Done moving

We are DONE. I handed back the keys Tuesday morning. Now we have to make the store/sell decision on the car.

I had forgotten how much work it is to move onto the boat

We made the process worse by having storage units in both Seattle and Anacortes. It's amazing how fast we accumulate stuff - when we moved up here five years ago, our possessions fit in the boat and a single storage unit. Of course then we moved ashore and went to Ikea where we bought an apartment's worth of stuff that we've spent the past five years slowly upgrading. Somewhere in there, we moved from a two bedroom apartment in Bellevue to a one bedroom apartment in Seattle. The result is a bunch of post Ikea stuff (much of it in storage) that we don't want to get rid of.

As of today, we're out of the storage unit in Anacortes. Art spent a couple of days up there earlier organizing, taking the ancient containers of methyl ethyl bad shit (some of which, I'm embarrassed to say, date from our time in Alameda - yes, we moved old cans of paint thinner and lighter fluid with us when we came to Seattle*) to the Skagit County hazmat disposal site, and disassembling the bakers racks (those chromed wire shelves you can get at Costco) of which we've somehow accumulated six. This morning we drove up there and picked up a one-way U-Haul. Thanks to all the work Art did in advance, we had the truck packed up in a little over an hour. I drove the car back, taking the scenic route through La Conner as my Skagit Valley farewell tour. After quick stop at the boat to take some stuff out of the car so that Art would actually have somewhere to sit when we dropped of the truck, we headed down to the place where we're storing all of our stuff while we're in Mexico.

Originally we were going to bring all of that stuff to the apartment and then pay the movers to take it to storage*. At some point last week, a little lightbulb went off and we realized that we could, wonder of wonders, through the amazing technology called the telephone, call the movers and see if we could just drop it off at their storage facility ourselves. Which we did. Cheaper and easier. I like that.

Next week = movers, which, of course, means the remainder of this week = packing.

Seaview is definitely redeeming itself - the watermaker works, and although there's still some sort of leak at the mast, the Spartite is quite possibly not the problem (which, in addition to perhaps not being the yard's fault, might be a bigger problem than we thought, but la la la la la I'm not going to think about that right now...). The owner was positively mortified about the packing gland. The guy they've sent to do most of the work is great, really seems to know his stuff, and funnily, is married to a woman we've met a couple of times who goes to the same Spanish teacher we do.

Our autopilot, unfortunately, appears to have bitten the dust. As a) it's 20 years old and b) we've rarely used it, this isn't terribly surprising. However, neither of us wants to go down the coast without a method of steering the boat that doesn't require actually standing at the wheel. It was also pointed out to us that even if we were to manage to revive it, if it died again, the likelihood of finding parts to repair a circa 1989 B&G Helmstar 740 are somewhere between slim and nil. The good news is that the hydraulic ram (the part that moves the rudder), which would be fairly spendy to replace, appears to be OK - meaning we'll just need to replace the brain. What was I thinking? Of course we needed to replace the ram too - on further inspection, it was unsalvageable.

The status on our SSB is still unknown. We're going to have it bench tested to see if the problems we're having are operator error (quite likely) or there's something wrong with the set (also likely, as this is another circa 1989 piece of equipment).

If you've read this far, you may be wondering if our retirement has turned into a bleak and unending ordeal of uninterrupted toil. Not likely! We went over to Blake Island and hung out for a few days at the end of last week, which was lovely, unseasonably warm, and a great introduction to cruising around Seattle. Also, we signed up (#13) for the Baha Ha-ha, which makes everything feel a little more real and all the schlepping we've been doing totally worth it.

* What can I say? Sometimes we are idiots.

It's been a really crappy couple of days for the cats...

... and not so great for us, either, although we are very, very glad to finally have our boat back. Friday morning, we arrived in Bellingham, supposedly needing only to get briefed on the operation of the watermaker and new fridge, to find the boat swarming with boatyard workers. Thus, the cats spent Friday shut in the forepeak to keep them from "helping" (or escaping). This was not good. We'd been assured that all the work would be complete by Tuesday, and that the yard would take the boat out for a sea trial sometime between then and Friday. Obviously, that hadn't happened.

