As Quadra powered through the current sweeping past the timbered breakwater walls of my marina I saw four other Grand Banks yachts cruising westbound in Guemes Channel.
It took a few minutes, about as long as I needed to raise the tip of the mast and to hoist radio antennas upright, to recognize something else: All of these GBs were cruising at about seven knots, although several were capable of greater speed.
Quadra’s engines still were warming up, with the throttles at about 1300 rpm. After a couple of miles I decide to join the seven-knot parade and nudged the engines to 1500rpm. We puttered along easily with help from the ebb.
This was fuel conservation 2008.
I began thinking about writing about this new look in cruising. A title popped into my head: Seven-Knot Summer. I thought about what I might say as we crossed Rosario Strait and eased through Thatcher Pass into Lopez Sound for the run through the San Juan Islands.
All the while, something was trying to escape from a file hidden deep in my brain. Finally, it slithered loose. Someone else had written a book called Seven-Knot Summers. I found it in Quadra’s library.
Beth Hill, a British Columbia anthropologist, history buff and boater, wrote Seven-Knot Summers in the early 1990s to sum up 30 years of boating with her husband, Ray. Cruising slowly in a converted fishing boat, they concentrated on visiting out-of-the-way places, including old homesteads and villages that had disappeared and in searching for traces of the culture of native Canadians who had lived along the Inside Passage hundreds – and thousands – of years ago.
Beth tugged at other memories as she mentioned M. Wylie Blanchet, who wrote The Curve of Time to describe B.C. cruising with five children and dog after the death of her husband in 1927. Caprice was 25 feet long and had a hand-cranked, magneto-ignition gasoline engine. Space was so precious the dog often spent nights in the dinghy. Dishes were washed one at a time “over the side of the boat.”
Beth Hill takes readers even deeper into time by remembering Francis and Amy Burton who began cruising in British Columbia after their marriage in 1906, making drawings and photos of pictographs and petroglyphs and writing detailed journals. They cruised in Toketie, a 26-foot wood boat built in 1903 or 1904.
The totems Capi Blanchet admired and the Indian villages she visited are gone now, or off limits. The archeological finds that attracted Beth and Ray Hill are still to be seen, but weather aging and encroachment of forests may make them difficult to find.
I want to remember the kind of cruising they did – slow and easy, with plenty of time outs on shore, with opportunities to meet people and explore new places. Too often we treat the major waterways of the Inside Passage as interstate highways good only for speeding toward a distant destination. Adventure and good times can be found by turning off the freeway.
Quadra will cruise north of Cape Caution in 2008, with departure only days away. (Her tanks are full of cheap fuel bought in April for only $3.22!)
I don’t know how much fuel I’ll save by slowing some, but I’m looking forward to new adventures and new discoveries. I’m looking forward to my Seven-Knot Summer. I’ll let you know how it goes