After Duncanby Landing we’d anchored at Green Island in Fish Egg Inlet, before leaving Fitz Hugh Sound for Fisher Inlet and Loma Channel.  At Shearwater, which serves as the ferry dock for Bella Bella, there’s a grocery, a marine supply store, a pub, a post office, a public telephone, and the self-proclaimed “cleanest laundry on the BC Coast”.  We stocked fresh vegetables, fruit and yoghurt, did ten days’ laundry, epoxied the leak in the dinghy, straightened the pole of our flagging American flag, and rigged up the barbecue to spare propane bottle.  

Shearwater offers a chance to observe bald eagle hunting and fishing technique up close.  At eight every evening, one of the boatyard workers, still in his white Tyvek suit, arrives on the shore with plate with two pieces of steak or fresh salmon, the community’s offering to a pair of eagles nested several hundred yards away.  When he puts a pice on a nearby picnic table, the male, then the female zooms in, talons the food and flies it back to the nest.

The Ivory Island light house marked the start of Milbanke Sound, a stretch of open water with fetch to Asia. Perfect conditions:  clear, calm, the sun beating down.  Rather than navigated the shoal cluttered, current scoured Percival Narrows, we’d opted for winds and seas. We’d anticipated swells and winds at least equal to those we encountered at Port Townsend’s Point Wilson on Day One.  Alas the sun beat down and it was clear and calm.