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…
…And then a couple more followed us out. The guy in the 3988 right behind us lives in Wenatchee (eastern Washington). He keeps his boat at Friday Harbor, and flies his little Beechcraft airplane over whenever he wants to go boating. His boat’s name is BeechBum. What a life. 👍🏼
This was our big voyage today… less than seven miles, less than one hour.
We came to Reid Harbor at Stuart Island. There were some pretty strong gusty winds from the northwest in the forecast, so I thought this might be more sheltered than Prevost Harbor on the north side of the island where we’ve stayed before. Both sides are a state park, so our annual state park mooring pass allows us to tie up or moor to a buoy for no charge. Otherwise it would be $27.30/night for us to stay at the dock. There are a dozen or so mooring buoys in this bay, two floating docks away from land, and the shore dock. I was pretty sure we’d find someplace to tie our lines. This park is one of the lesser used ones because it is the farthest away from U.S. mainland. (The next island over is Canadian.). We were here during the full moon, and our low tide would be minus -3.09 for a couple of days. That means there would be no sail boats on the dock, for sure! Here is the tide chart for Monday, June 5. At least the low tide would be around noon so that we could watch and see how much water we had under us.
I had read a review in Active Captain that said the depth on the outside of this dock at ZERO tide was about seven feet, so I figured that we should have about four feet with the minus three that was coming. The bottom looked sandy/muddy, so it was like docking in Florida! We came in at a pretty low tide and idled in to the dock, and all was fine. We prefer to be on the dock (since it’s paid for in our pass anyway) so that antsy-pants-me can go for hikes and stuff. Plus we get to meet other peeps that come to the dock, too.
We got all settled in and checked the water depth with our boat pole and calculated our current tidal depth with our depth finder just to be sure. Yep -we should be ok. I went up the steep floating dock ramp, and then up an equally steep shore ramp to get up to the registration kiosk. You still have to register since there is a three night maximum stay per visit. I saw one of the boats on that float out there move to the other float….to start their timer over. No big deal, since during our whole stay, those were the only two boats that were on either of those floats.
This was the view of our Girl from up on the hill – so pretty!!
Later in the day, I couldn’t help myself, and went for a hike around a one mile loop that I remember from last year. It is a nice hike through the woods. This part of the trail is like a rooty stairway.
There are some beautiful views along the way. This was the north Prevost harbor. I did not capture a shot of the dock and the half-dozen or so buoys in the bay. It is a larger dock than we’re on, and it is perpendicular to shore, so it can accommodate more boats than ours. There was only one boat on the dock, and no boats on buoys the whole three days we were here.
Perhaps everyone else thought like I did, that Reid harbor would be more sheltered.
Along the path in the forest I didn’t see many flowers, but I did spy these tiny little daisy ones. No big bursts of color today.
The evening was very peaceful. We had several boats on buoys, several on their own anchors, and just the two on one of the floating docks. There was plenty of room for more boats here.
On Monday I turned on the depth finder just to keep track of whether our props were going to get a mud bath. It was pretty weird to see the bottom behind Island Girl.
We had another boat come in late in the evening on Sunday, and they threw a couple of chicken bones into the water for our crabby entertainment this morning. It was pretty fun watching the crab wars.
Our depth finder screen at the downstairs helm is pretty burned out, but I could just make out the depth if I shielded it from reflection. 4.2 feet was the shallowest that we saw. Whew! 🫣. Our props are probably 3.5 feet below the surface of the water.
We had a parade of water clowns come by! It was a whole herd of sea otters! It’s so fun to be out in nature and see critters that most people only see in a zoo or aquarium. What is a herd of sea otters called? You will NEVER EVER guess. It’s a RAFT! They are called that because they group together and float around together like… a raft! HA! Who knew?! Well, now you and I both know as a result of today’s marine mammalogy lesson. 😃
I took this picture before I realized that they were going to keep coming toward the dock, so then I switched to video.
This is a clip shot from one of the videos. There were at least eight critters coming toward me in the water, and at least another on shore (yellow arrow). Thank goodness they aren’t aggressive because this scene could have been real intimidating!
