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.............-- Lake Powell – Thur/Fri – Oct 5th/6th ---...... .......Beached Boat --------------------------------- N 37º 37.84´ ….....Seven Mile Canyon--------------------------W 110º 35.37´ .................................................................................................................... ...............Motored = 29 miles ---- .Sailed = 0 miles…...Sailed up lake = 7 miles

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During the previous couple days I had been studying the Lake Powell guide book that we had on-board for interesting side canyons to explore on the way back down the lake. One that caught our interest was Seven Mile Canyon. The name came from not how long the canyon was but how far down from where the original site of Hite was. Hite boat ramp is above the actual site of where Hite, UT was located.

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We headed in a southerly direction with the outboard set at a low power level to keep the noise down and ...

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..... motored along at about 5 knots.

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Dottie spent time reading and working Sudoku puzzles and I mostly read the guide book, kept a lookout for other boats and took a few pictures and pretty much let the auto-tiller-pilot do its thing. Dottie took the majority of the pictures for this trip log though.

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The Zodiac trailed behind us like it had been doing the whole trip and the 3.5 HP outboard (picture, upper left) for it never came off the side mount during this trip as I rowed or paddled the inflatable those times we used it.

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After 5-6 hours of motoring …..

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.... we arrived at Seven Mile Canyon and Dottie took over the tiller and motored us ...

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..... slowly in.

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It was stunning with ….

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..... the rock walls reflected almost perfectly off the still water.

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To show how perfect the reflection was the picture above is the previous picture flipped 180 degrees (upside down). Water is now on top and the sky on the bottom.

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We went almost to the end of the canyon but there was a small power boat tied up just before the end with a couple camping in it.

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We found a site on the south bank where we could tie the boat up. We then took the dinghy to where the water stopped and spent a little time talking to the couple camped just before there. We decide to return and hike up the canyon a ways the the following day. Then we returned to the boat and called it a day. I fished again and caught some but nothing worth keeping to eat.

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.The following morning we again took the dinghy as far as possible and then started hiking up the narrow canyon.

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For a ways there was a nice little stream flowing down the canyon and ...

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.... we found this guy in one of the pools. He/she swam out and then played dead.

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The couple that were in the boat mentioned seeing Big Horn sheep tracks and we found those along the way but never saw the sheep that put them there.

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.This was a beautiful canyon and ...

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.... a nice walk. There were places it was quite chocked up with large boulder size rocks that ….

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..... had come down from the towering walls and they were somewhat challenging to get over and around.

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After hiking up a mile or a little more and eating our lunch ...

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..... we returned to the dinghy and to the boat. The boat and solar panels were only in the sun about 2 hours that day and that worried me some but we ended up with plenty of power to run the fridge and other items and still had over 50% of battery left the next morning.

We have two 6 volt batteries in series for 12v charged by 320 watts of panels for the house bank and also two 12 volt batteries that can be switched between running in series to power a 24 volt trolling motor we have or they can be switched to parallel and used to be part of the house bank. They are charged by 240 watts of solar panels. There are two 60 watt panels that can be switched between either the 12v MPPT controller or the 24v MPPT controller. Since I added the panels and batteries before the Bahama Trip I've never seen the batteries go below 50%.

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