Ken and Karen’s travel adventures
*****Wednesday***** we were up at 7:30 for an 8:30 departure time. It is about 20 miles to Deception Pass from here and we wanted to try to get there near slack tide. No sense fighting a 6 knot current in the narrows if we don’t have to!! We were actually all hugged up with good-byes and untied from Miss D’Rocks and on our way just after 8:00. We were happy to see that there was no fog here, so we thought we were in the clear.
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.
…..continued……
Our route around the southern end of Lopez Island took us through Cattle Pass, with San Juan Island on our port, Lopez on starboard. We were running with the flood tide, and we were flying at nearly 16mph!! That’s a 7mph current pushing us faster than our normal 9mph cruising speed. Woo-Hoo!! 🚤
After the camping trip we had just a couple of days to do some chores and things. Among the projects was looking at a toy hauler camping trailer for Shany and Cam up in Snohomish. Since they live in Spokane, they didn’t have time to drive over just to look at it and take measurements, so they asked us if we would do that for them. Since they have a Kawasaki that is even longer than ours, we wanted to make sure that Mr. Saki would fit. It was a very nice unit, Saki will fit, and it would work well for them. Who knows? Maybe on our next camping trip they won’t have to bring two vehicles!
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
