Feels like a holiday already

Despite the furnace being broke (more on that in a subsequent post, I'm sure), we decided to sail up to Port Hadlock to my parent's house for Thanksgiving.

The original intent was to have the boat as accommodation as much as transportation, to alleviate the demands of an unusually full house this year. Not having the furnace running put a damper on that idea. But the more we thought about it, the more we thought that a sail might be nice regardless, and also that we had some other options for staying aboard if it really got too crowded. There are four marinas in the area, two of which host yacht clubs with which we have reciprocal moorage agreements, and one of which is within easy walking distance of my parent's house.

I don't know if we'll avail ourselves of any of those options, but once we realized we had them, sailing up didn't seem utter foolishness anymore.

So we blocked out the entire week for getting up there. Weather is always a little iffy this time of year. Today saw gales and torrential downpours, proving the point; fortunately, we had already decided not to take off today in order to give ourselves extra time to prepare. The power went out for a while at our dock, reinforcing the point that going out for a sail might not be all that much worse than staying here.

Just the fact of being un-rushed makes me feel a bit like I'm on vacation already. I've actually done a bit of work today, in addition to boat work, but it felt like that optional stuff that you do while out on holiday anyway.

Tomorrow is supposed to be the gap in the series of storm systems bearing down on the Pacific Northwest this week, which works out perfectly for us. There's still a Small Craft Advisory on, but the forecasted winds are going to be lighter than we saw to today, and will be on our stern, so it should be a quick and not terribly uncomfortable ride north. And the rain is supposed to abate for the morning, at least, after which we should be up into rain shadow territory, anyway.

The things I'm most concerned about are all early on; Mandy is feeling a cold coming on, and we have three bridges and the locks to clear right at the start of the day. This would be easy if she was 100% but she might not be, and I'm not super-comfortable single-handing the boat through the locks yet.

On the plus side, the large locks are closed, so there is zero chance of any complicated line handling. And I just went over the engine this weekend, changing the oil and checking for any obvious problems, so hopefully there won't be any snags there, either. Really, we've never had any signs that there would be, but I still get nervous from having trouble in the Ship Canal with the last boat. It's the stuff you don't get any signs of that really messes with you.

Oh, look, we're back

New boat, new blog name... I've been meaning to re-activate our blog for a while now that we're back aboard our new Freedom 36, Rosie, and now here we are again.

Sorry about the delay. We had quite a time in between selling Insegrevious, finding places to stay as lubbers while we were searching for a new sailboat, finding, negotiating, and buying the new boat, then moving aboard. If you care about many of the impersonal particulars, you can catch up on my more mainstream blog, Late Entry, on Three Sheets Northwest, which chronicles much of that time. Unless Mandy or myself is feeling particularly ambitious, I doubt we'll update this blog with any details from that period.

Going forward, however, we'll see if we can do a bit better about keeping this current.

Next up... installing a new furnace! During the first below-freezing cold-snap in Seattle, of course, our Webasto furnace packed it in. So we're out looking for a replacement and the process is sure to provide blog fodder.

Thanks for reading (again)!

Seasons

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.

USCGC Bertholf

We noticed something odd about the superstructure of a Coast Guard cutter nearby here for the past couple days, but she arrived in the rain and we didn't get a good look before most of her hull was obscured. We're pretty used to our two resident High Endurance Cutters, the Midgett and Mellon, both Hamilton-class vessels based in Seattle, and this didn't look like them.

Today she is pulling out and it turns out there is certainly something different: she's the USCGC Bertholf, the first of the new Legend class "National Security Cutters." According to the Wikipedia article, she's homeported in Almeida, so I don't know if they are moving her up here or if it's just an extended cruise. I haven't decided yet if I like the looks or not. Kinda boxy superstructure, but the hull itself is more classic. As implied by the name, these are more oriented toward drug-runner interception and terrorist intimidation than search and rescue, so there is less to like on that front. But, if we ever have a dust-up with the Canadians, I trust now we'll come off fairly well with the new weapons systems.

Know the market

Just now watching CNBC, I realized why MREs are so expensive right now... they had a story on about how disaster supply and survivalist stores are booming right now, in part because of the recent example of the Sendai quake, but more so because of the Mayan mythology about the world ending next year. There couldn't be a worse time to be shopping for that stuff.

I think I will just stock the kit with ramen and macaroni for now, then, and pick up my MREs in January 2013 when they are suddenly dirt cheap.

Laid Up

That pretty much describes the both of us for the month of March: laid up. We brought home colds from the conference we went to in Spokane (or the party we attended on our way home, who can say?) and have been taking turns laying on the couch moaning about them. Then, we started our month-long dog-sitting stint with Daffy, a tubby and ancient dachshund belonging to some friends of the family. I was not previously aware that dachshunds were nocturnal creatures, but she seems to come alive only at night, snuffling and snorting about the bedroom, or whimpering softly in the dark. From time to time, she appears to have a seizure during which it sounds like she is trying to cough up a hair ball, leaving us both wide awake and wondering what horrors we might see if we turned on the light. We usually leave it off now. Her owners said she's been doing that for a while and hasn't keeled over yet.

So anyway, it's been hard to sleep around here and I finally gave up this morning when Mandy accidentally head-butted me a little before five. My brain is too fuzzy to work so I have mostly been looking at boats. It turns out there is another 38 footer up in Anacortes that I might want to take a look at, an '84 Catalina 38. I should have checked the listing sites more closely before we went up there to look at the Hunter. Fortunately, Anacortes is pretty close to Port Townsend; short hop on the ferry over to Whidbey Island and then a nice drive up across Deception Pass. Daffy doesn't always react well to being left unattended, however; she will pretty much just cut loose and perform her elimination functions anywhere she happens to be. We have a time-tested method for dealing with this while we are here: any time she shows signs of life and drags herself up off of the bed where she spends most of her hours, we take her outside and keep her there until her duty is done. If we're not here, though, we can't count on her to hold it for more than a couple hours. She will also whine loudly and incessantly until we return, which obviously doesn't effect us during our absence, but makes me feel bad when we get back. She is a poster child for the Wikipedia article on dachshunds:

If left alone, many dachshunds will whine until they have companionship. Like many dogs if left alone too frequently, some dachshunds are prone to separation anxiety and may chew objects in the house to relieve stress.

