Boy Murray, scenery doesn't get any better than that. I need to get out that way sometime.
From Hartley Bay on the Inside Passage it's only 25nm to the entrance of Gardner Canal. Hardly anybody goes up there.
Gardner is about 50nm long, and Brim River is about 1/2 way in. The mountains keep getting bigger the further in you go. We're saving the Kitlope River/Lake and Chief Mathews Bay (at the back end) for when we can spend at least three weeks, to do it justice.
Anchoring is "interesting". In scouting where to drop the hook this time we went over a 47' depth marking on the Navionics chart and the depth sounder said 27' at mid tide. There's been about 100 years of debris being washed out of the mountains onto estuary outwash fans since they were charted and have changed shape quite a bit.
This last time we dropped the hook in 75' of water, let out 150' of rode and pulled the anchor 'up slope' to set it, which put the stern in 15' of water at low tide. Me-thinks the angle of the anchor and rode to the bottom was probably close to 4:1 with a flat bottom. This lined up with the southerly winds which are the strongest at this time of year. When we swung out away from the beach the depth was 100 feet.
Winds were such that we didn't feel a need to stern tie this time, but I did sleep at the helm seat to be close to the depth sounder alarm (set for anything deeper that 150') in case we got blown away from the shore, the anchor got plucked out of the slope, and we went for a rock wall bumping ride during the middle of the night
Thankfully, it was calm all night.