Toba Wilderness (with sub story)

Friday July 27th – Today we left Squirrel Cove and headed to a new to us destination just at the start of Toba Inlet called Toba Wilderness. They recently put in all new docks and a nice covered gathering place on land but that’s all there is. It’s a remote location, all their power is provided via a diesel generator and water comes from the falls just above the docks.

Skylar and Zack got in the dinghy we were pulling behind the boat and started fishing just off the docks. Before we even got tied up they had 2 nice Yellow Eye Rockfish.

Once tied up we shut the generator off and plugged in to shore power. The generator was running while we were underway because we had the washer and dryer going. Now on shore power, we didn’t need the generator to run the equipment, but I noticed that we were not getting full 240 or 220 volt power at the dock. It was only 188 volts.

We all hiked to the waterfall up a trail then took the dinghies out to go swimming. Lots of fun in the hot weather and we found a waterfall that shot out into the sea. I got the nose of the dinghy so close it doused Skylar and filled our boat with what felt like 10 gallons of water. A super fun day filled with incredible views.

(Sub story below. Related to the voltage at the dock. Well not actually related, but I thought it was)
Ok, I’m going to fast forward a couple days, so I can tell this whole stupid story in one post. The following all happened over the course of the next several days. After leaving the dock the next day our dryer would not turn on. Todd and I checked that we had power getting to the dryer, which we did, and I also noticed the dryer door would not shut. However, the dryer power light indicator would not turn on. I figured that because of the low voltage situation at the dock we had fried the main board and the latch that keeps the door locked when in use had locked in the closed position with the door open when the board fried.

After a lot of phone calls and help from Kurt at American Tugs we found a new board at a parts supplier in California. Skylar had a couple friends flying up in a few days, so I had the board shipped to his friend’s house, so he could bring it up with him when he came up on the floatplane. I was proud of my resourcefulness.

For the next week and a half, we hung our clothes out to dry on the boat, luckily it was hot.

When the parts arrived, I installed the new board. Much to my frustration after install it still didn’t work!! I must have done something wrong I thought, so I went back and checked my work. Still didn’t work. Super frustrated I asked for help. Todd’s dad had his brother Brian onboard and he owns an auto repair shop, so I asked him for help. He went through everything and all checked out ok.

Then Brian discovered something very disturbing. Turns out the dryer didn’t turn on because the door wasn’t shut, and the door wasn’t shut because the lint trap was in backwards!!!! There was never anything wrong with the dryer! All we had to do is turn the lit trap around, so the door would shut.

I’m not even sure why I am writing this in the blog. I consider myself to be fairly mechanically inclined, but this was not one of my better moments.