Last year, she ate the molding in the dining room when we left to go to town for the day to run errands. This year, we at least hope to prevent physical destruction by means of a pug-cage lent me by some other friends. If it can hold two rampaging young pugs, it ought to be able to confine an elderly wiener dog for a few hours.

So if we ever get to feeling better again, we may go up and take a look at that Catalina. I don't have terribly high hopes for it from the design perspective, but it is even less expensive than the Hunter was. It also occupies a similarly exceptional role in the pantheon of production boats: as the Hunter cutter was designed by John Cherubini, the Catalina 38 design is a product of the renowned Sparkman & Stephens naval architecture firm, designers of a long line of historic and undefeated America's Cup defenders (and, legend has it, during WWII the hull of the now-famous DUKW amphibious trucks that can still be found criss-crossing the streets and waterways of Seattle loaded with tourists). Due to the volume of the model that was produced and the association with the less auspicious Catalina name, you can pick up a high-performing boat at a fraction of the price it would sell for if it had the original designer's name attached.

That said, the Catalina 38 has some of the exact same features I disliked in the Hunter 37 cutter, namely the keel-stepped mast and the head forward. The keel is also nearly two feet deeper, which can be a drawback. But it looks like it might have more hanging locker space, which would make Mandy happy, and it's a foot longer and $15,000 cheaper. It's relatively narrower for the length due to its racing lineage, but also has less tankage, so storage space in general might be better. I'm fine with that. Tankage is a perennial concern for cruisers, but I would rather start out with less built in and either add additional tanks to preference or carry additional stores in cans. Single large tanks are more efficient, but less trustworthy and less flexible. We would rather take advantage of the extra space while doing short hops around here for now, while later having the option of taking on more cans of fuel and water to stretch our range if necessary.

The Catalina also has most of the advantages of the Hunter, in that it is a well-known boat with large and dedicated owners groups, for which much information and advice already exists dealing with common issues and upgrades. I've heard that some runs have been prone to osmotic blistering (that could explain the price) but you never know until you take a look.

But since we are laid up, that will have to wait.

The Hunter 37 cutter

So I mentioned in a previous post that in our search for a newer, larger boat, we thought it made sense to minimize the uncertainty inherent in used boat purchase by sticking close to a model and design that we are familiar with: the John Cherubini designed late 70s/early 80s Hunters. I also lamented that few were for sail in the Pacific Northwest market. Well, a couple weeks ago, a 37 foot cutter of that provenance came on the market, and so when Mandy and I were on our way back to Port Hadlock on Monday, we swung up through Anacortes to take a look at it.

I had high hopes. Thirty-seven feet seems just enough larger to accomodate our needs without being too expensive to maintain or too difficult to maneuver. The 37 cutters also occupy a special place in the Cherubini lore, being reputed as some of the finest sailing, most livable boats produced by the Hunter/Cherubini matchup. They are the among the few Hunter models that have been broadly accepted as long-distance, blue-water boats, and the owners almost universally seem to love them.

We didn't love it. I really wanted to; this particular vessel was priced a little higher than what we want to spend, but there are others for sale across the country in our range and assuming the design basics were all right, we might have picked up one of them just as easily. This one was in fine shape, recently re-powered, and no doubt worth the asking price. But too many of the features that we really like about our current Cherubini Hunter were missing or terribly flawed on this model.

One of my biggest personal complaints about our current boat is the size of the head/shower. I literally don't fit well enough to take a shower... can't wash my feet! It is unavoidable on the 33, there just isn't enough room. But the shower compartment on the 37 is even smaller! The head is located forward, too, which I find a fatal drawback in many American built cruisers. There is just too much motion up there in rough seas for a safe and tidy completion of necessary bodily functions.

The mast is keel-stepped, as opposed to our current deck-stepped model. That may make it stronger, but it also makes it more susceptible to leaks, which this one had, even though it was a very well-maintained boat.

The internal stowage was also lacking. We have come to rely on the relatively large spaces under our settees and under and atop the pilot berth on our current boat for storage and when packed correctly, everything we need fits in just right. On the 37, and on other models in that range we've looked at, there is greatly increased tankage, and typically the tanks are located under the settees. On the 37, this isn't even replaced by space under the v-berth (where our water tank is located) because that's where the holding tank is at. Notwithstanding the queasy thought of sleeping on top of the sewage, that just doesn't leave a lot of room. Presumably the cockpit locker and lazarette are much larger (the salesman didn't seem too interested in actually selling the boat; he didn't bother to unlock any of those hatches so we could take a look, and didn't seem to know or care much about the boat itself) but those spaces are inaccessible much of the time and unsuitable for many of the items we currently stow in the cabin. The quarterberth is not much larger than ours, and the space beneath it is taken up by the fuel tank.

The galley layout was not particularly appealing; the chain locker was tiny; the nav desk was small; engine access was poor; there was very little hanging locker space; there were no good candidate areas for creating a work space. These are all areas in which, despite moving up to a physically larger boat, we felt we would actually be taking a step back from what we have now, or at least not gaining in the particular requirements that we feel are not already being met.

