Discovery Bay’s scenic and relatively secluded waters recently hosted an incongruous guest when Boyer Towing’s tugboat and shipping barge spent a week waiting for the seas to calm.

Boyer Towing, which is based out of both Seattle and Ketchikan, Alaska, runs “irregular but steady” routes from Southeast Alaska and British Columbia to the Puget Sound region, according to company vice president Kent Halvorsen.

What Discovery Bay resident Kathy Case spotted, and reported to The Leader March 27, was a load of logs.

“We had a shipment of logs en route from Vancouver Island to Port Angeles, where it went through customs and off-loaded some logs,” said Halvorsen, who estimated that the barge was carrying 1 million board feet, or approximately 7,000 tons, of logs. “After that, its destination was Coos Bay in Oregon, but the weather conditions were temporarily impassible.”

The tugboat Lois H. (one of 14 tugboats in Boyer Towing’s fleet) and the barge Bainbridge (one of 20) finally departed Discovery Bay on the morning of March 29, but only after spending a week waiting for the seas to settle down.

“There was far too much wind, and there’s a limit of about 10 feet to the size of the swells we can put up with on the ocean, which the conditions at the time surpassed,” Halvorsen said. “Port Angeles is a pretty busy place to hang out, but we were able to slip up into Discovery Bay and find a very nice little shelter.”

Halvorsen noted that, once the load of logs arrives in Coos Bay, it’s slated to go to a saw mill in town.

“A monster backhoe that’s attached to the barge can off-load and on-load bundles of logs, from the docks or the water,” Halvorsen said. “The bundles of logs are about the same size as what trucks carry.”

While Halvorsen wasn’t thrilled by the delay, he appreciated the surroundings where his ships found shelter.