Late Entry | Three Sheets Northwest

The Cheap Sailor’s Port Guide to Vancouver

Looking down on False Creek

Vancouver is a wonderful and cosmopolitan city, and False Creek, the reformed industrial waterway bordering the south edge of the downtown core, is an interesting anchorage right at its heart. Prominent location of both Expo ’86 and important parts of the more recent 2010 Olympics, False Creek has a checkered history that is slowly being sublimated into the glitz and opulence of big city living. It’s an amazingly central location for the visiting sailor to experience views and a taste of the lifestyle that comes with ownership of the million dollar condos springing up in the Yaletown neighborhood on the northern shore. It is also surprisingly affordable and packed with places to go and things to see.

Anchorages
False Creek is a heavily regulated body of water. It is a no-discharge zone for sewage (a fact you may find hard to believe after watching the rings appear on your hull near the waterline after a couple days there). A speed limit of 10km/h (5 knots) exists throughout. Anchoring is limited to two weeks in every four between April 1st and September 30th, and 21 days in every 40 days between October 1st and March 31st, and requires registration and display of a permit. You can register at the Boating Welcome Center beneath the north span of the Granville Bridge (second bridge in; the BWC is clearly marked in houseboat at the docks of the False Creek Yacht Club), or at the dinghy dock at Stamps Landing below Monk McQueen’s restaurant. The staff at the BWC are extremely helpful with any question or request you might have and I highly recommend them as a resource if there is anything you are uncertain about.

A well-marked navigation channel extends the length of the Creek through the center, in which anchorage is not permitted. You can get a free map at the BWC showing both the channel and surrounding amenities. The map suggests East Basin, furthest inland, and Charleson Bay, along the south edge about halfway in, as the recommended anchorages. The East Basin looks appealing, but as it is past the Cambie Bridge, with a least height of 13m, it’s generally unavailable, or at least inconvenient, to most cruising sailboats. Charleson Bay looks nice and appears to have good holding, but is perpetually crowded. It’s also some distance from most services and dinghy docks.

We had better luck just south of the channel in between Stamps Landing and the Cambie Bridge, a popular spot very near to two dinghy docks and the closest grocery store. This area can also fill up, however. Our next most favored location is just off David Lam Park, opposite Charleson Bay. There is room for only a few boats in the narrow slot between the channel and a “No Anchor” zone where the Vancouver Fire Department pump intakes are located, but this is very close to the Yaletown Dinghy dock and convenient for landing. Holding was not as good here as we found elsewhere; it took a couple tries to set the hook and I was never as comfortable with it as I would have preferred, although ultimately we had no problems in winds as high as twenty knots.

The view from anchor off David Lam Park

In both these locations, you are right on the route of the fleet of small harbour ferries that serve those nearby dinghy dock locations, so you’ll get a lot of traffic going past. There are also dragon boat and kayak teams practicing along the shores which will grunt and shout their way past you close abeam morning and night. This is charming for the first few days, until you’re trying to take a nap. But both the slapping wakes and the splashing paddles, with the traffic noise and the sirens, are part of the overall character of the place.

Summer weekend evenings are also rife with intoxicated powerboaters and passing party barges. Most people don’t bother with anchor lights at night, considering the city lights and the generally well-known anchorage areas; we did, if only for insurance purposes.

Landings
There are five public dinghy docks on False Creek (and a psuedo-public dock at Quayside Marina), all of which are marked on a convenient downloadable map from the Vancouver city Blueways site. They are all well-positioned for access to various attractions and neighborhoods around False Creek. Each also doubles as a stop for the ubiquitous harbour ferries, so the water-facing side of the dock must be left clear. The periphery can become pretty crowded but there is almost always some way to tie up one more. Depending on the value of your dinghy and your degree of paranoia, you might want to bring along a lock for it and/or your motor. The docks struck us as universally pretty safe in the daytime, but some (particularly Spyglass Place) are a little isolated after dark and have an uncomfortable degree of proximity to bars disgorging intoxicated folks in high spirits whose judgement may fail them when presented with an opportunity for joy-rides.

We didn’t have any trouble leaving oars or other basic gear in our dinghy while leaving it tied up at any hour, but then we have pretty crappy stuff.

Moonrise over Vancouver

Surrounding Neighborhoods
From almost anywhere, a morning or evening in the cockpit provides a priceless window on big city life as the well-used trails and parks lining the Creek are used by residents going about their daily lives.

We really enjoyed going ashore on the north side in Yaletown, an upscale neighborhood with a beautiful public space in David Lam Park, where we could sit and drink coffee and admire Insegrevious at anchor just off-shore. Apart from that, it was a little too swanky for us, but there is a very convenient SkyTrain stop which we used as a launch-pad for exploring the rest of the city. Either by train or on foot you can head north to historic Gastown or the rest of the downtown urban core, both of which will feel familiar to most city folk.

To the south is a great walking/picnicking spot, Charleson Park, and of course the incomparable Granville Island with its curious mix of industry, education, tourist shops, and marine services.

Science World is the big dome at the east end of False Creek; I haven’t been there in years and it was in the middle of renovations when we were there so I can’t comment, but I have fond memories from the past. Beyond Science World is Chinatown.

