Month: June 2023

We left “home” (the marina) on Thursday morning and headed out to my brother’s place to get Kawi and Nitro. We were headed to an area called the Ahtanum State Forest to camp with Shan’s family. It is in the Cascade mountain foothills, west of Yakima. We decided to drive there by going over White Pass which is along the south side of Mount Rainier. It was about the same time and distance as going over Snoqualmie (Interstate 90) on the north side, but more scenic and different for a change of pace, being just a two lane road. I laughed at the tres because they all had old man moss beards on their trunks. The southern Spanish moss has nothin’ on northwest fur (fir) trees.

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We were ‘home’ for a week, took care of a few maintenance things, and had more family fun.
The last time we brought Nitro home, the automatic leveling jack system had a fault, and wouldn’t level itself. We were short on time because we needed to load up Island Girl and head to the islands for the Rendezvous, so we just left it be. When we got back, fixing Nitro was first on Mr. Mechanic’s list of things to do. If he can’t get it to work correctly we’ll need to make a warranty claim. We’re still in the original manufacturer’s warranty period for a few more days, then our extended warranty kicks in. (This particular system is the primary reason I wanted the extended warranty.) If it IS a warranty issue, we want to make the claim and see where we need to take it and when, and all that. Since we’ll be on Island Girl all of July, we could hopefully make some dealer timing work to get it fixed…? Maybe?

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Tuesday morning we weren’t in a hurry because we wanted to time our travel with the incoming tide. We had the Port Townsend canal to go through, and if we could avoid a strong opposing current, it would be good. Here is the tide table for the day for that location. Actually, even if we hit it on the outgoing tide, it only gets up to about 2 knots, so it really wouldn’t be bad anytime today for us. Also to note – we were only going about 14 miles today, and the marina’s check-in time was 1:00, so we didn’t need to leave until at least 11:00 anyway.

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On Monday we lollygagged around and finally pulled our lines around 10:30 for our big voyage. Fort Flagler is just four miles across the bay, up a curvey narrow channel where we had to stay between the lines. It was like boating in Florida!

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Apologies on this late episode. We had an I.T. crisis and lost the ‘Friday Harbor’ episode and half of this one. They just disappeared. 😟 I had to re-write, so now it may be more or less interesting than it was two days ago. My techie was doing an upgrade that our GoDaddy host had advertised, but it didn’t work. He had to make two phone calls to get us restored, but I lost two days of work. At least we didn’t lose the whole shabang, right?! Anyway – on with the adventure!

We’ve never been to Port Townsend by boat. It is on “The Peninsula”, and anytime we go north to the San Juans we stay on the east side of Puget Sound. The east route offers more sheltered waters so that we don’t have to mess with the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I told you that it can be gnarly, and often has ‘small craft’ warnings or advisories while the rest of Puget Sound is fine. But this trip, we decided to wait for good weather and cross the big water. It’s about 20 miles across which is fine if the water is fine, right? The purple line is our normal route. The red/orange route is what we’re doing this trip to explore where no man has gone before. Well, where no Island Girl crew has gone before, anyway.

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We left Stuart Island around 10:00 on Wednesday morning and headed to Friday Harbor. Friday Harbor does not take reservations, so when you arrive there, you just call in on the radio and request a slip. We wanted to get there around noon, when boats would be vacating. It usually is not a problem getting a slip, so we weren’t too concerned.
We also tried to time our trip according to the water currents. The currents are the next most important planning aspect about boating in these waters – after wind. It was ebb-tide time which would negatively affect us for just a few miles, then it would help us. In this picture, the blue line is where we went 0-5mph, green (is normal for us) between 5-10mph, and red is 10-15mph. Our entire voyage for today was only 14.2 miles.

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Sunday morning lots of boats left the rendezvous pretty early. We waited until we’d had our coffee to get excited, since we were going less than six miles to our next destination. Most folks were headed back home. We had already planned to hang out “up north” for awhile. We don’t have anything else on the calendar until another camping trip with the littles on June 22. It’s just too bad that all of our “Red Neck Yacht Club” friends that live up here are either still working 🙄 for a living, or some don’t even have their boat in the water yet!! So, we’re on our own this month. We’ll come back north and see the gang for crabbing around July 1.
Here is our Bayliner parade leaving the marina at about 10:30. We followed four or five boats out…

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Kenny belongs to all kinds of internet forums for all the various toys that we own. He peruses through them frequently for information and ideas. He happened to come upon an announcement for a Bayliner Owners Rendezvous, in Roche Harbor on San Juan Island for the first weekend of June. We checked our calendar, and saw that we had penciled-in an idea for a camping trip with our nephew’s family. We checked with their schedule, and as it turned out, they weren’t going to be able to make the camping trip, so we booked the Rendezvous! We figured that this would be a fun way to meet some peeps and it is taking place at a really nice resort that we always enjoy visiting. The flier said that if we booked all four nights, the resort would give us the first night free. YAY!

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