Sunday, August 30, 2009

All you can eat

...and more, would be a good description of our first outing with the West Seattle Yacht Club at the annual Steak Fry in Brownsville.  This is a bunch of folks who know how to eat, drink, and be merry.  From the Friday early arrivals potluck to breakfast today, there was chow (and booze) aplenty, and a lot of genuine, jovial people enjoying themselves.

Neither Mandy nor I are by nature joiners, so we were relieved that things went so well this weekend.  We had a good vibe when we had dropped by another outing of the club's earlier in the year, and this confirmed it... it's not one of those snooty, jacket-wearing yacht clubs, but a working man's club with a little history to it, a bunch of people who have a good time on the water and have gotten organized about it.

It was not only our first outing with the club but our first time in Brownsville, and we're kicking ourselves for not having explored our own backyard a little sooner.  The Port of Brownsville is a charming, inexpensive marina in semi-rural East Bremerton (or thereabouts... I'm fuzzy on where the lines are all drawn on land) with friendly staff and tenants, great accommodations, and a lovely view.  Sunrise this morning (which I saw only because I volunteered to help cook breakfast; a sort of warm-up for a big family gathering in Idaho next weekend that we also plan to attend) over Port Orchard and Bainbridge Island, lighting up the patches of fog and a blue sky overhead, was beautiful.  We had a patch of rain on Friday night but otherwise the weather was terrific.

We met a lot of new and interesting folks, with boats and boating preferences as varied as are available in the Pacific Northwest, from sailors to trailer-boaters to people who just like boats but don't have one yet themselves.  We were at first a bit concerned that there are relatively few sailboat owners in the club but it became clear after a few conversations that there were many sailors-at-heart; as is often the case, former sailors "of a certain age" were members who had found it necessary to give up the labors of cranking winches and balancing on the weather rail for the safer and more practical realms of powerboating.

The whole thing really did remind me quite a lot of my own family gatherings and so I felt almost immediately at ease.  Mandy was a little more reserved at first but even she had loosened up by Saturday evening.

We're missing the next outing, coming up this next weekend, but we're looking forward to the annual Halloween Cruise.  I'm not a costume guy but Mandy is already plotting something.

It's another gorgeous day here in Puget Sound today.  The fog has lifted and we pulled out of Brownsville, with some regret, just after noon.  We didn't go far; another place we had never been down here was Manzanita Bay, which is just across the channel on the Bainbridge Island side.  We have our slip at Shilshole sublet through the end of the month, which is tomorrow, so we have a couple days to wander.  Anchoring out with fancy houses and boats all around us isn't a bad way to spend them, we figure.  With solid Internet and enough Pepsi and Pop Tarts to get me through the mornings, it shouldn't be much different than working at home.  Tuesday, I'll drop Mandy off in Poulsbo to go up and feed the cat (the Graebel's are moving half the family these couple of weeks, it seems) and collect the car, and I'll get the boat back over to Shilshole, finally, for a rest.

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