This was a real let-down, because there are some other very positive qualities. The size of the fleet and the iconic nature makes the 37 cutters generally quite well documented and easily supported... the community on hunterowners.com is very active and helpful. Problems with the model and their solutions have been thoroughly discussed and explored. The build quality is something we can judge from our own boat, produced in the same shop in the same era. The sailing performance is supposed to be excellent, which is important to us as we prefer to sail, in situations where others are often forced to motor. And the Hunter name, much reviled in sailing circles, tends to push the price down despite the respected designer.

I suppose I was hoping that we could short-circuit the hard job of doing legwork and research to find a replacement boat by leveraging what we already know, in the same way that a lot of folks will stick with a brand as they are up-sizing. In this case, though, it doesn't look like that trick is going to work, and I feel like I am back at square one.

It's a given that all boats represent a compromise of some sort between price, livability, and performance. I don't think the particular combination that I am looking for is out of reach. There are any number of newer designs that have exactly what I want, which are priced in the same range that Hunters traditionally have been. In thirty years, they'll be exactly what I am looking for. But it seems that thirty years ago, no one was putting together those particular combinations of features.

At this point, I really don't know what to look at. There is very little in the Pacific Northwest in our price and size range and we don't have much of a travel budget to be out looking at other options. It looks like we probably will not be putting Insegrevious on the market this year after all, without a clear idea of what we might be looking at for a replacement. It's a bit of a let down, but I guess I am getting used to not having any really solid plans for the future by now, so perhaps not as much of a let down as it might otherwise have been.

Mid-winter update

It's a new year, and it finally feels like I have enough breathing space to post a blog update.

That makes it seem as though life has been more busy than it really has. In fact, it's been a pretty quiet winter around here. Mandy and I have just had our heads down working. Things were pretty hectic right after we got back in port; a variety of issues with our rental (I'll avoid going into any detail, but will say that I had some immediate sympathy for Jason and Christie over at S/V Hello World when they recently mentioned their dealings with "shitweasel tenants"), business, and the basic business of life all conspired to put us behind on whatever arbitrary scale of progress we had chosen to adopt.

So, once we got everything immediate dealt with, we just sort of hunkered down and got to work. It feels like it has all been productive, but it will be hard to say until we are into next year and business cycles start to pick up again (retail may do well during the Christmas season; with us, not so much). If we've done well, we should profit; if not, well, back to the drawing board.

Either way, we have had very little focus on boat-related matters, but we think we have arrived at a couple of useful conclusions:

- Our boat is fine for living aboard, if a little cramped for one of us, but it's definitely too cramped to both live and work aboard simultaneously. If we want to travel, which we still think we do, it's just too small to sustain that lifestyle.

- If we can sell this boat and take the proceeds plus some savings, we can afford a boat that is big enough to both live and work aboard.

So that is roughly what we are planning to do, and in that order... we definitely have to sell Insegrevious before we can contemplate moving on to another boat. For one thing, we certainly can't afford two slips for any extended period. We actually have a larger slip than our length currently at Shilshole, so if we can clear out Insegrevious then we have room to move something else in without hunting around for a new home.

Of course, that's assuming we can find a new vessel in this area, which may just be wishful thinking. Our original plan, long long ago, had been to hold out aboard Insegrevious until we could afford a new boat. There are a variety of arguments about new versus used, but I think I am fairly well settled on the thought that it would be easier and not much more expensive to get what I want, in a more or less pristine state, by buying new. Older boats in a given class are not hugely less expensive if they are at all worth purchasing, and they have a tremendous amount of uncertainty attached, and usually a lot of worthless and potentially problematic modifications in the bargain. So, if I am going to drop a couple hundred thousand either way, on balance I will probably get something new.

But we don't have a couple hundred grand laying around right now, so something older is what is in our cards. If you do have to buy an older boat, then it makes sense to minimize the amount of uncertainty. That means not just getting a good survey done, but also primarily looking at boats you have some familiarity with and which have a known record. For us, that means the older, Cherubini-designed Hunters.

There are 36s and 37s that fit that requirement, and happily also our budget. Unfortunately, not many of them are to be found in the Pacific Northwest.

They also are not really worth trucking around the country, so there are good odds we will be relocating to wherever we find what we might buy. Where we go from there is an open question; we aren't really planning that far ahead.

What we are doing is trying to get our businesses to the point where we don't need to be in Washington, or near Washington, full-time to manage them. I think we have made good progress toward that goal these past few months. The next few will help provide the proof. Then, by spring, hoepfully I will have enough time that I can spend on Insegrevious working to get her sold. What happens next will depend on where, and how quickly, we find a replacement for her.

From Quiet Ganges

Time to catch up on some happenings!

As Scott said, our last trip to Seattle was for me to work. So the days beforehand were spent in preparation. Wednesday night before we left Vancouver I suspected I might be coming down with a cold. I fought it in transit on the Amtrac train on Thursday. It was fun taking the train to Seattle since it was a route we've never seen before. We've driven it, taken the bus, and obviously sailed it. But the train follows along the water much of the way down, and it was interesting to see the water from land instead of that same land from the water. Also, we passed along Shilshole. We've seen the Amtrac train from the boat many times, but I'd never even actually considered I'd ride it some day. I wasn't actively dismissing the idea, but I never thought I'd have a purpose for it.

Thursday night I spent at our friend's place. Never before had I seen a sunset as spectacular from their waterfront home.

Friday morning I had my presentation, then in the evening we went and crashed at another friend's place in Everett. Still I could feel the lingering cold, and so unhappily avoided picking up their adorable baby.

Then Saturday was the bus ride back up to Vancouver, rather uneventful.

Sunday, four days after the first symptoms, my cold reared itself to its full extent. I was out, tired as hell, and fighting a pounding headache. Scott wasn't kidding when he said I spent most of the day in the v-berth. I didn't even wake up when he stopped for fuel. He had to single-hand the entire day, including docking for fuel, later raising and lowering the sails, getting us across the Strait of Georgia, and finally anchoring.

