I have been pretty slack getting posts up here on the blog. There are WAY more images and stories to tell of our seven week cruise, Summer 2019. But after the cruise, catching up with life, and planning some big future trips, has taken up my time. 

One of the important ones was getting ready for a 5 night cruise with my brother and Dad. As you know from our "Who We Are" page, I started boating with Dad when I was about 10 years old. And that's on a nice boat. Before that we did rowboats and outboards for fishing. 

I am leaving the house in a half an hour to fly to So Cal, but thought I'd get in a few pictures from this trip. I'll do a follow up post next week. 

Spent our first night in Gig Harbor, always great.

All alone in the South sound. Flew the drone with the boat underway for the first time. Landing was NOT FUN.

Cooking and eating well is always a part of our trips. Here I made shrimp and scallop grits. Can still taste them, they were so good.

Amazing double rainbow at McMicken Island. OK, gotta fly, see you next week.

Most Endurances have a microwave above the cooktop. Those micro units have tiny vents and fans, and Hampton does a good job venting this air outside the boat.

However, those small vents don't really do the job when one uses the cooktop. So I wanted a real vent/fan setup, called a "power pack" in the home building industry. It's a nice Broan unit with an infinitely variable fan control as well as dimmable lights. 

The factory did a nice job finishing out this space around the fan, and we selected plastic bins to keep everything in place. I have my cooking oils, vinegars and other non-refrig condiments. In the beginning I had these spice bottles in a bin, but that meant to get at any of them I had to bring down the entire bin. 

At some point I realized the bottles could sit on this "shelf" area, I just needed a way to contain them. I first looked into a plastic rod, but it got kind of complicated and was going to cost several times to ship what the plastic cost. 

My good friend Don had been doing some projects and had some extra metal rod. He cut it to length for me, and I painted the rod. It sits right on the hinge, I just used a dab of silicone seal to secure it.  Now I can easily access any of them. 

Did a lot of cooking on the trip, of course, and this area makes everything so handy. Only problem was that when I got home I had to relearn where everything is in the home kitchen!

We departed Roche Harbor, crossing Boundary Straight and into Canadian waters. Off Bedwell we cleared customs over the phone. We both have Nexus cards so this is really straightforward. Once we got connected to an agent it was about five questions over 90 seconds and we had our clearance. 

We proceeded to Madrona Bay, which is the bay right next to the very popular Ganges area, that has numerous marinas. This is one of our favorite spots, very pretty, and a short kayak or tender over to Ganges for any provisions or a meal out. 

We should have known that we were in for more challenges. The boat you see afloat here had been on those rocks. It had drifted over the night before, in the wind, and smashed into the rocks, taking on water. When we arrived large plumes of water were pumping into the air. At the point I took this shot they had her righted and towable. 

Well isn't that a lovely forecast? Winds to 25 kts! Although Madrona looks fairly protected except from the South, in reality the wind in this area just builds through all the small valleys and kicks everyone's butts. We had picked a good spot, really setting the hook. But that was while the wind was from the South, and it was supposed to turn around. 

And turn around it did. I spent a miserable night, mostly awake, watching the boats around us. I do envy boaters that can just drop the hook and drop off. I'm not one of them. A short distance from us an old boat with no one on board (common there) began drifting and another large yacht in its path had to move.  The drifter is the blob in the light blue shoal waters at bottom right. 

This is the radar overlay on the chart plotter screen (BTW we have one digital radar that takes very little energy, something like 80 watts). Those blobs are other boats. We have dragged our anchor a bit, otherwise we would be within the green circle. We are very close to shoal depth waters behind us now, and we were often as close as 150 feet from one of the other boats. I had my horn, hailer, and boat hook ready to go.  We recorded a gust to 33 kts during the night.

I was very happy to see daylight. You can see how windy it is. Those are two of the boats in the radar presentation, off to our port is a 60 foot sailboat. 

With no letup in sight we called the Marina, but there was no room for us. It was way too windy in the Strait of Georgia to consider crossing over. By now friends had convinced me to get the PredictWind app and purchase a subscription. I want to get the app "NoWind" and I'll pay good money for it. 

Most of the anchorages nearby either were open to the South or North, and the wind shifted between these and so there isn't a "correct" choice. We motored over to James Bay, which looked good, but it was just ridiculously exposed to Northerlies. 

Last year we had cruised up Long Harbor, which has a ferry that goes up about half way. We weren't too impressed last year, but said let's give it another go. Going further back toward the head of the bay it was actually quite nice. We tried to anchor on the North side in a little bight, but there was no (anchor) bite in sight. Looking at the land meeting the beach in that area I saw it was mostly rock, no vegetation. I have learned to pay attention to this, often the bottom is similarly rocky. 

