Ashore again, for a bit

We made it in to Port Townsend last night, after the second of two very long days transiting the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Right now we're very anxious for showers and laundry and getting caught up on bills and correspondence we've been missing; when I have some free time, and the ability to upload pictures, I will post some more detailed entries on what we did and saw in between Tofino and here.

We spent the balance of the interval poking around in the Broken Group in Barkley Sound, which is an amazing destination that could soak up an entire trip instead of just a small part of one. We only scraped the surface and plan to return again soon.

We departed the Sound from an anchorage near Bamfield two days ago at 0200, hoping with luck and current to reach Port Angeles to clear in before Customs closed there that day. It's a long stretch from Barkley Sound to Puget sound; 130-150 miles depending on your route. It's just about 90 to Port Angeles. The current wasn't that great and I started getting worried about our fuel state at about the halfway point (not a breath of wind was in evidence), and there are not only few inlets on the Canadian side of the Strait, but none at all with diesel. Sooke, 15 miles from Victoria, is the closest completely sheltered anchorage and the only one with fuel, so we opted to put in there instead. There are several options on the US side to either anchor or fuel up, but none of them prior to Port Angeles are customs ports--you can't legally put in there if you are coming in from Canada. So Sooke it was.

Well, Sooke is primarily a sport fishing port, although there are some commercial boats there; the big fish boats have their fuel trucked in, and the small ones take gasoline. Consequently, there is no diesel available in the outer harbour at Sooke! We puttered around looking for some in vein, then determined that we would tie up at the public floats and find a nearby gas station to fill up our spare can (which I had already put into the tank some hours before).

That almost didn't happen in the first place because the floats were pretty well full; we found a empty spot on the inside, but when we got down the narrow channel to it, there was a "Reserved" sign hanging in it! Fortunately, the harbour master's husband happened to be wandering past right then and yelled to us that the spot was open, the occupant was going to be gone for a few days. He caught our lines and helped us tie up and we mentioned to him why we were there and asked if there was a gas station nearby. He said that there was one up the road a bit, and then mentioned that he had two diesel jugs at home and that he would give us a lift up there! Bob and his wife were both extremely nice; his wife (whose name I promptly forgot, which should not in any way be taken as a reflection on her personally, but rather on my poor memory) has been harbourmaster there for twenty years and roams the floats as if she were walking the neighborhood after dinner, chatting with the tenants and visitors with equal kindness and facility. Bob ran me up to the 'garage' and I filled both jugs for just a bit less than most of the fuel docks have been charging. I was glad in retrospect that he offered the ride; it would have been a pretty long walk with a full five-gallon container!

Once we got back to the boat, the first five gallons I put in to the tank, filled it. My fuel calculations had been all wonky; we'd only gone through half of what I had expected. The tank has a gauge, but it's physically on the tank itself, and on the top aft side at that. You can only see it by crawling into the cockpit locker and wedging your head up into a small gap under the deck. My head is too big for the gap, so it pretty much has to be Mandy checking it, but putting Mandy into a confined space stinking of diesel while rolling around in seven foot swells is a recipe for Upchuck Surprise, so we didn't confirm my calculations. So, the stop in Sooke wasn't strictly necessary, but the public floats were extremely inexpensive, we met some nice folks, and there was a pretty good pub up the street where we had dinner. Not a bad experience, even with a sixteen hour day.

The next day we made the hop to Port Townsend, which should only have been about six hours with tides factored in; we even got a nice breeze (although easterly) right out of Sooke and got to sail for a bit. That died and we fired the engine up again. Unfortunately, not long after that, we noticed a leak in the engine cooling system; a hose had split on the intake line and was leaking and spraying the alternator in the bargain. To make matters slightly worse, the hose is a soft one; you can't patch it by applying pressure because it simply squeezes the hole wider. I patched it with some self-amalgamating tape and a couple of hose clamps tightened only just enough to hold the tape in place. I'm not sure if it actually reduced the rate of the leak or not, but at least it kept the alternator dry. The engine continued to run at a reasonable temperature at cruising RPM, but we weren't comfortable jacking it up to get to town any earlier.

