7/30&31/23: Baaaack in the USA 🎶

OK – I know that song is “Born in the USA”, but you sang it, right? Well, I did. 😉. We said good-bye to Sidney around 9:00 and headed out for a short day back to the U.S. of A. We weren’t exactly sure where we would stop for our next overnight, but had a few options in mind. We’d just see how smoothly checking in with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol went and then decide.
This is us weaving our way out through the breakwater at the Sidney Marina at low tide.

Out on the water was pretty calm this morning and really a pretty ride.

We started out with the windows open and wearing short sleeves, but within an hour or so we had our fuzzies on trying to stay warm in the cool sea breeze that was flowing around in Haro Strait, which is where the Canada/US border lies.

It only took us about 45 minutes to get to the border. We use the “CBP ROAM” app: “Reporting Offsite Arrival-Mobile” with Customs & Border Patrol. Kenny has all of our passport information in it, as well as all of Island Girl’s info. He answered all of the on-line questions, and then just a few minutes after crossing into US waters, he submitted our application for re-entry approval into the USA. Within just a couple of minutes, the app said that our application was being reviewed, then a couple more minutes and it said “preparing for video chat”. It’s really just a one-way video call through the app where the CBP officer can see us but we couldn’t see her. She asked for some verification of our meat and produce items that we had on board coming into the U.S., and nothing we had was against the rules. We tried to be really careful not to have any raw poultry or eggs, or much in the way of uncooked meat or produce. There was not a question in the app or by her about alcohol. I guess they figure there’s no way you’re going to buy alcohol in Canada at their prices to try to resell in the U.S. so anything on board must be for personal use or came from the U.S. in the first place? 🤷‍♀️ She asked to see both of our faces without sunglasses to match us up with our passport photos. Within about five minutes we were cleared for re-entry. TaDA! That was so much easier and faster than when we went into Canada! She said she was emailing each of us a “verified traveler” number which means we are eligible to be cleared by CBP without having to physically report to a CBP Port of Entry (when boating). Sweet!

Since we did not have to stop anywhere to see a Customs Agent in person, we continued on to Jones Island. It is a State Park with mooring buoys and a dock. However, when we got there at about 11:00, there was no room anywhere. We thought getting here at this time in the morning would be good, but all dock space and buoys were taken, and there were several boat anchored, so there was very little room to set an anchor for the night. We bagged that idea and continued on to Blind Bay on Shaw Island. Our friend Archie on ‘Cool Change’ that we met at the Bayliner Rendezvous had told us that there were crab in the bay, and we’d love to get us some crab! 🦀 There are four State Park buoys here and all four were open. It also is a really nice big bay to anchor in, so I texted Rick & Rocky and told them where we were. The plan was that they’d meet us this evening where ever we landed, they’d toss out their anchor and we’d raft up to them for a few fun days together. We grabbed one of the buoys for a few hours until they arrived.
Since we had to come across the border with no poultry, that meant we had no good crab bait – ie chicken. The only uncooked meat I had was bacon. I mentioned that in my text to Rick & Rock, and he suggested soaking a rag or sponge with WD-40 for bait. Seriously!? 😵‍💫 Yes, he was! I guess it has a fish oil base, not petroleum? So we put both bacon and WD-40 in the bait box in the crab pot, and dropped it overboard. As we swung around on our mooring buoy, the crab pot buoy stayed in one place that we’d never be able to reach from Island Girl, but we had Stuart to go check on it.

After two hours, Kenny and Stuart went to check our luck.

By golly there were five crab in the pot!! WHAT?!

He said there were two big females that always go back in the water, two big keeper males, and a fiesty rock crab that went flying once Kenny finally got ahold of it!

YAY! Two nice big eatin crab! He dropped the pot down for another try, but later realized that he forgot to check the bait box, so after two more hours, there was nobody home in the pot. 🙁

We tried it a third time with new bait, but still no luck. Oh well – we got two on a fluke of a chance, so that’s OK. And we know that when Rick & Rocky get here, they’ll have another crab pot and a propane cooker and a cook pot, and all of the things which we are not yet equipped with. They also use a five gallon bucket with holes in it and a lid that they put the crab in and put it in the water to keep the critters alive until they are done catching. We didn’t have one of those, so I kept changing the water out of our bucket every couple of hours to keep our two big crabbies alive.

Miss D’Rocks arrived around 7:00, but they didn’t have any bait either. Rick fixed up a concoction with his shrimp bait, thinking that might catch something, and the guys went out and dropped the pots for overnight. We only had today and Monday, then the rules say all pots must be out of the water for Tuesday and Wednesday.
It was great to see Rick & Rocky again. They’d had a very busy month having various friends and family on their boat with them, so a couple of relaxing days just floating will be good for both boats.

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Monday: After a relaxing Hurkle-Durkle kind of morning, the guys went out and checked the crab pots. Not a critter to be found. Oh well – it was worth a try. I guess the crab are not easily tricked into thinking they like shrimp 🍤 bait. 😏 Then Rick had the great idea that we take the dinghies over to Orcas Island, get the propane cooker tank filled, and buy some chicken. Alright! Time for an adventure!

This is our view from where we’re anchored. We were just over there where those boats are by that little island on the mooring buoy. There is a Washington State Ferry that comes into the mouth of the bay at Shaw Island, so we get a little bit of rocky rolly here, but not bad. Most of the wave slap all day long is from the wind but it calmed down to splat flat at night.

