Originally published December 2019
A significant storm approached as we were exiting Gale Passage. Gale
bisects the Bardswell Group and opens into Thompson Bay which faces south into
the open Pacific. If you were to continue south from Thompson Bay
your first landfall would be Antarctica. That is a hard-to-comprehend
amount of fetch and while this storm wasn’t being driven by some historic
low-pressure system that movies are made of it was big enough to get every
sea-going vessel’s attention and it was going to make Thompson Bay an
unfriendly environment to the extreme. There may have been good
places to hide from a storm in the bay but they were hiding from us and were
not marked on our charts with the exception of Cree Point and Islet 48 which
lay another 3 NM upwind from Cree. Dave and I had previously stayed
at the Heiltsuk cabin on Quinoot Point located 2 NM in the wrong direction and
downwind from Cree. We viewed it as our last resort option. We
thought that, if need be, we could probably slip through the backdoor route
between Dufferin and Potts Islands that is blocked at low tides and requires a
slippery and ankle breaking portage.