The jib was still sitting in its bag on the foredeck, where we'd left it last Sunday. The hydraulic system was still not hooked up, so the rig wasn't tuned. Nothing (lights, radar, new wind instruments) on the mast worked. Basically, the boat was exactly as we'd left it the prior weekend. Pissed doesn't really adequately describe our reaction to this state of affairs. By late that afternoon, the hydraulics were hooked up, the rig was tuned, and the jib was back on. After the yard told us all was good with the mast, Art tried the radar. It still didn't work. A call to Furuno tech support suggested that the problem was the video cable. An attempt was made to solder it. It worked until the housing was put back on, then stopped. A second attempt was successful - hopefully the fix will last - I'm a little nervous about it, honestly. The watermaker apparently works, sort of, but its electronics aren't talking to each other as they should, so that's going to have to be addressed by the branch of the yard down here in Seattle and/or the manufacturer in Eugene, OR. After everyone had left for the day, it started to rain, which was when we discovered that the Spartite around the mast partners isn't. Grrrr. Testing is apparently not Seaview's strong point.

We let the very annoyed cats out of the forepeak, ate dinner and went to bed. We needed to get up early the next morning to catch the ebb out of Bellingham to carry us to Port Townsend, where we planned to stop for the night.

We cast off from the yard at about 7:30 Saturday morning. So far so good. About 20 minutes out, Art suggested that it would probably be a good idea to check the packing gland. That, along with our entire stern tube/cutlass bearing assembly had been completely rebuilt. You can see where this is going, can't you? I went down to look at the gland, and there are two nuts spinning merrily away on the end of one of the bolts that hold the entire assembly together. If you don't have a boat, you probably don't know that had this particular item come apart, we'd have had a large hole in our boat about 2' below the waterline. This is, most assuredly, not a good thing. In fact, it is a very bad, potentially boat sinking thing. Art was able to get the thing properly assembled while I sailed around in circles with the engine in neutral. Did I mention that it was raining?

Things really couldn't get any worse from there, and they did, in fact improve quite a bit.

The ebb was really picking up by the time we got going again, and we went bombing down Bellingham Channel and Rosario Strait at about 10 knots over the ground. The wind was straight on the nose, so we were motoring. The cats, who hate the engine, disappeared into whatever dark and small parts of the boat they cram themselves into whenever we turn on the noisy thing. We were at or above 10 knots for a couple of hours, and covered a lot more ground than we had expected, finding ourselves at the head of Admiralty Inlet at noon. This is more than 40 miles from Bellingham, and if we were going to stop as planned in Port Townsend, this is where we would turn west and head in. However, knocking off at noon when we were only 45 miles from our destination seemed, well, stupid, especially as it had gotten sunny and on the edge of almost warm as the day went on. We figured we might as well just keep going to Seattle. This really annoyed the cats - the last couple of hours of the trip, Maggie would yell at us any time either of us went below, and would stand on the top step of the companionway yelling through the drop boards when we weren't. She was ticked, and had things to tell us. For an 8 pound cat, she's pretty damn loud.

We pulled into our new slip in Elliot Bay Marina at 6:30, completely beat, but really glad to be home. We averaged over 8 knots for the whole trip, which is really amazing - our usual speed is just north of 6. No one had any energy to make dinner, so we foraged. Even I didn't manage to stay up past 10:30.

This morning, we were both moving very slowly. Tomorrow, we'll take the train back to Bellingham to retrieve our car. I suspect we'll also be giving the yard an earful.

More Progress

We're back in the water! (Well, you know what I mean. Arione is back in the water.) Art went up last weekend to install our new loudhailer/foghorn speaker, and found:

The watermaker is in! I really like the way they put the panel behind a plexiglass door. We can see the gauges, but they can't get kicked. That area used to be a set of drawers that we rarely used. The space that the pumps and filters are in is where our engine start battery used to be (when we had a 6D for a start battery) before we redid our electrical system 5 years ago. OK, strictly speaking, we didn't do this - if we'd tried, we'd probably still be at it. This space was brought to you by Ron Romaine. It's under the berth in the aft cabin, up against the bulkhead that separates the aft cabin from the galley.





















The new cold plate for the fridge/freezer is in as well. We kept the old plate, which can be run by the engine driven and AC compressors. The new one is only run by the AC compressor, which we upgraded to a water or air cooled unit (so that we can close the seacock when we're away from the boat). Why a new plate? We used to have trouble actually keeping the box cold with the AC without running the genset for hours on end. David from Sea Freeze, who built the plate and is doing all the refrigeration work, looked at our system and determined that the old plate was biased toward the engine compressor, as in it had a lot more tubing in it for the engine compressor than the AC one. The AC compressor didn't have enough to work with, basically. This should fix that.

