Crossing Cape Caution to Shearwater

Friday May 23rd, 2025

We thought we were going to have Allison Harbor all to ourselves last night but this trawler, “Simple Pleasure” came in around 5:00 p.m. It was a beautiful ☀️ sunny day at Allison Harbor. We took in as much sunshine as we could because we knew that today was going to be rainy.

We left Allison Harbor a bit before sunrise, around 5:15. Our meteorologists forecast was for variable mainly SE-SSE winds under 10 Knots, wind-chop 0-2 and a swell of 1-3 feet with 8 second intervals. Very tolerable. Some patchy fog was possible and rain starting at around 9:00 a.m. Friday afternoon was forecast to have increasing wind at 12-20 knots with 3-5 foot swells. The net of all this was to get around Cape Caution as quickly as possible in the morning. I am pleased to report that Chris’ morning forecast was spot on as usual. We had rounded Cape Caution by 10 am and heading to our “initial” intended destination of Hecate Institute at the end of Kwakshua Channel on Calvert Island. This is a very pretty inlet with a research institute at the dock that you can walk around. Beautiful gardens as well. We had been watching this area on Marine Traffic (same place you can use to see where we are) and there appeared to be at least 6 boats in there last night but we figured most of them would be heading North and it would be pretty quiet by the time we arrived. However, since we had the wind and current going for us we decided that we would soldier on all the way to ShearWater, another 4.5 hours making it a 10 hour cruising day. We made this decision knowing the weather was not going to be any better tomorrow (rain and wind) and the degrading weather conditions could make a night on anchor at Hecate pretty rocky. Did we make the right decision?

At 11 am when we passed by the entrance to Hecate the sea conditions north of there in Fitz Hugh Sound looked pretty much the same as what had been forcasted earlier that morning. Unfortunately we encountered the afternoon forecast in full color for about 3.5 hours of our journey. We had 15 knot winds with 25 knot gusts and 5 foot swells. Fortunately, we did have the wind and current at our back so while it was a pretty rolly ride it was not uncomfortable—just long. We knew that conditions were going to get far worse after 3 pm so we pushed hard to get into ShearWater by 3 which we did. As I write this now at 4:17 the winds are howling. Glad we are tucked in.

Enough about somewhat scary weather reports. How about a baby picture? Everyone loves baby pictures.

This is a recent picture of our six month old grandson Atticus Oliver Kleven who lives with our son Matthias and his partner, Melinda in London. Last year when we were in Allison Harbor they called and announced that this little cutie was in “the oven”. We bought this outfit for him at a store in Petersburg Alaska last summer when we were there. We will look for a larger outfit when we return this summer.

Our current plan is to stay in ShearWater for two nights and weather out this storm. I have a couple of boat projects to work on, as usual. Right now our shower drain is running slow. Last summer I replaced the automatic floats but I’ll dive into the bilge tomorrow and see what I find. BTW, I hate messing around in bilges, tight quarters with lots of things to bang your head on. I will also do a load of wash since ShearWater has a great laundromat. Well that’s it for today. We made it around Cape Caution—our fifth time—pretty much in tact and unscathed.

ShearWater dock