Monday I also slept, and Tuesday I began finally feeling a bit better. We hung out in Nanaimo for the rest of the week, spending time at anchor, then at Nanaimo Yacht Club, happily taking advantage of their facilities.

Once we finished up in Nanaimo, it was a long-ish motor down to Ganges. This Scott also pretty much did on his own. Since finally feeling recovered from my cold I've gotten my head back into a major work project I've been working on, and he's obliged to let me spend all the time I want working on it. So, that's it. I've been working. And reading. And sleeping.

(Images, top to bottom: Vancouver Sunset; view from the boat, Shilshole from the Amtrac, Sunset at Ed and Terry's, Morning fog at Ganges)

Back and forth

Most of the delays in posting have been due to travel lately... not on the high seas, but more mundane excursions by car and bus and rail, with not a little walking thrown in for spice. Once we got back to the boat, there was, of course, work to be done... and that's what we've been doing, up through today, and now I feel like I can take a little breather and get back on course. Until next week, of course.

We're in Vancouver, still or again, depending on how you look at it, anchored out in False Creek. Mandy is back from a trip to Wisconsin to visit family, and I am back from Washington from a separate trip for similar reasons. I went backpacking in the North Cascades (after a short delay due to a brushfire burning across I-90; though frustrating, at least it came with an air show in the form of a helicopter making water drops from a nearby stream), which is a whole different sort of wilderness than the one we have been experiencing up here. A lot more work required, too! The mountains may be best viewed from a great distance.

The spot we ended up in in the Creek isn't as advantageous as the one in which I spent the few days after sending Mandy south. It's not as convenient to shopping, nor Internet, nor a dinghy dock. It's still quite lovely, but options are limited; in the last hurrah before fall, boats abound and False Creek is crowded. We had a couple days in relative seclusion, though the best spots were full up. Now we're a little wedged in by other boats. But we'll be here for a while, at least another week, so perhaps it will clear out again after the weekend. On the other hand, next weekend is Labor Day... so maybe not.

This weekend, we have some friends coming up for a visit, which should be fun even though the weather is taking a turn for the worse. We've been bound to the bus and train while exploring up here so this will be an opportunity to get further off the beaten path and see some things we might not otherwise.

Not that the transit system up here is shoddy in any way. We figured out yesterday how to get out to go shopping in a place much cheaper than the downtown core, and even with a couple of transfers in between, it only took a couple hours. With buses every 15 minutes and trains every 5 on the main lines, you're never waiting around for very long. It very much points to how limited the options (and the thinking) are in the Seattle area, where your best bet is usually to take a car and sit in traffic. There certainly is traffic here, but it seems to be less a problem, and with such flexible transit you're not really forced into driving as much.

Despite the weather, it's still pretty nice here, and I am looking forward to a little more exploring and a little less scrambling around next week. At the end of the week, though, we're southbound by land once again, Mandy for business and me for a convention (not business). While it's all for fun, all the bouncing around is starting to get to me a little bit and I'll be glad when it is all done, September has come, and we are solidly back aboard once again. Leaving the boat is a little nerve-wracking, as is coming back and getting adjusted to it once again after any length of time on dry land. There are rewards, of course: moonrise and moonset on the day we got back:





Although we have also had the occasional uninvited guest, who has left unwanted gifts in the dinghy as it floats along off our stern.

At any rate, September may bring cooler weather, but it will also have fewer crowds, less pressing travel demands, the possibility of televised football, and the promise of a return to familiar circumstances and what seems, despite our best efforts, to most resemble real life.

Another day in Campbell River

It's a good thing we both like Campbell River, because just about every time we are here, we end up spending at least one more day than we had planned.

That is somewhat understandable due in part to the location of the city. Five miles south of Seymour Narrows, five miles north of Cape Mudge, with no protected anchorages in between in either direction, it's a place you don't want to leave if conditions aren't just right. A southeasterly at Cape Mudge or a stiff northwesterly through the Narrows can cause you to postpone your departure from here indefinitely until conditions clear up.

This time around, though, it's something a little more mundane: the power is out. Around three am, a transformer blew that supplies at least some of the docks with power. A BC Hydro crew is up working on it right now, but as of 11:30 this morning, they are saying it will probably take the rest of the day to fix.

The only reason we were staying for the day in the first place was to get some work done. Now, it's like we're anchored out again (although Internet service has not been affected): we're cooking on propane, washing up in cold water, and relying on our solar panel to keep our computers charged (which relegates me to my tiny Eee PC and only allows Mandy to work about a quarter of much as she normally could... solar charging is slow!). So, not much is going to get done today. We did laundry when we got in last night, went shopping, and were all set just to get online and get stuff done today. Now we don't know what to do with ourselves. I washed the boat, and Mandy plans to patch up our dinghy sometime today. Otherwise, it's possible I might be more bored here than out at anchor somewhere!

We got to Desolation Sound last week two days out from Pender Harbour, and took on some supplies and spent our first night in Refuge Cove. Then we moved to Prideaux Haven, in the Desolation Sound Marine park itself, for a couple of days... it was busy, but not crowded. We moved up to another small Marine Park north of there called Walsh Cove, and that was great. Warm water, sunshine, some small but interesting islands to explore, and some cliffs with Indian petroglyphs on them (or, possibly, doodles by some teenagers with spray paint. I'm undecided). We read in the sun and went swimming. Mandy jumped off a small cliff a number of times. I did, too, but the warm layer of water ends about four feet down, so jumping in gets really cold, at least until you resurface. But as long as you float about in that top four feet, it's very pleasant.