The hull is all shiny - Seaview did a really nice job on the wax:

We're headed up to the boat tomorrow to spend our first night aboard in nearly six months. This has been the longest stretch we've ever gone not sleeping on our boat. Granted, we'll still be in the yard, but at least we'll be in the water. With any luck, we'll be bringing her back to Seattle next weekend via Port Townsend - the weather even looks like it may be nice - current forecast is for 70 and sunny!

Progress

We went up to the boat on Saturday to take care of a couple of things it seemed silly to pay the yard to do. The radar mount had some corrosion where the bolts holding the radome went through. Since having the radar fall off would be a very bad thing, Art wire brushed, primed and painted the corroded parts.




While he was doing that, I scrubbed the spreader leathers - there aren't any before pictures, but trust me, these are a lot better. The leather was green. It really is true that moss will grow on just about anything in our climate. I thought I might need to restitch them, but the stitching was in amazingly great shape at five years old. (Thanks Keith!)




The bottom is done, and it looks great. Prop's still not back in, there are watermaker parts all over the cabin, and there are about a million little things that need to get wrapped up, but it looks like we may have a boat again soon. We can't wait.

Getting the boat to San Francisco

We've been tossing around ideas about how we want to handle the trip down the coast from Seattle to San Francisco. It's way too long a trip for us to do by ourselves, so we need to add some crew. We also have pretty limited offshore experience -- Art has done this trip once before on Pete and Bonnie's boat, while my offshore experience consists of a few trips from San Francisco to Half Moon Bay. It seems like what we want is a mentor -- and we're thinking the best way to get that is to hire a delivery skipper. We'll need at least one other crew. I've found a couple of prospects via google, but apparently there are either very few delivery skippers on the West Coast (unlikely) or you find them in other ways. Guess we need to start asking around.

Weather workshop

I am a complete geek for thinking I might want to go to this, but it looks sort of fascinating.

In the Yard

For a long time, we've known that Arione had probably 20 years worth of bottom paint on her bottom. This year, we finally decided to do something about it (actually, Art decided and I went along -- to be honest, I wasn't positive this was really something we had to deal with -- WRONG!). It was a good thing we did. Although the bottom had no very few blisters -- pretty amazing for a 20 year old boat -- it did have a pretty significant moisture content. It was time to peel the gel coat and put on epoxy. Oh joy!

The peel was done in December. However, the hull was still sort of wet. We had two options -- peel off some laminate (expensive -- think taking all of the stucco off of a house and replacing it with siding) or let it dry out on its own (somewhat less expensive -- think scraping and repainting a house). Being cheap (and planning not to have jobs for a while), we chose option 2. The boat's been on the hard in a shed at Seaview boatyard in Bellingham ever since.

This week, the bottom is finally dry enough that there's light at the end of the tunnel. Once she's back in the water, work can proceed on the installation of a watermaker and a new fridge compresser and holding plate. We should have a boat again by April! Whoopee! We can't wait to bring her down to Elliott Bay, which is about 4 miles from our apartment. That will be a lot more convenient than Anacortes (chosen for ease of access to the San Juans), where she's been for the past 5 years.

Since this has taken a lot longer than we'd anticipated, we've pushed our departure date back until June. We'd thought we'd get to the Broughton Islands before heading south, but given the amount of work we have yet to do when we get the boat down here, and our desire to shake down the new systems while we're near the people who installed them, that's seeming less and less realistic -- which is OK, the Broughton's aren't going anywhere, and they'll still be here when we get back.

We're Baaack

For a few weeks, Art and I have been tossing around the idea of extending our planned cruise to the Broughtons next summer by continuing on to Mexico for the winter. The other night, we each realized that the other was serious. So, um, I guess we're sailing south next fall. Wheee!

(Man, is there a lot of stuff to get done between now and May)

Down the east side of Vancouver Island

Since we came up the mainland side of the Straight of Georgia on our way to Desolation sound, we decided to go down the Vancouver Island side. From Drew Harbour, we went to Campbell River. We had arranged to have our mail sent to the marina there, and it was supposed to be waiting for us when we arrived on Saturday. Unfortunately, it wasn't. UPS could track it as far as Richmond BC, but that was it. We had no choice but to wait until Monday and see if it would turn up. It did.

