Cruising Maya: Living off the Sea in the Broughtons! Lots of pics!

Hello and welcome back! We continue our journey around Vancouver Island on our 37’ sailboat. Let’s jump right back into it!

Our travel in during our time in the Broughtons

Distance Traveled in this post: 143.5 nautical miles

Distance Traveled from Trip Start: 487.4 nautical miles

Time duration this blog post covers: 10 days
Amount of time motoring/sailing during this post: 34.65 hours

Total Amount of Fuel Used From Start of Trip: 51.5 gallons

In the last post, we had just finished travelling up Johnstone Strait, using the ebb tide to our favor, breaking our single day mileage record on Maya. That record travel day delivered us to the doorstep of Broughtons, a large group of islands and channels on the north side of Canada’s Inside Passage.

Fun fact: The Broughtons are named for William Broughton, who was Captain Vancouver’s right hand man during his exploratory missions to the area in the 1700’s. Captain Vancouver was the first to map the coastline of British Columbia, and Broughton was second in command during that mission.

A drone view of Maya in Simoom Sound

The Broughtons are amazing!

On our boat trip last year, we had spent about a week exploring the Broughtons, and had vowed to return! And here we were- back again! Upon arriving in the Broughtons, we immediately brought the boat to Freshwater Bay in Blackfish Sound, which was our favorite anchorage from last year’s boat trip. When we were in Freshwater Bay, the September, before we witnessed a wildlife extravaganza with whales, sea lions, dolphins, and good fishing. This year was no exception: we saw whales, dolphins, and had good luck fishing with the added bonus of having the whole anchorage to ourselves!

Timelapse of the boat at anchor in Freshwater Bay

Panorama of Freshwater Bay at Low Tide

We spent two nights in Freshwater Bay, enjoying the sight of humpback whales in the distance. Their blowholes reminding us of their presence even after the sun went down. After a nice stay we forced ourselves to hoist the anchor and continue on- we had returned to the Broughtons to explore… not stay put! So on we went!

For roughly the next 10 days we stayed at new anchorage every night. Because the Broughtons are densely packed with channels, islands, and coves that meant our travel days were short- most days has us traveling under 10 miles… a welcome break from previous week's 30-40 mile days.

Since we were able to spend less time traveling from anchorage to anchorage, we were able to spend more time fishing, which the Broughtons is well known for.

Jenny with a nice catch that turned into dinner

A nice cabazon that was also turned into dinner

I thought it might be interesting to go over our fishing setup and how we go about fishing day to day. To start, we carry two crab traps, a prawn trap, and two fishing poles (a 9’ trolling rod, and 7’ jigging rod). A typical day fishing on Maya would start by us looking for a spot to throw out the prawn trap. To find just the right spot we use Navionics, which is smartphone based chartplotter type application. We look for areas of 200-300’ depth, which is where prawn typically live at and once a place has been selected, we drive Maya to the drop site, and toss the prawn trap overboard. Our trap has 250’ of floating line, attached to 100’ of leaded line, which is attached to our floating marker buoy that sits on the surface of the water. We use commercially bought prawn bait which is essentially ground up fish in pellet form- $10 of bait typically lasts us at least 5 soaks.

Once the prawn trap is in the water we continue on to our anchorage (which is generally within a mile or so of where we threw the prawn trap overboard), stopping along the way to fish with our rods from Maya if we found an area that like. We usually look for areas that have a lot depth contours…. Pinnacles or areas that go from deep to shallow in a short amount of distance have worked well for us.

Depth difference between crab and prawn traps

Eventually we would stop fishing and head to our anchorage where we would usually continue to fish, either off of Maya or in our dinghy. Once we landed a good sized fish we would fillet it and then put the carcass in bait bag, then attach that inside a crab trap. Crab eat anything and everything that’s on the ocean floor and they happen to love fish guts. For our crab pots, we look for depths under 50’. And with those pots thrown overboard and soaking, we kick back and relax for the evening!

In the morning, as we are leaving the anchorage, we pull our crab traps, typically from Maya. With the crab pots up, we move Maya over to the prawn trap. Then the real work begins. While crab pots are easy to pull up by hand, the prawn trap is another story. We do not have a fancy electric pot puller, which forces us to pull our traps by hand. And those prawn live in DEEP water.

This year has seen a marginal improvement of our manual pot pulling with the addition of a pulley, allowing us to pull down and lift the pot towards the surface, saving our backs from the rigors of pulling straight up from the ocean floor.

While all of this manual pulling is a lot of work, it has been worth it for the amount of prawn we have hauled in. While in the Broughtons, we pulled in hundreds of Spotted Prawn- over 300 prawn in one pot pull while in Simoom Sound! That amount fed us for several days! For scale, after cleaning, each prawn was about the size of a quarter. And, when you add in the 6 or 7 crab we caught while in the Broughtons, we ate like royalty. Nothing beats fresh seafood, and this was as fresh as it gets! Absolutely delicious.

A very successful prawn pull in Simoom Sound!

Cleaning prawn

Tasty victory!

Pot full of Prawn about to be cooked

Dinner from the sea! We even used "sea beans" harvested from the shore

Fresh Dungeness Crab! Cleaned and ready to be cooked

So fishing, eating, and relaxing sums up our time in Broughtons. There was not much exploring on shore to be done, as there were bears (which we saw on shore!), and no trails to speak of. Despite the lack of onshore exploring, we did spend one night at Sullivan Bay Marina, which is like a little floating city block- each pier of the dock had a street name and floating homes lined the length of the marina.

At all the marinas in the Broughtons there’s a tradition that all boaters moored at the dock convene at the dockside Happy Hour. These events are fun as the people you meet are always interesting and there’s lots to talk about. Sullivan Bay was very unique and quaint, we were glad we got to check it out. For reference, it cost us $45 USD to dock Maya there for the night. We declined tie to shore power (we are loving our new batteries, btw!), which saved us an additional $10 cost. While $45 is on the higher side of nightly moorage cost, it was worth the price to have the experience at Sullivan Bay. For additional reference, our nightly moorage at New Castle Island Park in Nanaimo was $15.

Disco at Sullivan Bay Marina

We saw wild frickin' bears in the Broughtons!

At the end of about 10 days touring the Broughtons, with our fuel tanks just about empty, we pointed the boat towards the area’s biggest town, Port McNeill (pop. 2000). This would be our last chance to refuel and reprovision before we made our bid at rounding Vancouver Island’s Northern Cape and entering the rugged wilderness of the West Side.

That’s gonna do it for this blog post. As always, thank you so much for stopping by and following our adventure. Stay tuned as we ready the boat for our biggest challenge yet: Vancouver Island’s West Coast.