Starting to Head Back North

In the morning, it appeared that the dock piling had grown over night. The tides are crazy here! Bill took a picture and you can see where the barnacles end is where the dock floats at high tide verses where we were sitting in the morning at low tide. That is something to remember when picking a place to anchor!

It is time to head back north to Anacortes for more work projects. It is July 31 and we have a slip reserved for August 4 to 12. Projects on the docket are: test the water maker, install rails on the stern so we can put up the awesome fish cleaning table, stern anchor rope reel, and necessary emergency man overboard pole, install our spinnaker lines so we can fly our parachute-like giant sail, go to the Sailboat Wrecking Yard to find a discontinued model of porthole latch so that the forward head (bathroom) window stops leaking, and finally go pick up our new 20 HP outboard dinghy motor to replace our current 4 HP motor.
We decided to check out Port Ludlow on the Olympic Peninsula. We had to motor all the way over. There was a 5 to 10kn breeze but our course was directly into the wind and with the current also running directly against us it would take 10 hours to go the 22 miles. Yay for the “iron genny”! We found the port way back around a hook of land. It was really well protected, barely a wave in the pond-like anchorage, and very pretty. We went for a kayak to the back of the bay and went between two small islands to a hidden, seemingly secret, place. It was so nice we decided to stay an extra day.

The next day we went ashore in the dinghy. There is a park with a waterfall just over a mile down the road. Hiking up from the dinghy dock we spied wild black berries. The park was where it was supposed to be and the three mile round trip hike-a-jog was beautiful. This area is all temperate rainforest rich with moss and ferns. Of course we picked blackberries on the way back repurposing the dry bag that we used to protect the phones from potential splashing in the dinghy. We did not get enough for a pie but plenty for a black berry crisp!

Back to the boat and time to try out our new air chairs. We bought these chairs 2 years ago picturing hanging them off the back arch but we could see that our butts will hit the aft rail so we need to find an alternative. After several attempts and lots of giggling about how low they could go, Bill successfully relaxed in his chair. We will need to do more figuring. It would be fun to swing the boom over the side and hang over the water but this water is 60 degrees……maybe in the Caribbean.