So we went to the South side, found a good spot all by ourselves and got a good bite. We hunkered down, not realizing we would be here for 3 nights. But it was great to have no boats anchored anywhere near us. This is where I did the kayak project that I blogged about while we were still in the trip.

The next morning with the generator running, I had this unpleasant sight. I went into the engine room and looked the gen over, it seemed fine, temps were good. Back up top I noticed there were a lot of small jellyfish. It could really only mean one thing, our generator was Cuisinarting jellyfish. Ugh.

With a break in the wind and slack tide the water offered up a veritable garden. Let's wait on that generator run, eh? Unfortunately, when on the hook, we do need two runs per day of about 4+ hours to charge our AGM house bank.

We were treated to a beautiful sunset our last night. I had studied the weather and also conferred with a couple of friends. That next day was THE day to cross over, with virtually no wind/waves predicted. That sucker blew itself out. 

And we woke up to this.  Glass, baby. This is going to be good. Surely our issues are all behind us. Or are they? Stay tuned...

Apologies for posts being a little out of order, but yours truly has been quite busy. We left Bainbridge the third week of July.  The trip began somewhat inauspiciously. 

The Poulsbo Marina near us generally has the best fuel prices. We checked that morning and they did. So we motored over there and called the fuel dock. They confirmed the price and then said "wait, oh geez, we just ran out." [GRUMBLING on my end.]

They explained to us that they might get some fuel later that day, or for sure the next morning. Our plan had been to go to Port Ludlow after fueling up. I wish I hadn't been so determined to save that money. They ended up not getting fuel that day, and since we had already waited this long we decided to anchor and fuel up in the morning. Which we did and then departed for points North. We saw that it was going to be too windy to cross the strait, so we just headed North and said we will figure it out. 

An hour or so later we were a few miles South of Point No Point. (Gotta love these names, eh?) Deb and I were both in our helm chairs, looking straight ahead, watching for logs/debris, when we heard quite a "clunk." The next sound was silence as my heart skipped a few beats. We slowed down, went into neutral. Just for drill I checked all the bilge pumps on the Maretron, none running. 

Once we were up and running again we felt a distinct vibration, that got worse with RPM increase. It only began at about 9 knots, it wasn't hard to live with, but I felt bad for our baby. I called my Hampton guys and they felt we might have hit a deadhead and I should get a diver to look at it. In the meantime they recommended I check the rudder strut bolts. These have double nuts and are torqued to 145 lbs. I found none loose.

Plan B. Or maybe C? Called Port Townsend (where ironically some neighbors/boaters had asked us to come for dinner anyway) and found space, as well as a diver. We got tied up around 6 pm and the diver showed up promptly. I told him what the issue was and he said he would look the hull and running gear over completely. 

When he reappeared he said "wow, that is one clean bottom and solid boat. I don't see any dings in your props, your rudders are solid, nothing is out of place. I saw two barnacles." We caught a cab to dinner with our friends Doug and Susie and had a very nice dinner in town. Afterward, it was raining (of course, we are in Port Townsend in late July, so it has to be rainy and cold, right?), and no taxis to be found. We glumly walked back to the marina in the rain. 

The next morning we were in good shape as far as wind goes and departed. We played with different speeds to feel out the vibration, which had the gall to not leave us during the night! My Hampton guys said I might want to consider hauling out, but I really just couldn't bear the thought. 

We motored up to Roche Harbor but by the time we got there the wind had come up again, and it was forecast up to 25 knots that night. We thought about going to Garrison, but that was too far in this wind to tender back to the hotel for dinner with friends Ron and Kim. 

A very sturdy small ship was clearing customs as we searched for our anchor spot.  A Dauntless, called "Undaunted," how clever.

We tried anchoring near the Seattle YC station, but the anchor wouldn't hold. We then tried a position fairly close to the marina, tucked up against the North side. We got a good bite, backing down with both engines. I think the guy behind us was a bit freaked. Have been there many times myself. Great dinner at the hotel as usual, fun company. Also ran into Bob & Pat, owners of a 720 Endurance. Ironically we would shadow them much of the trip and always be a day or two behind them. 

As we took the tender back to Mahalo I got the image above (top of this post). All seems calm, doesn't it? Tomorrow we would head to Canada.

Ahh, floating along in Queens Reach. We were waiting for slack to enter Princess Louisa.

But now we are back in Coal Harbour for a few days. I should get time to do some more posts. It's a shock to the system. Sirens, float planes, traffic, whoa! 

​More later!