This wasn't all bad. The marina was right in front of a huge shopping center, so we were able to stock up on everything. There were no restrictions on using water, so we were able to give the boat a real bath, with soap, for the first time in over a month. There was a great farmer's market on Sunday, and we spent a fair amount of time walking around the town. Here's a shot of the fishing pier:



Fishing is one of the main attractions in Campbell River -- on the pier, they had a board with the stats of largest catch of each day posted -- some of them were huge.

From Campbell River, we went to Tribune Bay. Tribune Bay has a lovely beach, but is completely open to the southeast. When we got in, we were too beat to go over to the beach, but figured we could always go the next day. Of course, the next day, the wind was from the southeast, which caused huge rollers to come through the anchorage and break on the beach. No beach for us! We sat it out in increasingly uncomfortable conditions for most of the day, listening to the weather report, which kept assuring us that the wind was going to switch around to the northwest. Around 6:00, when it still hadn't shifted, we decided to move to Deep Harbour, a few miles away and much more protected. Here's a picture of Tribune Bay, looking toward the beach on the first night we were there



From Deep Bay, we went back to Nanaimo, one of our favorite stops on the way up. We spent a couple of nights in the marina there, went to the farmers market, took in a bit of the blues festival (it was very, very hot, and there was nowhere to sit in the shade, so although the band was good, we didn't stay very long), and found a great used book store. We also browsed through a Native art store called "Hill's", which had tons of lovely stuff, including a huge suspended carving of a heron in flight, all wildly impratical for the boat.

After we restocked in Nanaimo, we went across the channel to Newcastle Island. This was another favorite stop on the way up. We spent a couple of nights at anchor, then yesterday morning, moved over to the docks for a night. The docks have no water or electrical, but allow easy on and off to the island, and there's garbage pickup. I wandered around yesterday afternoon and took a bunch of pictures.

There was a pulp stone quarry here in the 20's. Pulp stones were used on the mills to grind wood into pulp. They cut huge cylinders out of sandstone for this. Here's what's left:



There were a couple of cats hanging around the quarry, but only one stuck around to have his picture taken.

More pulpstone:




There are also a couple of totem poles on the island:




And, of course, there are a lot of tidepools:






Several of the tidepools had literally hundreds of tiny crabs in them:

Desolation Sound, then heading south

From Prideaux Haven, we stopped back in at Cortes Bay for a night. We saw a guy in an apparently brand new boat completely ignore the marker on the reef at the entrance and try to run between it and the shore. Not surprisingly, he ran aground, hard. We only noticed him because of the noise of his rigging slamming around from coming to such a sudden stop. Amazingly, instead of backing up and going around, he powered straight on through. He tried to tie up at one of the yacht clubs, no dice (which I thought was sort of harsh), then went to the public dock, we assume to inventory damages. When we looked for him later, he was gone, presumably to Lund, the closest place with haulout facilities. Hopefully, they were OK.



From there, we went to Grace Harbour. We were looking forward to hiking to a lake there, but unfortunately, it started to rain soon after we arrived and continued for the whole next day. I did get a couple of nice shots as we were leaving.


























Grace Harbour was full of jellyfish. We actually managed to suck several up into the water intake on the genset. We cleaned it once, but it clogged again, at which point we gave up. We did a speed drill getting the anchor up when we left, because we did not want to suck one into the main engine water intake.

Grace Harbour jellyfish:














From Grace Harbour, we went to Taku Resort, which was lovely. Brand new docks, beautiful facilities, easy walk to a very well stocked store. It's one of two marinas in the area, but doesn't advertise. The other marina is much older, crowded (we found when we went over to look at it), and, most importantly, must have been having some sort of problem with their water system, as they told us we couldn't fill our tanks if we stayed there. "No boat washing" signs are pretty common up here, but not being able to fill the tanks seems a bit beyond the pale at $40/night. We walked over and had a very lovely meal at their restaurant, though.

Apparently, the resort is a "hobby" for a woman from Vancouver -- it's certainly developed beyond any rational expectation of economic return out of a short season. Lovely stop.

It was very windy when we came in, but it was early enough in the day that we had our choice of spots. Three power boats who came in late weren't so lucky, and it took help from all the people on the dock to pull them against the wind and up to the docks.

We took a bike ride to Rebecca Spit Park, and liked it so much that we decided to go all of about 500 yards the next day and anchor there.