This turned out to be a Very Bad Thing in the opinion of US Customs and Border Protection. Port Townsend is a customs port, but not a designated small boat port of entry (oddly enough, Port Angeles is, though Port Townsend is perhaps the premier sailing port of the region). This means you can clear customs here, but you have to call the local office and set up an appointment. We hadn't wanted to make an appointment too far in advance (prudently, considering the engine problem) so we weren't planning to call until we were sure of our arrival time. By that time, however (around 1630) the office was closed (at 1600!). There was a message on their voicemail with an 800 number to call if arriving after hours; I called that but it only applied for I-68 or NEXXUS program participants (which we are not). They gave me the number for the Port Angeles office and said to leave a message there, since they were probably dealing with a ferry at the time. I did; we waited about an hour and had no callback so we tried again, fortunately, since they hadn't got the message. That office gave us the number for the local guy, who in fact lives twenty miles outside of town and wasn't in the least bit happy getting a call after hours.

This all took a couple hours after we actually arrived, the boring wait interspersed with various phone conversations with Customs threatening doom for various unspecified offences. When the local officer finally showed up (and I'm not blaming him for the delay or being in a foul mood; we ruined a dinner date) he said that arriving at a non-designated port after hours and without a prior appointment carried a heavy fine; also, there was some problem with our customs decal, which I had painstakingly gone to the trouble of obtaining after having problems with it last year. We told him our tale of woe and showed him the engine repair, without ever getting into the messy and unbureaucratic discussion of how exactly it is that a boat, particularly a sailboat, should be able to forecast with any exactitude what mechanical problems it may encounter or what weather conditions might intercede so as to predict an appointed arrival time. Officer Vella didn't seem like a big fan of bureacracy either; he made many of the same points above in our conversation, lamenting that he is the only CBP officer available for the Port Townsend area, and the small boat traffic, particularl during the popular wooden boat festival here, runs him ragged. At any rate, he took pity and let us off with a warning for the arrival time and gave us a clearance; the sticker problem seemed like perhaps it might be too much paperwork with a hot date waiting, so we didn't bring it up again and neither did he.

Clearly we bear a big chunk of the responsibility for the delay and the problems and I'm not making excuses for that. Certainly the whole thing is a huge argument for getting a NEXXUS pass and we'll definitely be doing that before next year. You can clear in from anywhere at any time with a phone call. And if we had made landfall at a declared small boat port, we could have avoided some of the hassle (perhaps; it's not clear still what happens if you arrive at one of those points after hours, at least so far as I have read in the section of code Officer Vella provided for us... how you can ever guarantee an arrival during business hours with the Strait being in the way is beyond me) and definitely the problem of irritating an officer personally (never a good move). And yet...

So far, coming home to our native country has always been the worst part of our trips overseas. And it's so hard to reconcile this with our experiences with customs in those countries. Coming back to the United States is like going into a corrupt third world country, not our home and the land of freedom and opportunity. Contrast all this to clearing into Canada; we have never, on the boat, seen a customs officer there. One phone call, five minutes of conversation, and we're clear for six months. This year, it didn't even take that long; they still had our records from last year, and it took all of thirty seconds to clear in.

Some people might argue that this is because US Customs is more thorough and checks inbound vessels and persons more carefully. Not so; although we had to hang around and chat with Officer Vella, wasting our time and his, he didn't inspect the boat, didn't look at our sticker number, did not, in fact, even ask to see our passports... he learned nothing more than the Canadian inspector on the other end of a phone line. It was all about paperwork and protocol, nothing at all to make this country safer or better protected.

We were grateful at least that Officer Vella, despite having every reason to be extremely irritable and unpleasant, was merely moderately grumpy and turned out to actually be a pretty decent and personable fellow coping with what sounds like a kind of crappy job. I imagine he, and many other agents, would prefer to have a little bit of initiative granted them and to be allowed to do things that actually effectively protect the border instead of simply focusing on checking the write boxes and filing the right forms to avoid incurring the wrath of the bean counters at headquarters.

Anyway, I'll stop ranting about this for now; hopefully I won't have anything more to rant about after getting signed up for NEXXUS. I just think it's really a shame that the thing we hate the most about traveling is coming back home, entirely because of Customs.

After we get some of our "regular" lives straightened out we're back on the boat again; there is a West Seattle Yacht Club event in a couple of weeks down in Bremerton so we will poke our way down there (repairing the engine first) and then be back at Shilshole by early September.