Alaska 3 - Whiskey Golf Shenanigans and Jedediah Island
My mom taught me not to play with fire. Actually she didn’t, I played with fire all the time. I smuggled small amounts of firecrackers across the Mexican border in Nogales and sold them at 100% profit to my neighborhood clan of pyros when I was a kid. One time she caught me after I lit an ant hill on fire and wanted to see if an aerosol can would explode if I put it on top — it took a while, but it did. My mom only found out after it exploded. Loud noise but no harm done.
Despite that lack of guidance, I figured out on my own not to engage with torpedoes when I’m on a boat. When leaving Nanaimo and going north-east across the Strait of Georgia, one will do just that if one is not careful. There is a military exercise area there in the shape of a pentagon (coincidence?) called Whiskey Golf (WG) that is jointly run by Canadian and US forces.
Whiskey Golf Area in the Strait of Georgia
The routine before transiting the area is to find out whether or not it is active and there are several ways to do this — VHF, Weather Radio, Phone, etc. Before leaving Nanaimo I called the Winchelsea Center that manages all the operations in Whiskey Golf and spoke to a very nice gentleman that told me it was not active on this particular day and that it wouldn’t be unless the cloud cover rose above 5,000 feet.
It was a windless day as we motored off to Lasqueti Island across the Strait of Georgia directly through the Whiskey Golf area. There was a boat in front of us that we could see on AIS and as they approached the southern boundary we saw a Canadian Coast Guard helicopter hovering over them then hail the boat over VHF. So I called the Winchelsea Center back only to find out that the area was now open for exercise. Lesson learned — call just before entering torpedo zones!
We saw the boat in front of us alter their course to skirt of the western edge of WG and we followed suit. But the party wasn’t over. Shortly thereafter we saw the helicopter doing concentric circles around another boat that had entered the no-go zone and didn’t have their radio on so the coast guard gave up hailing them.
I thought to myself what I would do if I saw a helicopter hovering around our boat getting ever closer. Would I think “Hmm, are they trying to get my attention?”
For even more fun we heard the coast guard hail yet another motor boat transiting the area towing a sail boat. When I heard “this is Victoria Coast Guard calling the motor boat transiting Whisky Golf towing a sailboat just north of Winchelsea Island” my ears perked up because we were a sailboat and in the location specified.
I picked up the radio mic and asked the coast guard if they were hailing us. The response was “No, we’re hailing that boat towing the sailboat across the no-go zone without their radio on and if they don’t respond they are going to have a bad day.” I can only imagine what that looked like for them.
The rest of the crossing was uneventful. I had never been in Bull Passage between and Lasqueti and Jedediah Island just west of Texada Island and it is spectacular. We anchored in Deep Bay on the north end of Jedediah all by ourselves where there are no less than 17 stern ties. I’m guessing a busy place during peak season.
Deep Bay on Jedediah Island
Sunny warm days in April with no wind in this area are a rarity so we got the kayaks blown up and went for a paddle. Laura was pretty sure she saw bears but it turns out there are black sheep all over the island. We’ll see bears and whales soon enough.