The other direction, west, leads to Kitsilano, a lovely little neighborhood that we didn’t really explore. Likewise, we failed to hit either the Vancouver Maritime Museum or the HR MacMillan Space Centre, both right at the entrance to False Creek and also on our list of things to see… but we just ran out of time.

Provisions and Services
The False Creek Esso location near the Granville Bridge has been closed (despite still being listed in some notable Pacific Northwest nautical publications; we’re looking at you, Northwest Yachting Magazine), and with it, the last fuel dock convenient to the Creek. You’ll have to make the voyage up through First Narrows to Coal Harbour if you need to tank up, or as one enterprising gentleman at a nearby marina did, hike back and forth from the nearest petrol station (about eight blocks up Burrard Street from the BWC) with a five gallon can. Better yet, buy a sailboat, and sail it. We took on fuel in Nanaimo. Two months ago.

Update: Reader Tricia Coldren points out that a new fuel operation has opened up just this month, at the site of the old Esso barge just west of the Burrard Bridge on the south shore of the inlet, False Creek Fuels. That’s great news and a boon to visitors in general and False Creek in particular. And we apologize to Northwest Yachting Magazine, who were only wrong for one year and saved themselves the trouble of editing their list twice!

Internet access is pretty much unavailable throughout the Creek, a significant defect if you are living aboard and working. However, many coffee shops in the city provide free wireless, as does the Vancouver Public Library (Central Branch located just up the hill at South Georgia and Homer streets) with a guest access card.

The closest grocery is the Budget Foods in Leg In Boot Square, just west along the seawall from Stamps Landing. The prices are reasonable but the selection limited. Once you master the Vancouver transit system, there is a Real Canadian Superstore at 350 SE Marine Drive, accessible by a short hop on the SkyTrain Canada Line. That was the cheapest grocery we found; there are a number of small mom and pop produce shops downtown with better prices than any general grocer, but you have to leg it around to find the best deals. There are also an IGA and a Safeway in the downtown core, both along Robson street, but they are generally more expensive. A Save-On Foods south on Cambie street looked like another promising option, but we didn’t have a chance to check it out.

Things to See
Well, what’s not to see? You can have your pick of tourist brochures at the Vancouver Tourist Information Centre near Canada Place, so I’ll skip all the usual highlights and stick with the free stuff.

Moonset the next morning; time for another day of exploring!

Granville Island is a close analog to Pike Place in Seattle, only with more of a mixed use flavor to it. It’s absolutely worth walking around and enjoying. The “farmer’s market,” however, may be quaint but it absolutely not the place to get the best deals on food. Buy something there to say you did and do your real shopping elsewhere.

Like in Chinatown, for instance. If dried chicken feet are your thing. If you’re used to the International District in Seattle, Vancouver’s Chinatown will amaze you. The third largest in North America, it is big, and packed with interesting and exotic sights, sounds, and smells. You could spend a day there, easily.

Stanley Park is worth another day or two. At one thousand acres, it is the largest urban park in Canada, and perhaps one of the largest in the world. You can walk from the up-scale shops of Robson Street into native forest in a few blocks. If nature itself isn’t your thing, there are also other diversions such as a miniature railway and an aquarium scattered along the 16 miles of paths through the park.

Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver is surprisingly accessible as the northern terminus of the public Seabus service, and is a small-scale version of the Granville Island shops and markets that is often less crowded and more local.

And while you’re in North Vancouver, there are the public parks of the North Slope. Capilano Park, home of the Capilano Suspension Bridge, may be the best known of these, but the tour of the bridge costs rather a lot. Less well-known, but equally interesting, is the Lynn Canyon suspension bridge in Lynn Canyon Park. It’s free, less crowded, and easy to get to on the number 228 or 229 bus from Lonsdale Quay.

Two weeks is really too little time to take in everything that Vancouver has to offer. We used up our anchorage permit time and took an additional week in a marina and still didn’t make it to everything on our list. Clearly, future visits are in order. Whether you have a lot of time or a little, Vancouver is an excellent stop for sailors on a budget.

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Neighbors

We have never spent enough time in our slip to really get to know our neighbors. The fellow on the other side of our finger pier has been the only constant. Until this week, I’d never before seen anyone on the boat that shares our slip. Every other time we have come back to the marina after months away, it seems like everything around us has shuffled, and there are new boats and new faces each time. Add to that the fact that neither my wife nor I are particularly outgoing, social people, and it makes it hard to get to know people.

Still, I appreciate our neighbors, and all the more so when I find myself wandering down to the M-x (number have been obscured to protect the guilty!) restrooms in the mornings, as I must if I am to indulge myself in the occasional urge to have a Cherry Coke for breakfast; M-x is where the soda machines are. Our head has been torn apart for repairs for an ungodly amount of time now, so we have been relying on the marina restrooms more than ever this spring. Compared to our restroom block, M-y, going into the men’s room at M-x is like entering the fourth level of hell. There is always the potential for a certain tragedy of the commons to occur at marina restrooms, but our neighbors (at least our immediate neighbors!) keep it clean and respectful.

