A Storm and Unexpected ‘Powder’ Skiing

What was supposed to be a short stop after dropping Russell’s Mum off turned into hanging around for almost a week. When we saw the weather forecast, a rather large storm rolling through in a couple of days, we decided this was going to be the best anchorage to wait it out. So far, we have found it very difficult to figure out exactly which anchorages are going to be sheltered from where, so it was quite nerve wracking waiting for the storm to arrive without knowing how our little bay was going to handle it.

We managed to fit in our very first ski tour from the boat before the storm arrived, after meeting one of the professional sail/ski yachts and their customer telling us the skiing was excellent, while the guide behind was shaking his head and saying no it was crap (it rained most of the day). The skiing was very slushy but nice to get some turns!

The day of the storm dawned beautiful and sunny, Angela even went for the first swim of the trip! Then, like someone flicked a switch, it changed to windy and snowing. We spent the next couple of hours getting the boat ready for whatever we thought the weather might throw at it, and let all of our 65m of anchor warp out. Both of us were a little nervous. In the end, while we had some pretty violent gusts come through it was nothing compared to the 60-70 knots we were seeing on the live wind readings around. Over the next days we had a couple of the locals we had met check in to see if we did Ok during the storm, it definitely seemed pretty violent in other places!

Finally, we had some beautiful weather. So beautiful and calm in fact that our bay froze overnight and we woke up to a very strange sound at 2am as the yacht moved around grinding and breaking the ice - luckily it was super thin! After a bit of a sleep in and some terrible coffee, we headed up for a longer ski tour. What we found was a bluebird day with some beautiful powder runs to be had in a large bowl. The sail/ski tours had beaten us to it, but luckily there was enough space for us to get fresh lines as well. What a treat!Read more