And away we go!

That’s R&R in their Boston Whaler go-fast 25hp dinghy. Our destination is across this big freeway of water to Orcas Island.

I call it a freeway because there are a lot of ferries that travel through here. You can sort of see the dotted lines on this Google shot. We left our anchor spot and took the pink line up to West Sound. That is four miles, just to give you an idea of distance. Stuart did not like running at slower rpms, but did fine getting us across the freeway and up the big water.

There isn’t much to West Sound other than a marina. They did have propane, so Rick was able to get his tank filled for fueling the thermoblaster crabpot cooker.

We left there and decided to stop at the Orcas Hotel by the ferry dock for lunch. Stuart did NOT want to start, and when he did (with the pull cord of course, because his electric start never works), it sounded really grindy. Uh Oh. And then he wouldn’t go fast enough to get us up on plane. R&R circled around and made sure we were doing OK. Kenny kept the throttle on and we eventually gained speed very very gradually but we did finally get up on plane.

We pulled into the docks here and found some fun stuff. A big mural showing an orca, but I don’t know the story that it is telling.

The Orcas hotel perched up above the ferry dock has been here since 1904. It is a neat old historic hotel, and Rocky said that all of the rooms are decorated with vintage Victorian furniture and are really neat.

There was a bunch of lavender around the building buzzing alive with black bumble bees.

The view from the front porch is nice. The ferry comes in right here, so it is easily accessible from Anacortes on the mainland. That is Shaw Island across the freeway, and it’s ferry dock is over there on the left where there is a light spot on the island. Blind Island State Park is the little island just to the right of center, and our anchorage spot is around the point on the right.

We found the entrance to the Orcas Hotel Cafe around back. They don’t have a huge menu, but enough items to choose from that Kenny & I split a fish & chips, and R&R split a $18 hamburger. We told them it could be worse! At least we aren’t in the $30 burger zone any more!

We had a nice lunch on the porch and enjoyed a beautiful day out on an adventure. We also stopped at the little store here and bought a chicken to feed the crabs. 😁

We limped Stuart back to the Mother Ship, trying to avoid getting run over by a ferry. R&R zoomed across, and although we were trying to go fast, we looked at the oncoming ferry and decided to slow down and wait. The last thing we wanted to to was to try to outrun a ferry with a sick Stuart. As it turned out, the ferry wanted to go in to the dock, not straight across on the freeway, so we were OK. Kenny worked on Stuart for awhile when we got back, but we’re both about ready to stick him with a knife and let him sink. Stuart that is, not Kenny.

The guys took Rick’s dinghy out to drop the crab pots with our new free range chicken.

After a couple of hours, they went and checked, and we had seven keepers! YAHOO! They dropped the pots again, and the next time we had three more. So that makes ten for today (two limits) and twelve crabs total that need to be cooked. THAT makes firing up the cooker worth the effort!

They loaded all the crabbies into the holey bucket and submerged them for the night, tied off to Island Girl in between our boats. Tomorrow will be cooking day.

After dinner we played a rousing card game of “five crowns”. It is a fun game while we listened to some old 1970’s soft rock music songs that we could all sing along with. The challenging part was naming the bands… Like America, Bob Dylan, Ambrosia, Carole King, Bread. We always have fun with these two!!

We had a beautiful full moon, but my Apple phone does not take Samsung quality pictures, that’s for sure.

Tuesday morning we woke up to FOG! It was in the bay when I got up, and this picture was as it was receding out into the channel at around 9:00. That made us rethink about our schedule to get back home to Tacoma. We’d been tossing around ideas, but if we have thick fog on the morning that we want to leave, perhaps we need a plan B. We weren’t even sure what plan A was yet. R&R need to be back on the mainland no later than Thursday morning. We all agreed that maybe we should plan to leave Wednesday rather than take a chance on thick fog Thursday morning. With that in mind, Kenny & I figured that we want to get fuel in Oak Harbor – it’s the cheapest in the whole Puget Sound region. It is 40 miles from here. Let’s just go there on Wednesday, fuel up, stay there one night (we get .20 off per gallon of fuel if we stay the night!) then we’ll do 77 miles home to Tacoma on Thursday. 👍🏼

Once we figured that out, the only thing on the agenda for Tuesday was cooking crab. After a nice sleepy morning, Rick got out all of the cooking gear to set up the cookery out on his swim step. They’ve been doing this for a long time, so have the process down to a science.

Oh baby, would you just look at that?! We did two big pot loads of whole crabs, cooled them in the holey bucket in the sea, then Kenny cleaned them all.

R&R didn’t want any of the crab since they’ve been eating so much of it all month. After cleaning it, I bagged it up in gallon zip locks. Since our refrigerator is pretty bare, we just moved all of our food to one side and loaded the crab into the other side. It’ll be fine until we get “home” in a few days to share with our kids.

The rest of the day was very low key and relaxing, and a complete lack of pictures, but it was nice to just hang out. The weather was beautiful! One wonderful thing about Rick & Rocky and our friendship is that we can just be. What I mean is, it’s OK to just be there without any feeling that we must interact all the time. We can go about doing whatever, and even though we’re rafted up together, there is no expectation from anybody that we have to be doing stuff ‘together’ all the time. It’s OK to read, take a nap, do chores, whatever. I love having friends that are that comfortable.