They were all munching on something, diving down, coming up, munching, repeat. They swam right under the dock where I was standing. They splashed around under there for at least an hour, and they grunt!! It was so funny!! Somebody came into the dock with their dog in a dinghy, and the dog went bezerk. 😂 We certainly will not leave anything out on Island Girl at night, and will not leave the transom door open! These little buggers are the trash pandas of the sea and can make a big mess in a big hurry!
Of course I went for another hike (by myself) on Monday and it was just as beautiful. Kenny is not a fan of hiking these days, so I did the same trail because it’s familiar. I am a big crazy clutz, so I wanted to be on a trail that if I failed to negotiate, somebody could find me.
Soooo pretty!
Later in the day we took Stuart out for a spin, and he seemed to run great. Kenny cleaned out a little breather hole, and then the electric started worked! But not always. 🤷♀️. Such a temperamental little minion! There’s the two brave boats on the shore dock.
It got nice an toasty, so with my hiking adventure, I had on a tank top. Kenny was still in cool weather mode. We had a weak speck of cell service here, so I couldn’t work on this blog at all. But we’d get connected once in awhile, and we had several channels on the TV coming through the air antenna.
On Tuesday I took another hike, but braved another trail. I heard other people on it, so I knew I wasn’t totally alone. It was another stunningly beautiful sunshiney day. The winds at night and early morning have been very gusty, yet nice and calm in the afternoon and evening. Although we weren’t so sure about “out there”. The marine forecast for this area if for the “Northern Inland Waters Including the San Juan Islands”. I can tell you that the wind in Anacortes can be totally different than here, just due to the various islands and straits. The forecast had a consistent “Small Craft Advisory”, so we decided to stay a third night because we weren’t sure exactly where the wind would be bad.
This is a map of the state park. I walked the loop trail around on the left a couple of times, and the trail down to the left around the cove. Last year I did the trail on the right, and it seems that I remember that it is a high cardio experience, so I didn’t go that way this time.
On the trail that goes down to the shore in the cove, there is a big staircase. When I came back up, I counted the steps, and I think it was 129? A lot.
I wandered around the shore for awhile, but didn’t find anything really cool. A sand dollar would have been fun, but I don’t think there are any here.
On the trail down in the woods there were millions (I am not exaggerating!) of caterpillars. Somebody I talked to on the dock had said they’d been over here, and the trees are full of the ‘tent caterpillars’ and the fruit trees are all dead. There are at least a dozen crawlers in the picture that you can easily see.
When I looked down the shoreline, to the left was apparently a grove of fruit trees, and yep – they’re all pretty dead.
They are filled with tents! I don’t know if the trees are dead, or if they’ve just eaten all of the leaves. It was actually pretty creepy walking through the forest. I wouldn’t want to camp here! There would be fuzzy worms in everything!!
Back up the hill I went.
Awe – isn’t she pretty?
I told you, well, I reminded you because you already know, that I am miss antsy-pants. Kenny is not. So, me looking for something to do, I suggested another Stuart tootle around dinner time as a cocktail cruise. He wasn’t responsive, so I decided I would go by myself and try to not pop any wheelies. Kenny told me that I had to start the Stu-zuki by myself. Well of course, the electric start decided to not help me out. So I had to pull start it. No problem! 💪🏼 It wasn’t difficult, and it does start on the first or second pull. So I got a quick lesson on what was what, and away I went. It died once while I was just idling past an otter on one of the docks, so had to pull start it again. I just tootled around the cove at a slow rate of speed. It’s kinda hard to go fast with just one person in Stuart, because he wants to stand up! But man – the vibration in my hand was crazy! It think my hand was still tingling for a couple of hours after I got back. Wouldn’t you know, when I got back Kenny showed me a picture of a new dinghy with a steering wheel. 🤦🏼♀️ Well, my hand wouldn’t tingle, right?
This evening was sooooo calm! It was flat as a bowl of soup. Huh? That was a Kennyism.
The weather/wind forecast is looking good for us to motor on to a new destination tomorrow. We don’t have any plans {GASP! 🙆🏼♀️} so I suggested that we go to Friday Harbor. We’ve been on the batteries for three nights, and have only run the generator a few times. Being plugged in to shore power will charge them back up and we can be in civilization for a day. It has been lovely being here on Stuart Island. Next time we’re here, maybe we’ll have some friends with us!
