Late Entry | Three Sheets Northwest

Blind Channel

by Scott Wilson on 04/08/10 at 12:22 pm

Dog Show Tricks

There’s not a lot to recommend Blind Channel Resort if you are assessing it using the conventional cruiser’s nine-line report. It’s expensive, awkwardly located in the middle of a set of tidal rapids, very rolly, docks swept by current, deucedly shallow along the inboard rails, and they pack you in like sardines. The fresh baked bread is excellent and they have all the sweet, clean water you can squeeze on board. But the pickings are slim at the store, and if you’re over forty feet, you’ll probably need a reservation to get in there in the first place.

None of this changes the fact that it is the best managed, most fun place we have stopped on our whole trip.

There’s a reason you need a reservation to get in here (although we’re assured if you’re around thirty feet, as few of us are up here, there’s always room for another): Blind Channel is the place to be north of the Discovery Passage current gates.

We knew it from the minute we showed up and were met by Nick, the youthful dock attendant. It was low tide and he talked us in past the shallow spots and helped us tie up. He asked if we had been there before and seemed genuinely excited when we said “No.” He launched into the spiel: all the fresh water you want, feel free to wash down your boat (this is a big selling point in this area where good water in quantity can be difficult to find), walking trails through the forest to stretch your legs and a 1200 year old cedar to see (I think he inflated the age by about half, but no one is counting rings here). There’s a daily barbecue on the patio between eleven and two, and, oh, do you have a dog on board? There’s going to be a dog show at three. Oh, and it’s ten o’clock now, so the cinnamon buns should just be coming out of the oven.

We were sold. The cinnamon buns were excellent.

Moorage is about what it is further south, which is about twice what you would pay at a public dock in these parts. Hydro (as they refer to electric power up here) is ungodly expensive (it’s from a diesel generator; the diesel, as with everything, has to be barged in), and the limited supply of groceries is as spendy as you might expect considering how far they have to bring them in. There is a full fledged restaurant, reservations required for dinner, which smelled heavenly, but I didn’t even want to look at the prices on the menu. And as the place started to fill up later in the day, we had about a foot of clearance fore and aft between our neighbors… close enough for concern considering how much we were rolling around even tied up.

Everything was well worth the prices. We had a lovely walk in a sunlit, still forest. We saw the ancient cedar (didn’t look a day over 800 to me). We listened to the trickle of a clean, clear stream. We met a nice lady out walking her cat in the forest.

When we got back to the docks, Nick was dashing around with a clipboard, a much younger Gopher from the Love Boat. “You folks don’t have a dog on board, right?” he asked.

“No,” I confirmed.

“How would you like to be a judge at the dog show, then?” he asked, springing the trap.

Thinking quickly, I stepped behind my wife and thrust her forward. “Mandy love dogs!” I said. “She’ll be happy to be a judge at the show!”

The dog show judges deliberating with the hosts

And she was, more or less, although at some of the awards her integrity (and that of her fellow judges) was called into question, although the bribery was mild by the standards of such ad hoc boating events. If any of the winners actually paid up, she didn’t share any of the booty with me, anyway.

This sort of community event is not uncommon at the small resorts up through Desolation Sound and the Broughtons, but at Blind Channel it was well planned and executed, and everyone, even those of us without dogs, had fun. It’s the design of such things to make you feel right at home, and we did; many of our fellows really were home, or at least as much home as they have for the summer. In chatting with folks informally, it seems that twenty years is about the average number of years they have been coming up here. That’s longer than I’ve lived anywhere, much less regularly visited.

And now we know why. They keep coming back, even the losers in the annual dog show, for the cinnamon rolls.

The owner of the overall winner, Bella, accepts the Grand Prize