They are not without blemish, though, our neighbors. One fellow spent a recent evening pacing up and down our finger pier talking on his cell phone and blowing his nose. As I was trying to sleep at the time, it was somewhat unwelcome but not entirely unexpected. Close friends of ours lived on a houseboat on Lake Union for a time, and I had learned there that the dock is everyone’s front yard, and that life lived in such proximity inevitably exposes many of the ticks and quirks we all have to one another. A measure of willful blindness and a recognition that we are surely equally annoying to others on occasion improves tolerance.

So too does another result of living cheek-by-jowl, which I can’t quite find a word for. I see it in the fellow who dropped a bottle of vodka (an inevitable occurrence on summer docks) and carefully picked up all the glass from the dock and a nearby kayak it had sprayed into. Or the other gentleman I came across hosing bird poop (another inevitable occurrence) off the dock the other day, in front of someone else’s slip, who looked up apologetically (although I’m not sure why you would apologize for cleaning up bird poop) and said “These damn birds just don’t stop,” as if he held out a secret hope that someday, they might. Until then, I imagine, he’ll continue cleaning off the floats in front of other people’s boats, making it a nicer neighborhood for us all.

It’s an eclectic kind of community. Boats draw in all sorts of interesting folks. But there is something about it that does just make you want to clean up bird poop, tidy restrooms, and ignore sniffly folks just outside your portlights. That’s just what you do for good neighbors.

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Don’t Touch The Nature

I see it’s that time of year again, where well-meaning but short-sighted folks start to sprout along with the tulips and the cherry blossoms, and take root in legislative and planning offices whispering their soft refrain into the warm spring breezes: “Liveaboards are bad for the environment! Liveaboards are bad for the environment! Crush them and drive them before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!”

This gentle admonition has been popping up with some regularity in Seattle since the 1950s. And it has worked, driving the number of households living on the water here down from a high of around three thousand to perhaps eight hundred or so now. And what do you know… the water is cleaner now! So we must be on the right track. But this is slow, slow progress. I think that we, as Seattleites, can do better.

I would like to propose a new policy instead of all these piecemeal attacks on houseboats and liveaboards, a comprehensive alternative to take care of these miscreants once and for all, and more besides. It’s called “Don’t touch the nature.” We love the outdoors, and wildlife, and fish, and trees, but for god’s sake, don’t touch any of it… you might break it!

I think you will find that this policy aligns with the general objectives of the new shoreline regulations, and further, that it is much more effective in reaching those objectives than what the city proposes.

Don’t Touch The Nature! Don’t let anyone touch the nature. Ban all boats; ban public access to the shoreline itself, and to any tributaries which might at some point deliver their contents into the Sound. We’re ruining it, all of it, simply by performing our natural and inescapable bodily functions. We should be allowed to look, but not touch. For a fraction of the cost of enacting and enforcing these regulations, large glass viewing towers can be erected at a safe distance from the water, from which those unfortunates who previously were contaminating all if it can get their fix by staring out at it as long as they desire.

I say all this because, while I have no more scientific understanding of the contribution of liveaboards to environmental degradation than do the regulators, I am down here on the water all the time, and I can tell you that it is not at its worst in the cold of winter, when only liveaboards are here: it’s at its worst right now, summertime, when all the other folks come down to the water. Gas sheens blossom, floating candy wrappers multiply, and un-identifiable bits of ick flow in with abandon from both the marina and the nearby beach at Golden Gardens. I shudder to think what Lake Union looks like right now.

Clearly, then, the problem is not just liveaboards, but boats and boaters and recreational shoreline users in general, and the solution must be to do away with all of them, entirely. Our planners mean well, but I understand it’s hard to get out of the office to look at what’s actually going on, so I hope this tidbit of information from a concerned citizen will be helpful for them. Certainly it would be a much easier law to write; the poor dears have been down there slaving to churn out some two-hundred pages of amendments when they could get it down to four words: Don’t Touch The Nature!

This will have the added benefit of getting rid of all that nasty bottom paint without any additional state law required, and probably driving those terrible, polluting boatyards out of business as well. Hey… maybe we can erect those viewing towers in the empty lots of defunct boatyards!

Of course, Puget Sound is only one of our many natural wonders that is being absolutely ruined by people. Eventually, this policy can be extended to the Cascade Mountains, Olympic National Park, and someday to your neighborhood park.

It’s difficult to write about these matters without sounding like an indifferent, polluting heathen or a self-righteous environmental zealot; depending on where you stand along that spectrum I imagine you’ll be able to read this either way. I like to think I’m pretty close to the middle: I think some regulation is necessary to protect and preserve our shared natural resources, but I believe it should be minimal, rational, and as respectful of individual freedoms as possible. Obviously the difficulty arises when trying to make those particular distinctions, but surprisingly often it doesn’t need to be as hard as people would like to make it.

