When we sailed up to Port Townsend last Friday, it was summer... the typical cyclical northerly bombing down the Sound, bright sunshine, blue skies. Today when we came back, it was fall... almost no breeze, fog, grey overcast. We motored the whole way back.
We went up to visit friends and family and to go to the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival. The Festival enjoyed perhaps the best weather it has seen in the last decade, sunshine and eighty degrees every day. It was packed and there were a lot of boats to see. There were also a lot of seminars to go to but we didn't go to any of them. Wooden boat maintenance is, thankfully, among those few things we don't feel any need to know anything about. We'd like to keep it that way.
Looking at the boats themselves was another story. There is no denying that they are gorgeous, some of them, outright works of art. They are also floating pieces of history. We were aboard boats that had belonged to John Wayne and Howard Hughes. The owner of Norwester, Wayne's yacht, read out passages from old logs describing nights the Duke spent aboard and other celebrities he entertained. Also in the mix, as always, was the tug Elmore, owned by a friend of the family and a centerpiece of the show. Mandy and I had watched last year just before Thanksgiving as the bow of the hundred and twenty-one year old was stove in during a storm. Going through her and seeing all the painstaking repair work was interesting; seeing the upgrades being made was terrific, as a forepeak that had been a glorified junk locker last year goes through the process of being turned into a finely crafted berth.
It was a great weekend to spend with friends, so it was bound to be a bit of let-down coming back to Seattle today. The grey skies didn't help. As we eased into our slip at Shilshole and I shut down the engine, it occurred to me that it might be the last time we ever sail aboard Insegrevious. Our plans, always subject to change, at the moment reflect an intent to list her for sale at the end of October. It's very unlikely she'll sell immediately, and if not we tentatively plan to take her up to Victoria sometime in December on a holiday cruise, and there are a couple of yacht club events we might catch before the end of the year. But should a buyer happen along immediately, we could be in an apartment before Thanksgiving, and our next trip by boat would be aboard a different boat.
That's a positive thing, of course, but it was a little depressing to consider it all the same. Insegrevious is our home, after all, and despite many challenges and travails, she has made a pretty fair job of it. I am comfortable with most of her systems and there is not an awful lot wrong with her anymore; or perhaps I've just grown accustomed to most of the deficiencies. Looking at other boats has certainly served to illustrate all of the things we like about this one and made those features stand out. There's no doubt we need something larger. It's going to be hard to find it without sacrificing some of what we already have, though.
Those are melancholy thoughts entirely in keeping with the weather today. I started out in and fine and optimistic mood about where we are at in the world and how events are finally progressing in accordance with a long-term plan (sketchy though that plan may be); now I am feeling as grey as the skies overhead.
