Is Mandy memorable?

I think she must be. I mean, I can't forget her, but she's around all the time so that may not be a real test. But apparently other people remember her, too.

Yesterday, she was up doing laundry here at the marina, and a woman walked in and gave her a funny look. Finally, the woman said, "Did you go to the Olympics last year?"

We get into a lot of funny conversations around here, but that might have been stranger than usual. In fact, we did go to the Olympics last year in Vancouver, BC. Of course, so did several million other people. It's not a question like, "Did you have dinner at Matador last night?" And it's not as if Mandy were wearing a Vancouver 2010 Olympic stocking cap, or clutching an Olympic mascot Miga doll or anything; she was as plain as possibly could be at the tail end of a laundry cycle.

But it turned out the woman was Jean, of S/V Perfect Fit, a Bavaria 37 that had moored next to us at the False Creek Harbour Authority docks for a couple of days during the Games in February 2010. We had chatted with her and her husband Mark a couple times as we ran into them, either coming or going during that busy week, but if you had asked me to pick either of them out of a lineup a year and a half later, no way.

At that time, they were living in Arizona and keeping their boat up near Victoria. Now it turns out they have moved themselves and the vessel, respectively, to Portland, and to N dock here at Shilshole. And, apparently, they remember Mandy. No word on whether or not I might have been similarly memorable. But anyway, we'll probably be running into them more frequently now, so that test is yet to come.

Keller Ferry

For a long time, whenever anyone said "ferry" I pictured not that hulking green and white apartment building-sized ships that cruise powerfully back and forth across Puget Sound with a backdrop of fog, green pine forests, and towering snow-capped peaks, but instead a little cabin-less thing shaped more or less like a dinner-plate with a few up-ended cubes of butter stuck around the periphery. This vessel, surrounded not by the verdant mountains of Western Washington but by the sage and sand hills of Eastern Washington, was the only thing I knew in my childhood that was ever called a ferry, and everyone always just called it "Keller Ferry."

We called it that because that's how you got to Keller, obviously, or the popular Sanpoil campground almost as far away. It's only today via a blog post by Captain Richard Rodriguez over at Bitter End that I find out that Keller Ferry has a real name: the Martha S. Even more incredibly, she's been on that run in more or less continuous service for more than sixty years, having begun in 1948.

I had always assumed, as a child, that this was the ferry, an assumption reinforced by the fact that the county it connected to the north was Ferry county (named, I also find this afternoon, not after Keller Ferry, but instead Washington's first governor, Elisha P. Ferry). I grew up not far from it and spent many a summer swimming and playing in Lake Roosevelt at a Park Service campground just downstream from the landing. If you waited until it got close the the landing and then dove under water and were still, you could hear the throbbing of the engines, a much different sound than the high-pitched whine of propellers from every other craft on the river.

I think about that now as I hear the throb of the Evergreen State through the hull as I sit moored near the periphery of the docks at Friday Harbor.