The proposed regulations do not have any justifications for their restrictions at all that I can find (admittedly, they are long, marked-up documents written in dense legalese; maybe I just missed it). Absent some sort of scientific rationale, I think it’s pretty clear that the bias should be against creating spaghetti legal code that impacts the lives and livelihoods of folks just trying to live decently and quietly. I fail to see how that sort of standard could even be controversial, but apparently it is; we keep getting more and more rules with less and less reason. It seems that the reason for restricting liveaboards has largely become the fact that liveaboards have been restricted in the past.

Apparently, a general sense that folks living on top of the same water that our beloved salmon swim in are an environmental problem is reason enough. I think this is a failure to see the forest for the trees. It may be true that liveaboards generate more grey water into the Sound than folks living ashore (this being the only justification I have heard for these regulations). But that is one relatively minor impact on the environment, weighed independently without consideration of any of the benefits to the environment inherent in the liveaboard lifestyle.

Now, I know that my wife and I have a vastly lighter ecological footprint than the average land-dweller, because we house-sit frequently and have an easy basis for comparison. We generate less trash aboard, use less water, heat and cool far more efficiently with far less gas and electric consumption. We even drive less. Not even apartment dwelling is so green. It could be that the folks over at the Department of Planning and Development are all huddled up in 75 square-foot apartments, carefully rationing their water, avoiding purchasing anything over-packaged because they don’t want to fill the trash can up once a day, and keeping their electrical draw down below 20 amps at all times because that’s all their circuits can handle, but somehow I doubt it.

The first half of this post was facetious, but I am serious when I say this: MORE liveaboards would be far better for our local environment, and the health of not just Puget Sound but the planet in general. Forcing folks who are now living, or who want to live, in a lightweight, environmentally friendly manner to move back into energy-hungry, pollution-generating, resource-intensive houses and apartment buildings isn’t doing our salmon any favors in the long run.

All the greywater, the occasional diesel spill, and the bag of chips blown out of the cockpit from time to time don’t hold a candle to the impact of putting up more housing developments out along salmon streams. It’s true that the impacts from the suburban developments are far more detached than those from boaters. I suppose that makes them seem less real to most people.

It might be that exposure to the reality is the final advantage of living aboard. Living on the water, you can see all this up close and in person. The oil slicks, the garbage, the eagles that can’t find fish, the diminishing numbers of other aquatic life… those are not just abstract numbers to us. One of the best ways to get people to change their behavior is feedback. Touching the nature, it turns out, helps you to measure and regulate your impact on it. Keeping people away from the resources that they are going to impact either way, hiding the costs of their daily lives on the environment, isn’t helping anyone to live more cleanly and efficiently with nature.

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Compression

Moving aboard a boat is almost always a simultaneously traumatic and liberating experience. For most people, it involves a radical down-sizing in lifestyle-related “stuff” and a significant re-engineering of the mechanics of daily living. At the same time, those necessities bring with them a simplicity that is refreshing and novel, a degree of freedom that most of us would not otherwise have willingly experienced. This tradeoff dulls much of the sting, and for folks who decide to stick with the lifestyle, it’s a net gain.

Doing it repeatedly, on the other hand, is starting to seem a little masochistic.

This spring marks the third time we have moved aboard since we started living aboard, returning from our winter gig house-sitting, and with the experience I can say this: it’s a lot easier to take all the stuff of your daily life on a boat and move it into a house than it is to take that same stuff and move it back onto the boat.

When you move to a house from a boat, you are taking a very limited amount of stuff (in typical house terms) and putting it into a very big space, where it sort of naturally spreads out and settles in the many areas available to put it. Moving from house to boat, even if you have only the same limited amount of stuff, it all gets compressed into a very small space and starts to look like an unmanageable bundle of impossible clutter.

Last year, we actually split our time much more evenly between where we were house-sitting and on the boat, and less stuff went back and forth. This year, we actually spent very little time aboard, and moving back has been much harder. I know there are places to stow all this stuff, it has been here for three years now and we have worked out fairly well how to keep it all safely and securely out of the way. I just can’t seem to remember where any of those places are! Compression seems, perversely, to have lead to expansion somehow: we were so proud to have pared life down to this limited bundle of things the first time around, and now they themselves seem to have exploded into being too much.

It doesn’t help that we are both suffering an attack of three-footitis, so every time we come across an item that just doesn’t seem to have a place to live, we find ourselves muttering, “If only we had three more feet…” It’s a common refrain, but the idea that you can simply buy your way out of storage issues on a boat is a sure sign that you don’t understand the basis of the problem: compression! Any amount of stuff, taken from a large area into a smaller area, is just going to seem like too much. A temporary reprieve might be had if we moved our stuff from a smaller boat to a larger boat, but should we go back and forth between that larger boat and a house again, the boat is inevitably going to seem to be too small. And we’ll be looking for another three feet, no doubt.

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What’s up with Nanaimo?

Nanaimo is a regular stop for us pretty much any time we are going anywhere in or through the Strait of Georgia. It’s the natural jumping off point for slow boats heading either north or east, and it’s a well-protected and easily entered anchorage for anyone coming back toward the Gulf Islands from those directions. I have heard people denigrate the town as uninteresting and while it’s true that there is not a lot going on for boaters past a relatively narrow strip of downtown, the accessibility of the port and the wonderful park on Newcastle Island more than make up for any other deficiencies in our view. Plus, you know, Nanaimo bars. It’s common for us to spend a week anchored out in Mark Bay, enjoying the natural beauty of the anchorage and exploring the island.