After Walsh Cove, we headed up through Yaculta and Dent Rapids. It's the first time we have taken that back route and weren't sure what to expect. It was a lot of current, but the guidebooks show good techniques for getting through, and we followed several other sailboats with the same general idea, so it was just a matter of connecting the dots. I have some ideas to make it easier and faster next time around; the guides are all written for people going further north, so they advise cutting some corners at the rapids, but I suspect we would have gone through quicker if we had done things differently.

Our swing up north of the rapids could best be characterized as: windy. Gale force winds have been blowing down through Johnstone Strait for almost a month now. There was a lot of chop in all the channels and a lot of wind in all the bays. We stopped at the resort at Blind Channel because Terry keeps telling us how great the bread there was. We missed the bread but got cinammon rolls, which were good; we also hiked up to see an 800 year old cedar tree (just like other cedar trees, only bigger), and I got Mandy roped into judging a dog show. I think she had fun, though. That will all probably get a post of its own, though. I got pictures... she had to wear a funny hat. Funnier than her normal hats, even.

It was a fun stop, but very expensive, as everything up north of the rapids tends to be. Even so, they were full up while we were there. We only stayed a night. Even that seemed like a mistake, since waves rolling in from the nearby rapids kept us rolling around all night even at the dock.

The next night we tucked into a little spot at Turn Bay just out of the main part of Johnstone Strait. That was a nice little nook, but the wind blew in fiercely. It was the same story at our next stop, Small Inlet in Kanish Bay. Small Inlet actually isn't that small, but we were the only boat in there. A couple of kayakers came through in the afternoon, but that was it. We rowed ashore and hiked up across a low saddle to Waiatt Bay (sp?) which was chock full of boats. It also happens to be, in a convoluted way, south of all the rapids, which explains the difference. It was a great little hike, but a very strenuous row back to the boat, since it was all upwind. Also, we blew a leak somewhere in the dinghy and it wasn't as rigid a platform for rowing on the way back.

That night the gusts came in and batted us around pretty good, keeping Mandy awake much of the evening, but our anchor held like a rock. Even though she was tired the next day, she took the helm through Seymour Narrows coming south... it was uneventful, though, as our timing was right on and the wind was with us.

So here we are in Campbell River for two nights plus an extra. After this, we'll poke around near Desolation a bit more, then head down to Vancouver for our various trips stateside in mid-August.

The Violence of the Tack

A sailboat is pulled upwind, most will tell you, using the same physics that lifts an airplane off the ground. I have little understanding of either, but, since every airplane I've ever been on has been able to defy gravity, and every sailboat I've been on has been able to sail with the wind coming from a frontal direction (rather than pushing from behind, which, of course, it can also do), I can buy into the logic that the aerodynamic properties of an airplane wing and a sailboat sail are similar.

When sailing upwind, there is the well-known sailing concept of "apparent wind." The faster the wind comes toward you, the faster the boat sails (to a point), as the boat sails faster into the wind, the more quickly the wind passes over the sails. This makes the boat try to sail even faster yet, until the point is reached when the resistance of the wind is too much, and all that results is uncomfortable, and slower, sailing. This is known as "being overpowered." The solution is to have less sail up when the winds are too strong.

Also, since a sailboat cannot sail directly into the wind, it must zig-zag to get to an end location that is directly into the wind. In British Columbia, the Gulf Islands are laid out in such a way (long and skinny), that often where you want to be is exactly where the wind is coming from (or exactly where you just came from, if you happen to be sailing downwind at the time).

The process of making the boat zig or zag while traveling upwind is called "tacking." The boat turns about 90 degrees and the sails are moved from one side of the boat to the other. While sailboats look so serene out on the water, there is nothing serene about tacking in heavy winds; tacking can be an outright battle between wind, sail, skipper, and boat.

The process of tacking is, quite simply, amazing. It starts quietly enough by prepping the sheets to be released. Then the helm is turned and the upheaval begins. Beneath the water, the rudder directs the boat into a new direction. The bow turns and the sails begin to savagely flap as the wind howls through the process of flowing mainly over one side to switching to the other. The mast vibrates, then shakes ferociously. The jib flows over the front of the mast, the fabric of the sail making a zipping sound as it abrades against the metal. The boom pulsates until the force of the mainsail holds it steady to the opposite side of the boat. All the while, the teeth of the winches are ratcheting the jib sheet, tighter and tighter to the opposite side of the boat from where it had been only a few seconds earlier. The rope strains as it resists stretching, voicing its torment in low groans. Then, so quickly, all returns to the state of balance again, and the boat resumes being pulled through the water. The only difference is that it is now going 90 degrees in a different direction. The helmsman, having been quite occupied through the process, barely notices the sounds of the strains of physics that just took place.

From inside the cabin, however, the sounds of the rest of the boat are not so masked by the sound of the howling wind and briefly luffing sails. The first sound is the shout, "TACKING" made by the helmsman dutiful enough to alert the rest of the crew that all hell is going to break loose for a few seconds. It is from below decks that the vibration of the mast is then felt, the quaking and quivering. The sound of the jib sliding across the mast is carried directly down, through the mast, into the interior space. The ratcheting of the winches seems amplified through the hull. And then everything in the entire cabin moves. The stronger the wind, the greater the "heel," the more the boat is tipped on its side while sailing. Even well-stowed items tip from one side to the other while tacking. The dishes slide from being held against one side of their cabinet to the other. The tools and books do the same. And the cabinets themselves chime in, adjusting to new forces prove that this sturdy vessel gives in ways unseen, but certainly heard. The wood squeaks and groans. The vibration slows, the winch stops, and the boat builds back to its previous speed. The sound of the water against the hull picks up. The person below finds a new way to brace themselves against the opposite heel, and the sail continues, until the call is heard again, "TACKING!"

~M

About town

We invested in bus passes today, got up early, and explored the town.

