The tides wait for no one!  With that in mind, we were up and out by 8am this morning in order to time the Malibu rapids at the entrance of Princess Louisa Inlet.  This area in BC experiences 20 foot tidal exchanges and Jervis Inlet is one of the deepest fjords along with coastline with depths over 2,000 ft in places.  This all means that there is a lot of water moving in and out of these channels and when the channel narrows as it does at Malibu, 10 knot rapids can occur.  Looking to avoid that, we planned to arrive just before slack tide.

Jervis Inlet is a spectacular place to cruise.  High mountains rise steeply on either side, still dusted with snow this morning.  The scenery just about makes your jaw drop, and the further into the inlet you go, the better it gets.  Traces of the glaciers that gouged out these channels during the last great ice age are all around.  There are wide U-shaped valleys and smaller hanging valleys high up in the mountains where less powerful tributary glaciers met up with the main flow.  Most of the mountain tops were rounded down by the force of the ice moving over them.  Only the tallest peaks, that stood above the sea of ice, are still pointed.

We navigated our way through the S-turn of Malibu rapids, taking in the Malibu Club campus perched right on the edge of the entrance.  Once through, we continued on into Princess Louisa Inlet and settled in at the head of the bay right in front of Chatterbox falls and the sheer, granite cliff face rising above it.

Rob, Rick, Stacey and I all took off on a hike up to the trapper’s cabin.  The cabin is 1700 ft up the mountain and the trail is a steep climb/scramble over roots, logs and boulders.  Despite the difficulty, we enjoyed walking through the beautiful forest and taking in the view from the top!  The rest of the crews enjoyed a more leisurely afternoon and did some cooking for tonight’s pot luck dinner aboard Deception.  We all enjoyed a great dinner and went to sleep content and happy under a magnificent starry sky.