Toba Inlet & Happy Anniversary!

Happy anniversary to Dan & Ashley! They’ve spent at least half their anniversaries on their yearly 2-week sailboat trip, as well as their honeymoon. We love this life and are so lucky to now be sharing it with our kids. This morning Ashley made her favorite breakfast to celebrate and we got ourselves ready for the day’s adventure. Walsh Cove is the perfect jumping off spot to make the trek up Toba inlet. The trip up Toba was uneventful, there wasn’t a breath of air so we weren’t able to sail. We weren’t sure if we’d anchor, all the books say the chart depths can be inaccurate due to silting and that with the logging debris it’s a good place to snag your anchor. If you don’t anchor the only other choice is to tie to a log boom. We weren’t exactly sure how to do this and the logging operation was running even though it’s Sunday. Also, a tug boat followed us up the inlet. What if he’s there to take a log boom down? What if it’s the one we’re tied to and we aren’t at the boat? We took our chances anchoring. All went well when we dropped it, we’ll see tomorrow how easily it comes up (or not). Dorothy & Dennis anchored a few hundred yards away and there is also a fully crewed mega yacht here. Once the anchors were safely down we decided to do some exploring. In these inlets there are inflow and outflow winds and the outflows are pretty chilly. There is still some snow on the mountains so we got into long sleeves for the first time on this trip. We piled into our dinghy and the grandparents into theirs and we took off up the larger of the 2 rivers that flow into Toba inlet, Toba River. The first order of business was to let Ranger off to do his business. We found a nice little shore right where we saw some elk crossing, once he was off the boat we noticed a large bear print in the mud! Once he was done we continued up river, the river really flows down quickly and there are lots of little eddies. In addition to what seemed like natural rip currents there were lots of logs to dodge. Some were submerged just under the surface and you could only really tell they were there by judging those eddies and looking to see if they had a long disturbance in the water, a longer line basically than the average eddies. You definitely don’t want to hit one of those (the water was 47 degrees)! We got about 6 miles upriver before the kids were all done with that. We found a really nice sand beach that also was a great place to take pictures of a gushing waterfall, you could see another waterfall from that spot but it was partially obscured by the trees. The kids played in the sand, Ranger chased his ball, and the grown-ups marveled at how amazing this place was. Ashley also found another bear print but it wasn’t as big as the first. The trip back into the inlet was quicker, we were moving with the current and felt more comfortable with where logs, rocks, and sand bars were. After dinner we went to Grandma & Grandpas boat for more cake and cards. I’m not sure what we’ll do when the cake is gone. The night is clear and absolutely gorgeous. With the mountains surrounding us on all sides the moon hasn’t yet risen so the night is pitch black. Except for every single star. Wow! The constellations are in full view, you can see the milky way clearly and we saw a couple shooting stars. The kids were already in bed when Ashley happened upon it but it was so beautiful we had to get them up. I’m not sure they even looked at it for 30 seconds.