30.January 2007 – As usual the cold, clear night passed uneventfully in Aleck Bay, Lopez Island. The water was lit by a full moon that gave way to a rosy winter sunrise. 
Which within the hour turned to fog – but fotunately that was only temporary. 
As the fog burned off, the engine was again just a wee bit hesitant in starting up, but start up it did so we maneuvered around the rocks guarding the entrance to Aleck Bay with no large worries. As we entered deeper water, We! Found! Wind! Enough to sail by! We sailed close hauled in a westerly direction around the southern ends of Lopez and San Juan Islands with the breeze never exceeding the mid-teens and the waters remaining calm. Seabirds aplenty there were, but sadly, hardly an aquatic mammal in sight. Having successfully dodged various errant logs and branches set adrift by recent storms and low tides (and a barge that the Coast Guard reported just couldn’t contain itself), we turned north at the Lime Kiln Point light to aim for our next anchorage in Garrison Bay (N48deg.25′.277, W123deg.09′.476) on the western side of San Juan Island. The batteries showed a bit low due to our regular use of the Espar heater, so we chose to defer further sailing and use the engine for the last few miles of this chilly but sunny day.
We have anchored more than once before in Garrison Bay and explored the historic English Camp on shore there. It’s a pretty little bay, crowded with mostly power boats in the summertime, but it’s just right around the corner from Westcott Bay’s oyster farm and irresistible when, as now, the weather was good and we had the water to ourselves. Relying on our previous anchoring experiences in Garrison Bay, combined with a review of our paper charts, our GPS, our chart plotter, the tide tables, and our depth sounder, MS navigated the Fox to just inside the mouth of the bay, well away from the eel grass, where the lowest of the day’s two low tides would leave 11 feet under the keel. What folly.
Low tide left 5’9" under the keel. The Fox has a 6′ keel.
Meh – unsettling, but not a large problem. We were clearly not hard aground, as there was a lot of free-floating silt over a rock-free mud bottom; the Fox was never at any great risk. However, it was obvious that Garrison Bay had…errrmmmm….silted in a bit since our previous visits. We mentioned this while chatting the next morning with one of the oyster farm’s employees, who told us that, indeed, there had been much erosion into all the area’s small bays with all the recent winter storms. And also, he said? In addition to the newcomer mud? There was a large, semi-permanent, mobile mass of submerged mud that tended to move randomly around the area including Garrison and Westcott Bays, thereby further confusing the already ambiguous depths shown on charts.* Long story somewhat shorter, despite the navigator’s best efforts, the Fox had encountered The Underwater Mud Entity of Mystery.
Moral of Cruising: if you possess all possible sources of information save one, the missing source will be the only one that’s important. In our case present-day local knowledge trumped our recent personal experience. Corollary to the Moral of Cruising: no matter how good the available information is or how well you analyze it, it may not help. MS had consulted all the available information and analyzed it to the extent possible, but we still got temporarily stuck in silt because we chose to anchor in a bay that, at present and in contrast to our own recent experience, had become marginally tenable for our particular boat.
Of course, none of this deterred us from going ashore on such a fine day. 
Nor should it deter any of you, if you happen to find yourself nearby. English Camp’s old orchard, blockhouse 
and other buildings
are an interesting glimpse into the area’s history surrounding the period prior to the American Civil War and subsequent Pig War and the 1870s — and if you go there on the Queen’s Birthday you may even be lucky enough to meet a volunteer historian in the uniform of the period.
* For those lubbers amongst the readership, paper charts are inherently inaccurate; a hyper-accurate paper chart can have an acceptable margin of error of…oh,…say 400 feet or so. Which in a narrow space like Garrison Bay can put your boat on land. That’s if it’s a recently-surveyed chart. FYI, there are charts that show features that have not been updated since Captain Cook’s crew measured the depths with a lead line. No, really.
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