These Last Days

Mario’s Log: September 19th, 2025

It’s time to stop kidding ourselves. We’re really coming down to it now.  A couple of nights ago, as Scott and I discussed the plan for the route to Anacortes, five days was our best guess at how long it would take. “We could make it in three from here if we wanted,” he said.  We didn’t want to. Sitting here at anchor in Otter Cove in the Rock Bay Marine Provincial Park off Vancouver Island, we’re about to move on to Boho Bay, the final anchorage of our trip. Following dinner with Friends in Roche Harbor, we’ll leave the Dock there on Sunday morning for a short four hour trip to Anacortes, Washington.

In truth, we just passed through a part of the world that we could have spent a year in and not seen it all; not even close.  It would be very easy to spend more time here in the inside passage, in Desolation Sound, in and around Vancouver Island.  We could spend days  visiting Comox, Vancouver, we could take the long way around to Victoria.  If we wanted, we could easily pack more into the last 300 miles of this trip than we did in the first 7,700.  But that has been true from the start.  

(Dryad Point Light House – Near Bella Bella)

We blew past Nova Scotia and Labrador.  We missed Baffin Island completely. Greenland was fantastic, but we saw a fraction of the coast and visited just one of hundreds of Glaciers between Nuuk and Upernavik.  In fairness, the Canadian Arctic Archipelago – the Northwest Passage part of the trip – is best taken as the weather and ice serve.  But with all of the opportunities missed, the sites not seen, and the places we didn’t stop for, the voyage itself is what we wanted to achieve – moving Sarah-Sarah from the East Coast to the West, over the top – the hard way.

We’ve done that, and it is time to get home to the families who were patient enough  to not laugh when we said, “we want to leave for an indeterminate number of weeks and months, possibly longer if things go wrong, because, well, it will be fun.”  It takes a special kind of trust to say yes to something like that while smiling as they did.

We managed, despite ice-floes and engine troubles, to beat our predicted finish window of the first week in October by wide margin.  We will arrive in Anacortes sometime around noon of the 21st because we can and we’ll leave what could have been until next time.  And, there will be a next time.  This trip has left all of us wanting more. More will have to wait.

Thanks, again, so much for your comments and messages (and advice) along the way.  Having a small band of interested people looking in on us from time to time has added something to the adventure that we didn’t really expect.  We were so glad to have you along; and we spoke of you more than you realize.

There will be one more logbook post wherein we’ll rack up all of the stats for the entire trip – the total milage, fuel usage, hours, etc. – and I’ll still be writing the gear reviews and recommendations after I get home to Florida in mid October, but this Sunday, the Passage 25 comes to an end as we pull into Anacortes, Washington.  Until then, if you have any questions or would like to say hello, you can reach me at mario.vittone+NWP@gmail.com

Best,

~ Mario