We didn't have anything else on the agenda today, and it was supposed to rain (which it did, earlier, but has since cleared up nicely) so we thought taking transit rather than walking might be a good idea. Also, I walked Mandy around last night through downtown and that probably wasn't a good idea considering she already has been feeling cruddy, so I didn't want to make her walk much today. In fact, we came back a bit early because she was feeling pretty poorly this afternoon, so we may hole up here and watch hockey the rest of the evening anyway.

But we started out pretty early to beat some of the crowds (although, to be honest, no where we have been has been outrageously crowded... there is always a seat somewhere, always an alternative to standing in a line, and things are always moving along pretty quickly), walking over to the near terminus of the Olympic streetcar line, which runs between Granville Island and the Olympic Village. There were long lines for it last night, but this morning there were only five or so other people on board.

From the Village, we got on the Canada line skytrain and took it over to the Coal Harbour waterfront. We did do some walking then, hitting all the tourist traps in Gastown, before doubling back and catching the Sea Bus back to Lonsdale Quay. We passed through there fairly quickly the other day on our way to Whistler and I wanted to explore a bit more. It's sort of a miniature Granville Island, a lot of shops and stands with trinkets, food, and produce. We had lunch there; I'd never had a breakfast calzone before, but it was quite good.

We headed back across the harbour again and caught the Skytrain out to East Vancouver, which runs you right past the downtown venues. We caught a bus on Broadway up to the University of British Columbia, which is where the secondary hockey venue is at. We were with the crowd headed for the US/Russia women's hockey game, a big one for us (still in progress as I write this, but if I am reading the website right, we're up 13-0... sweet) which was fun because everyone was in good spirits. The girl behind us was talking about being on the Sea Bus earlier in the day with the Bronze medal winner of the women's freestyle, who let her wear the medal and have their picture taken together. The bus driver, and indeed all the bus drivers we have met, was in good cheer and talking to everyone about where they were from and acquaintances he had near those places.

Mandy started crashing after we got out there, though, so we grabbed another bus back that let us off very near the Harbour Authority docks. We picked up some ice at the local mini-mart and now we're here, watching the Canada/Norway game. If she starts to feel better, we may head out again, if not, we'll stay in; no big deal. We'll head out sometime tomorrow, with a forecast that looks providential so far... hopefully a quick trip home. We're having a lot of fun, but we're also ready for a return to a regular, and hopefully more restful, schedule!

The Buzz

So most people have probably at least heard of Twitter, the micro-blogging site that started the trend of putting out short, quick updates on where you are or what you are doing or thinking about at any particular time. But unless you are a geeky sort of person, you probably haven't yet heard about Google's recently released answer to Twitter, Buzz.

Buzz is actually a part of Gmail, the company's free e-mail service, so if you have a Gmail account, you already are automatically in Buzz. It shows up as an icon on the left menu panel near the inbox. It works pretty much exactly like Twitter; you just have a box, where you type in whatever you want (although Buzz doesn't have the sometimes annoying 140 character limit that Twitter is either saddled with or blessed by, depending on who you ask) and click post and it puts it out there. You can also make posts public or private, restricting it to just your allowed Gmail contacts, or showing them to everyone.

Why does anyone need another micro-blogging service? Well, you might not. But Buzz has snared me in a way that Twitter never managed to. A lot of features that Twitter either should have or could benefit from are already in Buzz. With Twitter, you can get those things, but either only through third-party services, through some geeky hacking, or by waiting a long time for Twitter itself to slowly add them, frequently messing them up in the process. Buzz gets a lot of this stuff out of the box because it is so tightly tied with other products and services Google already offers.

You can comment on or "like" posts from others, which provides a more complete conversational tool than Twitter's homegrown @ or # adaptations. It's similar to Google Reader in that way, and in fact broadcasts items you share from Reader when you share them. You can go back and edit posts, or choose to e-mail them to others who don't have or use Buzz.

One of the neat things is that public posts can be viewed by location. So, I can choose to see updates from my contacts most of the time, but other times, such as when we are up here at a big event like the Olympics, I can switch to see what people nearby are buzzing about... and find out what fun stuff is happening nearby. A killer part of this feature is that it also integrates with Google Maps; so I can pull up a map that shows me exactly where people were when they made those posts. If I want, I can have it give me directions (by car, public transit, or on foot) right to that location.

You can also embed a picture in a Buzz post, or, Google's Picasa photo-sharing service automatically adds your recently posted pictures to the service.

Or, if you like, you can also set it up to add your activities from other popular sites like Flickr, Youtube, or Blogger (where this blog lives) automatically. Another site you can add to automatically update Buzz: Twitter.

I've always thought that is a great way to eat another company's lunch, and what it means is that it's easy for Tweeters to make the transition. With all the other features available, the personalization seems to me to be much more amenable to the sorts of friendly conversations that this sort of social networking tool should be about. In some ways, it's more like a Facebook feed in that way, but even more flexible.

This has all been a long way of saying, if you want moment by moment updates (oh, did I forget to mention that Buzz works perfectly on my Android-based MyTouch 3G for posts on the go?) on what we're up to here, get a Gmail account and get on my Buzz list!

Well, this wasn't in the forecast

It's a whopping 12° out right now, and sunny, if you can credit such a thing! That's open hatches weather here in Vancouver, and open the hatches we did, airing and drying various compartments, berths, equipment, and clothing that had not seen sunshine since fall. We've got a load of laundry in, the floors scrubbed, the head cleaned, and our bedding and sails airing out. It's beautiful out and we have no idea how long it will last... it was supposed to rain today, as much as it did yesterday, which was quite a lot. But apparently we got a break between systems. Today is gorgeous and we took full advantage of it.