We have no concrete plans to head that direction this year, but nonetheless when I came across a message board thread titled “Nanaimo, BC Changes” I thought I would see what was going on. Nanaimo has been shaping up as the next major battleground over free anchoring and unrestricted mooring in the Pacific Northwest.

From what I understand, the town has gone ahead and installed mooring buoys in the anchorage, with all the associated costs, time-limits, and size restrictions that one generally finds with public mooring balls. According to some, these are now your only option for staying in Mark Bay. The hue and cry is mostly over the cost, the supposed size limits, and the further displacement of long-term liveaboards in favor of transients. It’s not clear exactly what motivated the change. When we were last there in the fall, there was little to suggest an impending overflow requiring government intervention, nor any great dis-satisfaction among visitors as to the existing arrangements.

That thread is loaded with misinformation and conjecture, but the park website is hardly more helpful, noting only that the mooring buoys are $12 per night. This, at least, confirms that there are now mooring bouys, but does little to clarify what they are rated to hold or to what extent they are sited to prevent anchoring on one’s own ground tackle in the bay. Various commenters appear to assert both, and are apparently refuted by other commenters, leaving me scratching my head and worrying what I’ll find the next time I am up there.

It’s hard to speculate much with so little information, so this post is mostly a plea to anyone who happens to be up in that area: What’s up with Nanaimo?

I have touched on this tension before, the desire for freedom conflicting with the outcomes of other sailors exercising the same, and I have no real new thoughts on that problem now. It remains a central question of cruising, and I suppose of the world in general, that saddens me even in its need to be asked. How do you balance it without the ham-fisted intervention of dis-interested parties?

At any rate, if anyone has any more concrete information, please post it in comments! If Mark Bay has in fact been transformed from a lovely bohemian anchorage into the nautical equivalent of a Motel Six, I will understand, but will miss those carefree weeks on the hook in an idyllic setting.

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All ashore that’s going ashore

A particularly raucous beach party attended by a number of students from the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building (those wild and crazy wooden boat builders!) this winter apparently raised the ire of a local tideland owner, and with it, a lot of questions in my mind about public beach access in Washington state. It’s not an idle question for cruisers; whether it’s time to dinghy the dog ashore for a much needed bathroom break, or just an insatiable urge to get out and stretch the legs in a place where one can walk more than thirty feet in a straight line, almost all of us will at some point find ourselves with a need to go ashore someplace that isn’t necessarily a designated park or public beach. There is a lot of information and misinformation floating around on the Internet and by word of mouth, and it’s not at all clear to me even after digging around the matter what the law actually is. So, this is post will be about equal parts sharing what I have found, and asking if anyone else has better or more official information on the subject.

It’s beyond dispute that a significant portion of Washington state’s tidelands are privately owned (by tidelands, I mean the land between the normal low and the mean high tidelines). Both prior to and after gaining statehood, the territory and then state of Washington was granted “title and dominion” over all shore and tidelands, and promptly set about selling them off to the highest bidder. The practice continued until 1971, by which point 60 percent of tidelands were privately owned, a figure that remains roughly accurate today.

What is less clear is that private ownership of a tideland may not encompass all the same rights as private ownership of uplands. Under an ancient principle called the Public Trust Doctrine, courts have long held that the state retains an easement of sorts over tidelands and navigable waters to allow public passage and fishing. They have also held that this is a principle that cannot be abolished, regardless of the wording of the instrument of sale or the understanding of the purchaser.

But because this is a principle of common law (and, interestingly, because it originates in British common law, it has implications north of the border as well, Canada broadly sharing that legal tradition with us) rather than an articulated point of state law, it is left up to the courts to determine what it means exactly. While a 1987 Washington State Supreme Court case, Caminti v. Boyle, pretty well establishes that it is active and applicable in our state, the case was not specifically about public access and that right was not specifically affirmed. Subsequent appellate court cases apparently (this is an excerpt of a longer Lexis paper; I’m interested in this stuff, but not enough to spring for the $12 to find out what the actual document says!) have distinguished between “use” of private tideland on foot and afloat; you could dinghy over a piece of land at high tide and fish there, perhaps, but on the same land at low tide you would be trespassing on foot.

The most cogent opinion on the public right to access tideland I could find is in a legal analysis on the Public Trust Doctrine and its effect on Coastal Zone Managment, a dry and ecologically focused whitepaper available from the Department of Ecology. Although the paper is primarily about the implications of the doctrine for regulatory purposes, it does deign to briefly discuss public rights to walk and/or harvest shellfish on private tideland. Unfortunately, what it concludes is that while it is likely that the doctrine would allow public passage and other common uses of privately owned tidelands, the matter has never been tested before the State Supreme Court and remains unsettled.

