Rescue Bay to Culpepper Lagoon

No rain when we awoke. After three days of constant precipitation , what a welcome relief. Today is forecasted to be a transition day. And tomorrow is forecasted to be nice, even touching 70 degrees. Sounds like a great time to head for Culpepper Lagoon.

The Bellingham paper called the weather we’ve been experiencing a weather whiplash. Crappy, then nice for a few days and then returning to crappy.

We must admit that all of the rain is wearing on our morale. Looks like the weather is improving just in time. As we head up Mathieson Channel, the low-lying clouds don’t full cover the beauty of our surroundings. The only plus of all this rain is that the waterfalls are in their full glory. From the tiniest pencil thin flows to the well-known monsters, they are all putting in a show. Most impressive are the falls that reach all the way to the tops of the granite domes, often disappearing into the clouds.

amazing granite domes in Kynoch Inlet

waterfalls everywhere in the rain

Culpepper Lagoon is a long time favorite of ours. It is located at the bitter end of Kynoch Inlet, in a part of British Columbia dubbed “Fiordlands”.  Think snowcapped mountains and granite domes. We first heard about Culpepper Lagoon from the late Brian Pemberton, head of Northwest Explorations in Bellingham and explorer extraordinaire. He encouraged us to visit and not be held back by the narrow entrance from Kynoch Inlet into the lagoon.  Many boats prefer to just anchor at the end of Kynoch Inlet, which is certainly stunning enough. But there’s just something special about venturing into Culpepper Lagoon that draws us back time and time again. It’s even the photo on Karen’s iPhone Home Screen.

Being a lagoon, we do need to transit the narrows at slack, either high or low. There are benefits to each. At high slack, there is more “room for error”, but at low slack you enter the lagoon able to see the mudflats at the head, making anchoring easier.

Local knowledge says slack is timed off Tom Bay Low slack at Culpepper is 1 hour after low slack at Tom Bay, while High slack at Culpepper is the same as high tide at Tom Bay.

We decided to target High Water slack. The low of the day was lower than when we last transited at Low Slack, and we just didn’t want any depth surprises.

We ended up transiting the Culpepper narrows 12 minutes before high tide at Tom Bay. We had about 1.2 knots of current on our stern, and the water was smooth with no swirls. We saw a minimum of 20.5 feet on a 13.8-foot tide at Tom Bay. Yep, we’re glad we waited for high tide.

Although we have anchored here many times and have marks from our 2022 visit, the silting bottom is always a challenge. The water shoals quickly and it’s a balancing act as you drop in 100 feet, let out 300 feet of chain and hope you run no longer worked, so we repositioned our anchor a few hundred feet to the east and settled in. All alone in this magnificent place, it’s truly magical.

there is nothing like culpepper lagon, no matter the weather

There are still low clouds hugging the mountains in here. Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny, so we’ll hold off exploring until then.

the famous waterfall in culpepper lagoon. Good place to look for bears