Neither of us slept in as late as we had imagined we might, so we headed over to Granville Island for coffee around 0900. Mandy, perhaps unsurprisingly, has picked up a bit of a head cold (we're back at the boat and she is napping now) so we didn't push ourselves trying to do or see too much. Instead, we walked around Granville Island, saw the hourly Chinese New Year celebration (hourly? The dragon was only two kids long, so I guess they had to do it frequently to make up for the shortage. No firecrackers either, in a place so security conscious right now), and then headed across the bridge into downtown, which had looked pretty intriguing last night.

We found both the LiveCity venues over there but there were crazy long lines to get in. I hadn't realized they would be cordoned off, since they are, I believe, free to the public. But there are big blue fences around them both and metal detectors to pass through to get in. I suppose there is no way around that these days, although the whole city is basically a spill-over party from the games... I'm not sure that scanning one crowd of people inside the fence is going to do anything to prevent bad things happening in the as-large or larger crowd of people just outside it. Anyway, we didn't feel like doing a line today, so we skipped it (although the dance thing we could see up on the big screen inside the perimeter looked kinda interesting).

We had a great lunch at the Cafe Vancouver, which is just a little place across the street from the will-call office that I noticed yesterday. Free wifi, good food, big soft chairs. I am surprised that in a city obviously bustling with people, no place we have been yet has felt particularly crowded. We've always been able to find places to sit and eat or drink. Maybe everyone else is inside the LiveCity stalag.

This seems particularly true for Starbucks. If there is anyplace on the planet that rivals Seattle for Starbucks location density, this has got to be it. It's starting to surprise me to not see them anywhere. They are handing out free mini-maps of the city, which are pretty handy themselves, but which of course feature the location of every Starbucks store in town. Usually you look at such a thing and think to yourself, "Oh, interesting, I didn't know there was one just around the corner here." It's to help you find stores you didn't know about, but in this case, it has backfired: I look at it and think, "Jeez, I could have swore there were three of them on that street when we were there last night, the place is practically a coffee desert."

Of course it's not really possible in the Pacific Northwest to have such a thing as a coffee desert; we are blessed with deluges of both rain and coffee, and there are two or three other chains that are sure to be anywhere that Starbucks is not. Benz, Tim Horton's, and another outfit I don't recall. It's amazing there is any room left for cheap teriyaki joints and creperies, but there must be as we've seen plenty of those as well.

I suppose the density of the city feeds those small shops in ways that we don't really see in Seattle. Here there are block after block of small mom and pop shops and restaurants beneath tower after tower of condos. Downtown Seattle, despite recent efforts, is mostly office towers, whereas a large chunk of Vancouver is condo or apartment towers. I don't know what the density is exactly, but I have to imagine it fuels those sort of small service businesses in ways that an office district, de-populated after 1800, cannot.

I should have some pictures to upload tomorrow. It's supposed to rain, so that will give me something to do. Of course, I don't know how much to trust the weather report now, either. But tonight is probably dedicated to catching up on Olympic coverage and maybe watching some cheesy romantic comedy that Mandy likes... it is, after all, Valentines Day.

We made it!

In some senses, we were early, in others, we barely snuck in under the wire. It's hard to say in retrospect. Either way, it was a very long day and we're still laying in our bunk in the v-berth right now recovering.

We got up and out of Silva Bay at about 0500 yesterday and the wind was about 20 knots out of the south, just as forecast. I was able to immediately lay on a course of 060T which was exactly what I needed to end up in the mouth of English Bay, and even with a reef in the mainsail we were moving along at five and a half knots or better, more than enough to put us in town by 1000 as I had planned.

There was very little vessel traffic but the seas were confused and choppy which made for a pretty rough ride. I stood watch for a couple hours, during which the wind, unfortunately, started to back into the southeast, and as Mandy came up and took her turn it moved further and further toward our nose, pushing our course further and further north of the lay line for the Spanish Bank.

We ended up off Bowen Island at around 0900, where, as predicted, our pals in Warship 710 found us and chatted us up over the VHF. We didn't get stopped though, which was fortunate as the wind was now right on the bow between us and the entrance to False Creek. We started beating our way south but it became apparent we weren't going to make it on time. The seas were still so choppy that motoring wasn't likely to do much better, however. We cut into English Bay as far as we could and the chop was reduced, and we dropped sail and fired up the engine to head straight toward the entrance.

We had to dodge a few freighters: one coming in behind us, and six or so moored in English Bay. We got looked over again by an RCMP launch, but fortunately again, they didn't stop us. We ended up getting in to False Creek right about 1130. There was the usual drama trying to contact the Harbour Authority but they had a slip all ready for us when we did get hold of them, with the right kind of power, and toward the base of the dock, natch. So we were able to slide right in, tie up, and head out.

Unfortunately, I had neglected to print off directions to the will-call office. I used my phone's web browser (a very expensive web browser up here, to the tune of $10 per megabyte) to find a phone number and gave them a call, and managed to get the nearest cross streets through the staticky connection. It was just across the Granville Street bridge and up a few blocks, and there was no line at all when we got there (although Mandy contrived to delay us by launching into a conversation with the ticketing agent) and we were in and out in no time. Up a block to a bus line leading to the Sea Bus terminal, and one of a veritable cab rank of buses available swept us right up to the terminal.

There was a Sea Bus departure three minutes later, and so we were just about able to step right on board and steam smartly across the bay. The whole Vancouver transit experience was superlative. There were a lot of buses, running frequently, traffic was extremely manageable (I don't know if this was just luck or due to the traffic shaping efforts of the Games organizers), and directions were always clear and informative. The Sea Bus, a water taxi, is a purpose-built double-ender with a special terminal at each end that allows extremely fast loading and unloading for rapid turn around. I didn't really measure the trip time across Vancouver Harbour but it couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes. The boats were full; the buses were generally at a comfortable 3/4 capacity (although, later in the day, we passed one that was standing room only, stuck at a stop because the relief driver had not yet appeared).