This is confusing not only for boaters, fishers, and property owners, but for law enforcement, who may well arrest you for trespassing on a private beach, should it come to that. State employees have been expelled by shotgun-toting property owners, and have acknowledged the owner’s right to expel them, though that right is in fact far from clear. The waters are murky up near the high tide line and officials have better things to do than plumb deeply into the implications of common law and various court decisions… the result being that despite their authority, they may have as little clue as the rest of us as to what’s legal and what’s not.

If the answer to “what is legal” is “who knows?” then we’re left with the more general question of “what is right?” My sense is that raucous beach parties and bonfires on privately owned tidelands are probably not (sorry boat school guys!) but if Fido needs a head call or you need a few clams for supper or even just feel like going ashore and poking around in a fascinating looking set of tidepools, then that should be just fine. It’s not worth arguing with the property owner unless you have a boatload of money and a good lawyer and feel like settling the question once and for all, but the more respectful we are in general the less likely it is to need settling in the first place. Indeed, I get the sense that it rarely comes up as it is… beaches have figured prominently in our views for the past couple years and unless we happen to be anchored adjacent to an established park of some sort, we rarely see people on them. That’s a pity, because the tidelands are some of our most fascinating and accessible public places. Take some time and go ashore!

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The Second Wave

If last month’s tsunami wave was less than threatening to boaters in our particular corner of the Pacific Northwest, don’t get too complacent just yet: a subtler, more ominous wave is still approaching. The enduring image of the disaster in Japan is of a massive wall of water churning implacably inland, sweeping everything loose and man-made before it like a ravening monster chasing fleeing inhabitants up the littoral plain. Less shown in the media was the slower retreat of those waters, moving more slowly back toward colder depths… and taking with them much of the rubble they had created.

Aerial view of 2011 Japanese tsunami debris

That massive, unprecedented debris field, driven by ocean currents slower but every bit as implacable as the tsunami wave itself, is now headed inexorably our way. Still fighting to control other after effects, searching for dead, and working to distribute aid to the injured and displaced, Japan has neither the time nor the resources to attempt any cleanup, if such a thing were even possible on such a scale. Spreading out as it comes, the detritus of disaster is forecast to reach our shores between one and three years from now, with lighter, smaller objects arriving first and larger, semi-submerged debris coming later.

While the density won’t be anything like it currently is off the coast of Japan, you have to imagine that a pile of junk that is causing concern for nuclear aircraft carriers and massive freighters is going to pose some increased risk to the recreational boater. Something that is going to put a dent in a freighter prop traveling at speed is going to do a lot worse to the hull, keel, and other hanging parts on the average cruiser.

Enough study has been done on ocean currents and the so-called Pacific Gyre of late to attach a fair degree of confidence to the prediction on the timing of the arrival. Even without all the science, the not uncommon finding of intricately blown Asian glass fishing net floats along our shores is enough to tell you where items lost at sea in the Orient eventually end up. What is less certain is what a debris field of such magnitude and variety will look like once it arrives. There is a lot of research that has gone into what happens with the odd bit of styrofoam that gets tossed into the ocean; none that I am aware of has looked seriously into what happens when a whole intact house goes in the water.

A house adrift

Houses might show up on radar but it seems more likely that by the time it all gets to us, it’s going to be in smaller, and more waterlogged, pieces. In some ways, this is bad news. A semi-submerged dishwasher is harder to spot than a whole roof.

Fortunately, we here in the Pacific Northwest have been well-trained for this coming onslaught by the natural features of our region. If you haven’t had to slalom through a field of massive logs in poor visibility around here, you’ve been staying tied to the dock too much. I don’t know how it is in other parts of the country, but slash and debris are such a regular feature in the waters here that keeping watch out for them often takes precedence over watching out for other vessels; that is to say, we watch out for other vessels while we’re at the helm, but the real concern is crab traps, deadheads, loose nets, and the like.

Still, household items are unusual and may prove more difficult to spot until our eyes are trained. Beyond that, sailing in poor visibility may become much more risky than it ever has been. There have been passages we’ve made at night or in heavy fog where we could count on radar to keep us clear of other vessel traffic, but where we’ve simply had to play the odds when it came to debris… in the inky blackness, there was no spotting logs and we could only hope not to run across any. Those have been reasonable odds in many places at many times in the past here. Starting next year, particularly out along the coast, they may be much worse.

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Another year, another tsunami

As I woke up yesterday, blurry eyed, to the chiming of the tsunami advisory coming in on my phone, it struck me that it is just past a year since the last time we got such a message, in the aftermath of the 8.8 earthquake that hit Chile. Perhaps tsunamis have always occurred this frequently and we simply didn’t notice before we moved onto a boat. What will next year bring, I wondered?

We’re not actually on the boat right now, but we are on the water, and since we’re near Port Townsend we are far more exposed to tsunami damage than is the boat, tucked away far down Puget Sound in Seattle. It was for that reason that the night before, when the first tweet came in about a 7.9 quake in northern Japan, I sat up and took an interest in the developing story. As I watched the news, they upgraded the estimate from 7.9 to 8.4 and then to 8.8. The Pacific Tsunami Warning center almost immediately issued an advisory, then a warning, for Hawaii, but the West Coast and Alaska center’s board remained green even as I headed to bed around midnight. Nonetheless, I took my phone along and set an alarm to wake me just before the first waves were due in Hawaii.

