Stuart Island Black Mamba

We had a nice sail along the international border between Canadastan and the USA. It was a light air day, but we wanted to see how well our third crew member works. Her name is Matt. Kinda strange for girl. Matt is a Sailomat 601 windvane. Windvanes appear like Rube Goldberg machines at first glance. In actuality they are graceful self-steering  machines that drive your boat day in and day out without using any electricity or fossil fuel. (see mechanical http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-steering_gear) Hands free sailing is the way to go, especially on some of the long passages we have to look forward to. Here's Matt earning her rum ration on Jeorgia on the way to Stuart Is., with a piece of kelp in tow:

Stuart Island is at the NW section of the San Juan Islands. It has two great anchorages, Reid Harbor and Provost Harbor. We anchored in Provost. In the morning Chris got me up early to start the death march out to Turn Point Chris's favorite place in the San Juan's. Turn Point is an 1890's era light station that marks where the international border 'turns' to the south.. On a lucky day you can stand on the cliffs and look directly down on the Orcas as they pass by. No Orcas this time. Here's the view from the porch of the light keepers house.

    Stuart has a great one-room school house that is still in use. I had never noticed the totems on the side of the school before.

On the hike back to Provost Harbor we came across this Black Mamba just off the main trail. These are the deadliest snakes in Africa. Chris saw a dead one earlier this year when she was working in Malawi. Can't imagine what they are doing on Stuart Is. The North American ones have coloring similar to garter snakes.

Next morning we crossed over to Canada and cleared in at Bedwell Harbor. We anchored off and spent the night. In the morning we invested two loonies each and had a hot shower at the resort pool.

Tonight we are at Montague Harbor, carefully planning our next leg.

Paul & Chris

Hay, where's that water coming from?

We had a little stream of continuous water in the bilge. We could tell it was more than normal bilge water because the bilge pump was going off regularly. We have a Celectron bilge counter. It monitors how often and how long the bilge pumps run over a number of days. You setup conditions for it to blast out an alarm such as the high water alarm, which is particularly helpful with our shallow bilge.

With the boat recently loaded down with all of our cruising gear the ass end was low in the water and it was pushing up water through the rudder tube. There is a flange at the top that can be used to tighten down the packing. It requires emptying the cockpit locker and crawling back to the rudder. I headed back in

and snugged up the 8 bolts that hold the flange on. It seems to be water tight now.

That's why we do shake down cruises -to see what we can break. We'll see what's next..

We are out at Sucia Island now. It is weekend there are lot of boats out here. The anchorage is huge and could easily hold 100 more boats. It cracks me up when people complain about how crowded Sucia is. We are here on a peak summer weekend, and it is really pleasant to go take a hike on the island trails. We were at a BBQ with my friend's 80-something dad a while ago. He used to sail from the Puget Sound along the Inside Passage to Alaska during the Depression. We were talking about Sucia and the fun trips he used to have here. He said they quit going over to Sucia because it was getting too crowded. His daughter asked him when was the last time he was at Sucia. He said 1952!

While cruising around Echo Bay on the dinghy today we saw this mommy river otter and her pups in training.

Paul

Another San Juans trip

Got some great sailing crossing the Strait of Juan de Fuca. This can be an ugly trip when the wind is against the current. Other times it is a mill pond. We had the tides with us and a nice light breeze that let us sail from Port Townsend all the way to Spencer Spit on Lopez Island.  In a couple of weeks we will have to figure out how to head out the Starit and get to Neah Bay. It has been blowing westerlies the last week that would make the trip rough.

Next day we headed to Bellingham to meet up with my daughter Meghan. Spent the night in a free slip at the Bellingam Yacht Club, after impressing the dock crowd by backing down the fairway into the slip.. Meghan and her boyfriend Tyler came by for a pasta dinner and a beer and some good BS'ing. Tyler is just getting into embedded programming, so he likes to hear my horror stories from the field.

Next morning we headed out to Sucia Is. It was blowing pretty good when we left, but it ended up a motorboat trip near the island. After we got anchored in Sucia we spent the afternoon entertaining ourselves by helping this Tartan 34 get off the rocks.

They were headed though a really tight pass that the skipper said he'd been through twice before. Two out of three ain't bad.

This little guy was sunning himself all by his lonesome and seemed a bit perturbed that we wandered by.

Chris and I need to stay in the San Juans till we drink down our wine supply to level that allows us to clear into Canada.Each time we clear in they come down and check our supply. I think we are on some Home Land Security list.

Paul