The north SeaBus terminus, Lonsday Quay, is also the departure point for the remote venue buses... and we were there by one o'clock, an hour early after all the rushing!

It was an hour well-spent, however, as we had an opportunity to hit a cash machine and get some food, beverages, and snacks to replenish us after a taxing morning. We were the first ones in line for our scheduled departure time. The Olympic bus system was the only thing we saw in the whole day that seemed to have any glitches in it. People were given different directions, some of them kept off buses that were not full, but which departed before the time on their tickets, while others were allowed on. At the other end, coming back, vast ranks of empty buses stood ready to take us back, but all were being held to depart at the same time, even though many people were already ready to go. The kinks were worked out, eventually, but they were a little irritating and seemingly obvious.

The ride up to Whistler was about two hours. We passed some sort of motorcade coming back the other way; the bus driver made a crack over the PA system that it was President Obama but it clearly wasn't (he sent a delegation); a clue as to the identity of the eminences came later in the day as we overheard a volunteer talking about escorting members of the royal family around the venues. Even without the motorcade escort, it looks like they must have pulled in Mounties from all over the country. RCMP presence was heavy all along the route and at the venue. Good time to stage a bank robbery in Saskatoon, I'll bet.

It was raining when we got there and we had to wade through some slush to get to the security checkpoint. They were reasonably thorough but not intrusive and everyone was in good spirits despite the damp.

The drawback of watching the luge is the serpentine nature of the track, which makes it hard to get a sense of where you are, where the athletes are, or what exactly is going on. You could only see a hundred meters or so of track from any particular observation point. What we did see looked very nice, however. We picked a spot at the final turn, near the finish line, and a large TV screen was set up to show you what was happening elsewhere. I timed a few of the competitors going through, and if you didn't count the TV screen, we saw them live and in person for just under three seconds each. But it was an exciting three seconds... they were right in the "Death Curve" at that point and headed to the finish line. We saw a few of them bump the sides but no one wrecked, fortunately.

The Germans took an early lead and held on to it. At some point, the rain changed to snow, and then it really started to feel like the Winter Olympics. Actually, it got downright cold. I for some reason hadn't expected that. All that talk about lack of snow, unseasonable temperatures, and the like, had me more ready for rain than snow. So I froze a little bit; but a not unreasonably priced hot chocolate got me thawed out, and after they told us at the bus embarkation point that none would be leaving until almost 2100, we went and wandered around Whistler Village a bit. We'd never been there before, so I'm not sure what upgrades were done for the games and what was just that way before, but it's a lovely and inviting place, worth returning for a visit another time. Not during the games; no one goes up there that doesn't have a ticket or residency past the checkpoints on the Sea to Sky Highway.

The organization of the whole vast array of events is mind-boggling and has been extremely impressive so far. As I mentioned before, the only glitch we have seen is with the buses. But it's so complex, so immense, and so unpredictable (several other events were cancelled at Whistler that day due to fog) that it's an amazing tribute to the organizers that it is running so smoothly. The organizers, and the thousands of blue-clad volunteers who Mandy keeps calling "The Martians" (this absolutely befuddled me until I asked for an explanation; she said, "Aren't Martians always blue?" and I had to explain, from my vast background of science-fiction knowledge, that Martians were almost always little green men, not blue. But the name stuck) who are everywhere holding signs, radios, and clipboards, and doing all the grunt work of directing the hordes of lost spectators where they need to be in time to see their next event. We stood in line next to another guy from Seattle whose girlfriend is volunteering here; apparently all they get is the coat, hat, and pants, but the work they are doing is amazing.

The guy and his girlfriend seem to have the right idea. They found a cheap room at a hostel and have been scarfing up tickets wherever they can get them. They got tickets to the opening ceremonies, which apparently were amazing (we haven't seen them yet; we'll watch online later in the week). He liked luge, so he was going up to see that while his girlfriend had a shift volunteering.

If our accommodations hadn't been so up in the air and times weren't otherwise tight, it would have been fun to do that and play it more by ear here. I imagine they will have an amazing time. We're having fun ourselves already, and I'm looking forward to getting out and seeing what else is going on in the city over the next few days (protests aside; we missed yesterday's since we were up the mountain when it was happening for the most part). It is vibrant out in the streets. We got back in town around 2300 or so from the mountain, and it was as busy as when we left. Anyway, we made it to what we had hoped, and enjoyed it, and are looking forward to the rest of our stay.

I'm already awake earlier today that I had planned, so it's almost like a free day, although we have to devote some time to housekeeping and boat work so we can be ready to leave again next week.

Gassed up and ready to go

I'm just sitting around here right now watching the sun setting, cooling my heels until Mandy gets home. As soon as she does, we're off! Everything is looking good so far except the forecast... and that, at least, comes with the consolation prize of southerly winds later in the week, which should help speed us north. As for the clouds and rain... well, it's the Winter Olympics, isn't it? Could be worse... could be a lot colder than fifty!

We'll send Spot updates en-route.

It would have been a nice time to depart

This morning was when we would have been heading north if Mandy's work had not intervened at the last minute. I got up early to help her load some stuff for her presentation into the car. It was surprisingly warm out, cloudy, but dead calm and quiet out on the water. The floats were damp but it wasn't raining at all, and the tide was up, higher than normal, which makes for a nice ebb current to ride out north. All in all, it would have been a perfect time to head out, even without wind. In fact, sometimes I like to start out without any, to get out on the water and see the glassy calm stretching off into the distance, broken only by our own wake.

All in all, it would have been just about a perfect time to get going. We'll see how things are looking Tuesday night.

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.