I did so because, as I had watched the terrible pictures coming in from Japan, burning houses floating implacably inland on the debris-strewn waves, I had also been searching for some estimate of historical impacts of cross-Pacific tsunamis and the transit times… and I didn’t find out very much. There have not been very many to study in the modern era. Based on our previous experience, I wasn’t particularly worried, but since they kept upgrading the magnitude, I wasn’t exactly complacent, either. I wanted fair warning if it got upgraded again overnight.

It did, and WCATWC finally issued an advisory for one foot waves at Port Angeles, and my phone chimed, and I got up and got the camera out to see if I could capture any photographic evidence this time around. Almost a half hour after the predicted time of impact, this is as good as I got:

The tide was falling at the same time, and the actual measured impact was only six inches in Port Townsend, and ultimately those waves I saw could have just been the wake of a passing freighter. As with last year’s tsunami, I was distinctly unimpressed.

Despite that, I felt that this time around both the warning centers and the news media got it right; despite the relative accuracy of the predictions, in many respects this represents unexplored realms and the alerts had what I considered to be a respectable degree of excess caution in them… respectable in the sense that it was only clearly excessive in retrospect. The one death and several close calls suffered in California and Oregon hopefully underscore the wisdom of those who evacuated as directed, even though we now know most of them would have been fine.

The more time I spent looking into what is known and unknown about this phenomena the more seriously I came to regard it. One can scoff at the local outcomes of overseas earthquakes for only so long before having to consider the likelihood of such an event much closer to home. Japan’s warning systems and civil protection are the finest in the world when it comes to seismic activity; their infrastructure and population preparedness far exceed our own. Along their coastline, most residents had at least fifteen minutes warning that the waves were coming, and they have been drilled to a far greater degree than our own populace on what to do when they receive such a warning. Still, the death toll promises to be staggering.

In Seattle, it turns out, there would likely be no warning, or none besides the tremor itself. A quake along the Seattle fault could generate a 16 foot tsunami that would be on downtown’s doorstep in two minutes flat. Not only is that not enough time for a warning; it may not be enough time for the shaking to dissipate enough to make your run for the hills… the Sendai quake lasted five minutes. You’d have been under water for three by the time you could start to evacuate. How long can you hold your breath?

Based on what we saw from the Nisqually quake in 2001, most people in the inundation zone (you can check the prediction map here (PDF)) aren’t thinking about evacuating anyway. Video from Pioneer Square, sure to be hard hit, showed crowds milling around watching the facades crumble afterward. Without knowing that the origin of the quake had been the Nisqually fault, far to the south, for all practical purposes they should have been lacing up their shoes and sprinting up Yesler in an impromptu marathon.

If you’re aboard your boat, of course, you’re in even worse shape. I can barely get off my dock in two minutes on a good day, still less if it’s on an elevator ride down as the water is sucked out before the wave. Of course, the two minutes is a worst case scenario for which the odds are essentially unknown, the Seattle fault being a relatively recent discovery and a poorly understood one at that. A more likely scenario, and one that allows more response options, has to do with the Cascadia subduction zone, fifty miles off the Washington coast. That’s neither wine nor roses either, though, since it has potential for much larger (Sendai-size) quakes and more significant wave heights. And despite the yeoman’s work that NOAA, the USGS, and local civil defense authorities have been doing spreading the word about quake and tsunami threats, and despite the proximity of the threat to Puget Sound, there is actually very little information that I could find from any of them on what a Cascadia subduction zone quake might mean in the way of tsunami waves in the Salish Sea.

The few predictions I found about transit times were vague and dealt only with the coast… around thirty minutes. I suppose an hour would be a reasonable minimum guess for locations in the Sound. But what to do in that hour? If you’re anchored out, do you dinghy ashore and run for it, or get underway? If you plan to stick with the boat, conventional wisdom is that deep water (better than 100 fathoms, according to NOAA) is good, and much of Puget Sound is that deep, but it’s unclear that the depth is as protective in what amounts to a narrow channel, or with what could be as much seiche as tsunami. If you plan to seek shelter ashore, where ashore? The inundation maps are based around the Seattle fault data and 16 foot waves, not the 100 foot monsters possible from the Cascadia zone. Of course 100 feet at the coast will be less in Puget Sound, but how much less? What about currents? What impact does the funnel of the Strait of Juan de Fuca have? How much buffer is Whidbey Island? Or does the refraction from those high bluffs spell extra peril in Port Townsend? No official estimates appear to exist.

I suppose the safest answer is just get as high as you can as quick as you can if you’re near-shore, but it’s not that simple… given ten to fifteen minutes, I can get up about forty feet from where I am sitting at this very moment. A half hour, I can be up to 400. But to get up to 400 feet, I have to go down again first; so if it’s going to hit in twenty minutes, I had better take my chances on a lower hill. If I’m underway, I imagine I’ll get as close to the center of the channel as I can and ride it out… we’re so slow that there may be no other plausible options, which I guess at least takes the worrisome guesswork out of survival and places it strictly in the realm of fate.

