May 29th - Claydon Bay

Since today is my birthday (double-nickel), Marcia indulged me. We did an early morning paddle back to Muirhead Islets. We identified the cove referenced in one of the cruising guides as an anchorage. It would have been nice but would have required a stern tie (a line from the boat’s stern to shore) to make it really secure.

During the morning generator run, Marcia baked birthday brownies for tonight’s dinner. Afterwards, we spent much of the morning on the fly bridge enjoying the sun. Today is probably the warmest day of our trip.

We pulled anchor around 1 PM and motored about 14 miles to Claydon Bay (May 29). We're sharing the north bay with two sail boats currently.

A surprising bit of fauna has been the barn swallows at our last three sites. They seem particularly attracted to the overhanging brow of our salon, appearing to be trying to find a spot to build a nest. Their repeated close flybys of the boat is catching the attention of the cats who sit next to the windows trying to figure out how to do anything about the birds flitting by.

Besides the swallows, we saw both a common loon and a red-throated loon in the last two days. We have two pairs of red-throated loons cruising about the bay.

Tomorrow we intend to head back to Port McNeill to pick up and install the battery nanopulser we ordered last week. We may spend two nights in Port McNeill so that we can do a battery depletion to see whether we’ve made any progress on our attempt to recovery battery capacity. Certainly by running the generator twice a day we’re able to get by but it’d be nice to not have to fret so much about our house bank batteries.