Some rays of sunshine?

At least it has been sunny here in Seattle while we are back; not so on the Central Coast, which seems to have had rain every day and we are not sad at all to miss that, even if we do wish we were on the boat.

Talked to the yard earlier this week and they claim things should be finished up and the boat should be back in the water this coming weekend. I hope so, but it's already been quite a delay and I'm not sure if more time would really matter all that much or not.

Our plan right now is to head out on Friday to Port Townsend, then get a lift from my folks up to Port Hardy on the north end of Vancouver Island. A ferry leaves from Port Hardy Saturday night and puts in at Shearwater on Sunday morning, so we could be on our way again as early as that, or more likely, sometime Monday.

Which way is "our way" is still up in the air. We're constrained a bit by time... I have to be back by the end of July at the latest for business reasons, and Mandy by early August, also for business. That's a month, which sounds like quite a bit, but the complicating factor is that even after the repairs are completed, I am still not sure how far I can trust the boat systems until I have a chance to run with them for a while. All the obvious stuff will be fixed, but salt water is insidious... more could be compromised than we know, and until we do know, we'll have to take it easy and stay in fairly protected waters.

The upshot of that is, if we decide to bring the boat back home, we'll probably have to start south almost immediately, to ensure that we have time to limp it along if other things do turn out to be damaged. That's not the end of the world, there is a lot of neat geography to explore which we zipped past on the way up, but at the same time, having got as far north as we have, it seems a bit of a waste to turn back only to have to cover the ground again the next time we try to get to Alaska.

So our other option is continuing north, and using the remainder of the month to get into the panhandle, then to store the boat there somewhere over the winter and come back to collect it on another trip next year (although we probably can't afford to be away as long next year).

Option Two makes Mandy nervous, but having the boat up on blocks somewhere up there doesn't seem to me to be much different from having it down here somewhere. We weren't going to have time for a lot more sailing this year, anyway.

Internet access being what it is up there, you may not find out where we are headed until we are almost there.