We have a long way to go, both publicly and privately, before we are even as close to as ready as Japan was, but with chances of a significant event running between 10% and 37% in the current fifty year window (depending on whose predictions you believe), it’s not a trivial matter. I’m trying to do as much as I can personally to be prepared, but it’s a little frustrating to not even have the basis of an official nautical scenario to plan around. Hopefully this spurs a renewed discussion of the issues.

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Rough day for a soft grounding

I had imagined that most of the boats left out in the Port Hadlock anchorage by this stage of the winter had had their anchoring systems pretty well tested by the harshest northerly winds and waves that La Nina could throw at them. After the great culling of the Thanksgiving storm, in which at least three vessels were sunk and a handful more badly damaged, I figured we had gotten most of the drama out of the way early and didn’t have to worry about more wreckage and heartbreak. Apart from a little Catalina that got away somehow in a southerly a few weeks ago and drifted north toward Indian Island (to the Navy’s great displeasure; when I lost sight of it, it was on track to tangle up in their floating fence, and I later heard their radio traffic was pretty irate), that was pretty much the case until last week.

One of the sailboats that had gotten slammed up against the marina breakwater during the Thanksgiving storm had returned to the mooring field, though, despite still having gaping holes in the hull and having been dismasted. I imagine money was tight and the owner had nowhere else to go. He may also have subconsciously had a sort of death-wish for the vessel, too (I know the feeling), though, because I happened to look out the window on Friday to see her stuck in the mud just inshore of the marina.

Vessel Aground

Fortunately, the tide was rising, the mud flats were partly sheltered from wave action by the marina docks, and it just so happens that Port Hadlock Vessel Assist is moored at the dock right next to where it was all happening. They literally just backed straight out of their slip and got a line on her. It wasn’t all a cake walk, though:

And it got even worse as they got out from behind the breakwater and put her on their beam to push her into a temporary slip:

Bouncy ride! I ran out of memory on the camera before they got her tucked away, but it took a few goes with the waves on the beam. Nonetheless, once again a very professional, tidy job by Port Hadlock Vessel Assist.

While all this was happening, a yawl that also happened to be over there (with a crew aboard; the grounded yacht was empty and unlivable) raised sail and took off south through the Cut into Oak Bay. The tide was against him and the roller coaster was operating at full speed off Indian Island as the current smashed into the wind, but he swept right down south under sail anyway. It looked like fun. I have often wondered why I don’t see more of the boats out there doing exactly that when the storms blow in; you’re a ten minute sail from safety, no matter how rough it is running in the Cut. I was happy to see someone taking the opportunity this time around. He was back later in the evening when the winds dropped, safe and sound.

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Out of mind

Every winter seems a little hectic, part of the price to be paid for being out on the water and not working very hard at anything other than sailing for most of the summer. The sea seems far away sometimes, even when you are looking out at it every day.

This year I have been even more detached than usual. Typically, by this time of the winter, I am daydreaming of warmer, sunnier, longer days on waters less convulsed with shrieking winds, pounding rain, or drifting snow. This year I still have my head down, and the boat is further from my mind than ever as I work.

There are a few reasons for this, I think. For one, I’ve been working a lot, and since the boat is not a great environment for working, I have not been spending much time on it. The things I have been working on don’t require that I be physically in Seattle, either, so there has been little reason for me to stay aboard often.

For another, this is the first year in several years that we have not made any firm plans, or even slightly squishy plans, to undertake a lengthy trip of some sort. In winters past, planning and preparing for a trip to Alaska, or around Vancouver Island, or a mid-winter cruise to Vancouver absorbed countless hours of thought and action, and kept me deeply involved with nautical matters well into the off-season. This winter, work is really all that is on my mind. I have no idea what we are doing or where we are going next summer, and it all seems relatively unimportant.

There’s something else that I can’t quite put my finger on, as well. It happens that there are a couple of small-scale charts hanging on the walls of my borrowed office space, one showing the Inside Passage from Admiralty Inlet to roughly Stuart Island, and the other the whole of the Pacific Northwest Coast from Lincoln City up to Laredo Sound. In the past, when I was feeling bogged down or needing something other than business to think about, I would gaze at those charts and daydream. What was that point really like? That bay has a neat shape, I bet it would be fun to poke around in on a languishing blue summer day. How long would it take to get up Pryce Channel? I wonder if there there any good anchorages there?

I still find myself drawn to those charts now, but now I look at them, and for each name and feature on them, I already have a picture in my mind. They are all distinct, snapshots taken on warm days and cold, windy and calm, good days and bad, with some places having more associations than others, but on the whole the mental map is pretty well filled in. There are still mysteries up there. Local sailors spend a lifetime of summers on the Inside Passage and find new places to experience every year. But there are no big empty patches left for my mind to wander in.

It’s not as if the Northwest Coast is a solved problem. I have a catalog of places I have yet to see, several lifetimes worth of experiences yet to have there. I want to head north again, and I am sure we will do so. There’s just nothing compelling this year, nothing pulling me there like there has been in the past. It’s all out of mind at the moment.

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