Getting there

Before we got our slip reserved in Vancouver during the upcoming Olympic games, the trip seemed very much as if it weren't going to happen at all and I had halfway planned to auction the tickets off to the highest bidder and settle in for the predictably crappy US television coverage of the events and whatever I could glean off the Internet. But now we're into the trip not just for the cost of the event ticket, but the reservation fee, bus tickets, and soon, various boat preparations, so I am starting to feel compelled to make it up there and actually see people sliding down the side of the damned mountain.

As the saying goes, though, every time a window opens a door slams shut, and just as we found out about the slip space, we also found out that Mandy's big contract of the year was scheduled to start the day we had planned to leave for Vancouver. For two days at the start of the trip, she is now committed to teaching here in Seattle. The earliest we can get out is the evening of the 9th, and our tickets (and slip reservation) are for the 13th. By bus, car, or plane that would leave all kinds of time to get from here to Whistler, but by boat, it's a narrow window indeed.

By conventional routing we can get to Port Townsend or thereabouts in a day, across to Canada's Gulf Islands in another day, and then over to Vancouver on the third day. Leaving on the 10th, our first full day of travel, then, we could just barely hope to get into town in time to catch the mandatory bus up to Whistler when it pulls out around two in the afternoon (this doesn't even count the fact that we need to find time in there somewhere to stop by the will call office and get our tickets to the event itself).

But that is making some stiff assumptions about conditions along the route, namely, that they will be at a minimum safe to be out in, and yet hopefully brisk enough to push us along at relatively high speeds. This time of year, that's asking a lot. There are two significant passages to make (possibly; more on that later): the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Strait of Georgia. Either of those could be slammed shut on us at any time by gales, and we absolutely have to be able to get across at least one (Georgia). We can sneak around Whidbey Island and cut through Deception Pass to avoid the most exposed parts of Juan de Fuca, but Deception Pass presents its own challenges and demands a very precise timetable of its own, which may not fit into the large timetable (if we were forced to wait too long for the current gate to open there, we may not have enough time to get to Vancouver later). There is also the Swinomish Channel, which avoids the Strait of Juan de Fuca entirely, but isn't necessarily bullet-proof either and has a heart-stopping least depth of only 9 feet, which isn't a lot of room to spare in a blow.

Once we get across to the San Juan's it's a fairly easy run into the Gulf Islands, where we can clear customs and head north in considerable shelter. But sooner or later we have to cut back out through one of a number of narrow passes into the larger Strait of Georgia and scoot across to Vancouver; probably no later than very early the morning of the 13th (but also not much earlier than that, since that's the day our slip becomes available).

It's a tight timetable, which is always something you are told to avoid with sailing vessels. "Pick a time, or a place, but not both," the wisdom goes; you can get anywhere you want to go, eventually, or you can be wherever you want at some point in time, but attempting to predict when both will coincide is often futile. Worse, it can be dangerous if you feel pressured to make a passage in less than ideal conditions simply to make your time commitments. I'm afraid that may be a position we will be put in before the trip is out.

I'm quite looking forward to actually being there; I imagine the city will be an exciting place even without attending the events themselves, and if it weren't for the money we've already spent being on the line I would say to hell with it and just get up there as quickly as I safely could. And maybe everything will be sedate and we'll have easy crossings; the weather this past week has been almost spring like (I mean good spring-like, not bad spring-like) and we can only hope that continues, or recurs. But it's an unpredictable time of year. No matter what, if we make it at all, I think the four days we have scheduled in Vancouver are going to seem a heavenly respite after the difficulty of getting there.

I have to take a hard look at charts and tide tables later this week, but right now my thinking is that we will head north the evening of the 9th, hole up somewhere just this side of Deception Pass to sleep, and get up and through at slack near dawn on the 10th. That should let us into Rosario Strait on a flood, which will help carry us through the San Juan's and into the Gulf Islands by nightfall on the 10th. That gives us two days to look for windows to get through the various passes into the Strait of Georgia and across the Strait itself to Vancouver. The current gates in those passes may prove critical, because the crossing time to Vancouver at our best possible cruising speed under power is at least six hours. It may well require a night crossing; so an extra day to rest up first would probably be best. False Creek, at least, is a harbour we've entered after dark before, so it wouldn't worry me to get there before dawn. Whether or not the slip would actually be open so early is another question, but one I am willing to wait to have answered if we actually get there.

A long shot

A primary challenge during our housesitting gig has been getting reliable Internet access. We hadn't wanted to pay for phone service, cable is not an option at this remote location, and satellite is too expensive. Cellular is both expensive and slow. Yet both of us have jobs that require regular and somewhat speedy Internet access. Fortunately, due to the location right on the water in Port Hadlock, another option presented itself: five miles north, visible across the water, is the Port Townsend Boat Haven, a marina served by the same wireless provider as our slip at Shilshole in Seattle, BroadbandXpress. Although it's a bit further away, it has the virtue of being a solution that has already been paid for.

We picked up an annual subscription last year before we left on our trip, since BBX has hot spots all up and down the Pacific Northwest coast. We could use them in most of the marinas and ports we hoped to visit, and although the service is somewhat limited and definitely not customer-oriented (they refuse to provide support for any equipment other than their own, which is over-priced and under-performing), it's about as good as things get in the marine environment.

Our standard on-board setup for receiving the wifi signal is good up to a mile and has connected at up to three miles, but the basic 8dbi omni-directional antenna and 500mw signal booster wasn't going to cut it across 5.25 miles of open water. Although the straight, open shot was a blessing in that it was absent any foliage or terrain that might block the signal, it was far enough that the dreaded Fresnel zone could be partially obstructed by the bulge of the curvature of the Earth. Moreover, a directional antenna that could be pointed directly at our desired access point was necessary so that other, closer but unrelated signals would not swamp it out.

I settled on a 24dbi grid antenna, which would allow a very tight beam to be directed at the marina hotspots.

We mounted it on a plain old galvanized pipe planted in the ground near one corner of the house, putting it up high enough to eliminate the Fresnel problem but close enough to reduce the cable run into the house.

To power it, we initially used the same Alfa 500mw booster we had on the boat, but it got to be a pain to drag it back and forth, and the ability to tweak the signal for the distance involved was limited, so we picked up and installed an Ubiquiti Bullet2. The Bullet is better designed for such distant connections, with more configuration options and the ability to tweak for the best possible connection. That said, it hasn't actually improved our speed much... we get by with a average .16Mbps which is about what you might get with an old ISDN type connection. Still, it beats the alternatives and it has been very stable and averages lower ping times than our connection in Seattle!

The problem we have is that we control only one end of the link. The BBX folks claim to support connections out to three miles but they probably are simply relying on the normal maximum capabilities of their equipment. Really getting good connections at anything over a mile requires some timing alterations in the signals. We can, and have, made those changes on our end (which means that our upstream bandwidth, what we can send out to the Internet, is roughly double the downstream bandwidth--pretty much the opposite of most connections!) but BBX has no incentive to tune their systems for the distance when most of their customers are actually in the marina itself.

Still, it's proven an adequate solution, if not ideal. I'm impressed with the Bullet, which works across a standard network cable with power injected into it at the house side. It's very compact, has a good management console, and a signal meter built into the device (which itself mounts very near the antenna) which makes it very easy to align the dish with the highest signal strength. It works on a 12V system, which means it could be fairly easy to integrate into a boat-based system in the future without the added complication and waste of power inversion (which most other such dedicated devices require). And because it is a stand-alone device, it doesn't muck with our computers the way the not-ready-for-prime-time drivers for our Alfa 500 booster do.