouyWeather.com provides a 16 day weather outlook. This has proven to be extremely helpful in at least trying to plan the big passages. Thanks once again to StarLink we can get this information where ever we are, even in Baker Inlet, which is beautifully in the middle of nowhere!
We are trying to go to different anchorages during this part of our journey South so we can become familiar with them for the next trip to Alaska! Tonight hopefully we will sleep well. It is pouring rain, but no winds and we are cozy and safe for the night.