Rebecca Spit:


































One night, while we were anchored out at Rebecca Spit, this guy came drifting by on a log:


















We had a beautiful sunset that night:

Prideaux Haven

Was our next stop. It's an area made up of several coves and islands, absolutely beautiful, and great for gunkholing in the dinghy. It is also very crowded, but we were able to find a spot to anchor in the middle, which meant we didn't need to practice our non-existent mountaineering skills in running a stern tie to shore (we arrived at low tide, and it was a looong way up to any trees we could have tied to).

This was the view on the way up to Prideaux Haven:



The first afternoon we were there, a couple of guys came by and asked if we knew about the dinghy parade the next day. Why, no, we didn't. They went on to explain that the theme was "Western Christmas" (I have no idea why, the date of the parade was the 26th), but really any sort of decoration would do. We made a tinfoil star for the top of our mast, strung up a string of flags, and were good to go. The dinghy parade:



There were 48 dinghies in all, which was apparently a record. This is, we gathered, an annual event. Some people took the theme pretty seriously, like this woman:



Here's picture of Bubba, sunning himself on the liferaft. One upside to it's being so crowded is that we didn't really feel we had to keep much of an eye out for eagles.



The water in Prideaux Haven is impossibly clear:

From Cortes Bay,

We went to Gorge Harbour. Here's picture of the entrance. It's only about 50 feet wide, but once you're through, it opens up into a huge bay.



Gorge Harbour Resort, where we stayed, has a fantastic restaurant. We ate dinner there, and liked it so much we went back for lunch the next day. They also had a good store.

Cortes Bay

Cortes Bay was a very welcome stop after almost a week of being on the move coming up from Vancouver. We wound up staying three days. There was even internet access, thanks to the Seattle and Royal Vancouver Yacht clubs, both of which have outstations in the bay and sponsor a wifi hotspot.

Powell River, where we stopped the night before we came to Cortes, was not such a great marina -- basically a fishing harbour, and they had us rafted seven boats deep -- but it was a great stop if for no other reason than that the have a courtesy bus that runs to the mall, where there is a huge grocery store. We stocked up.

Here's a picture of the sunset, looking out the entrance to Cortes Bay:

Our route from Princess Louisa to Desolation Sound

Our Route from Vancouver almost to Princess Louisa Inlet

I couldn't fit Princess Louisa Inlet into the picture -- it should show in the next map. As you can see, we were covering quite a bit of ground for a while.

Friday Cat Blogging

Since I'm posting on a Friday, we must have some cats....

Bubba in the cockpit:
















Maggie on the boom:






Maggie:

Princess Louisa Inlet

Princess Louisa Inlet was spectacular. Completely worth the 6 hour trip each way up and back (which was actually a lot less time than we originally expected -- we got some help from the current). We got the very last spot at the dock at the foot of Chatterbox Falls. We'd been following another boat all the way up, saw them get what looked like the last spot and had pretty much resigned ourselves to anchoring when we realized they were going to pull forward and make room for us. There was a party atmosphere on the dock, which was fun, and lots of going back and forth to see other peoples boats. A beautiful Kettenberg 50 across from us, which was still owned by the original owner, had a group of older men aboard, one of whom was in love with our boat. Knew all about Masons, took the tour, just wanted to talk to us endlessly about the boat. Which, of course, we love to do. Later, the owner of the Kettenberg came by to tell us he had a guy on board who'd pay twice what we'd paid if we'd sell him Arione. We're pretty sure he was joking.

I took some pictures, but without the sound from the falls, which are thunderous, and the mist that comes off of them, they're a little disapopinting.

Chatterbox Falls:













There are waterfalls down the sides of the inlet about every 100 yards or so:





















Here's the view down the inlet in the morning. That's a cruise ship anchored in about 300' of water. It had a little pontoon launch that brought people over to the dock. We talked to a couple of the passengers -- the boat only carries 19 people, and they were out for a week, stopping in various scenic spots.

















This one is looking down from the falls:























Another little waterfall:



















and this is looking down the inlet in the afternoon:

















This is a shot of the falls I took from the dinghy. If you look closely, you can see three separate streams coming down off the mountain:


















This granite face rises straight up from the water, and the water alongside it is several hundred feet deep. It's like Yosemite, but with water. A little more global warming, we should have a lot of places like this. The boat in the picture is one of two 100- 120' square riggers that pulled in while we were there - each with about 40 kids on board. Some sort of summer camp, we guessed.