Day 10: Hello, Friday Harbor!

Friday Harbor, on San Juan Island, is the biggest town in the San Juans, and the Island County seat.

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It has a ferry dock, a marina, and several streets where one can purchase for cash money such maritime essentials as Campari, avocados, and flags.

We also bought a camera. And skillets.

Phil got to drill a hole in the boat.

Our Big Adventure, Day 9: Blind Bay and Shaw Island

Things you often see in the San Juan Islands:

• Otters
• Seals
• Eagles

Things you occasionally see in the San Juan Islands:

• Whales
• SCREAMING DEALS!

With a Washington State Parks mooring pass, you can stay for up to three nights at any of the docks or buoys in the Washington State marine park system, all year long. For our boat, that comes out at a grand total of $130. Rosario Resort was beautiful, but Blind Bay was peaceful and quiet, and we definitely prefer anchoring out to staying in a marina. Blind Island State Park is a tiny rock with nothing on it but a little outhouse, a perfect little world to visit with a kayak.



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Shaw Island is the smallest of the ferry-served San Juan Islands. The only commerce is its incredibly well-stocked general store, which has a small selection of delicious locally grown produce and satisfyingly hot mustard produced by the sisters of Our Lady of the Rock convent.



The ferry dock itself used to be manned by nuns, but it no longer is.

We took the county road across the island, passing some quirky public art:

And a fascinating community noticeboard.



The roads were so like the summer roads I grew up with in County Limerick, along the Clare border: High ditches of grasses, nettles, docks, Queen Anne's Lace, thistles, dandelions, and a thousand other familiar plants and trees. It feels extraordinary to me how places so far away can have such similar flora, but the San Juans are roughly on the same latitude as Ireland. They had just taken in the hay, but the warm, familiar sweet smell still hung in the warm air, and the heavy buzz of bees was always in the background.

Along the way, there were kayaks and boats stored among the trees,

On the other side of the island is the Shaw Island County Park, a beautiful campsite, and a lovely sandy beach, the kind of beach where you'd build a driftwood fort:

Or just hang out in the sun:

Or go for a walk:

Near the park, the residents had just built and opened a new playing field:

It was so peaceful and quiet, and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and the fragrance of cut grass.

Dinner on the boat:

That night, we took the dinghy out and sat in the middle of the bay looking up at the stars. Four unlit kayaks slid by us in the dark. Outside, we could see the massive ferries passing, lit up like cities. It was magical.

Our Big Adventure, Days 7 and 8: Lopez Island to Rosario Resort

Goodbye Lopez! Years from now we'll look back on our first trip to your beautiful, jewel-like shores. Then we'll laugh awkwardly and quickly change the subject.

This is our first big trip, so we were pretty cautious with the planning. We included a bunch of marinas / resorts where we could tie up and know we could get water/power/Campari.

Rosario Resort has all of these things!



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The trip there was beautiful - smooth seas and bright sun.

It has a beautiful snug little harbor, where you can watch the seaplanes take off.

It has a lovely restaurant where Phil takes a Manhattan, and where the chef put together a tasty vegan dish:



It has a beautiful adults-only pool and an extraordinary music room with an amazing organ:

The historic mansion is really worth exploring for its amazing views, beautiful rooms, and exhibits. The marina has free wi-fi (no password required!) and free showers (no coins required! Towels provided!) . And the store sells growlers, which I find extremely aesthetically attractive and thrifty.

The Big Adventure, Day 6: A quiet day on Lopez Island

We hired bikes:

And suffered the consequences:

We explored the Blossom Grocery Store. It's tiny, but it ranks with the Farmer's Market on Maui as my favorite grocery store ever. It has all the essentials you would ever need, and all the treats that you would ever want.

New life plan: Winter in Maui and summer on Lopez.

We had a lovely lunch (mmm, eggplant burger with a delicious raw sauce of roasted peppers, soaked cashews, and dates) at the Love Dog Cafe:

Lopez Village has a wonderful local museum, with an excellent display of farm and fishing equipment from the turn of the last century. It's just there, out in the open, for you to wander through. I loved it.

Lopez Village is close to perfect! It's all about small-town democracy!

And literacy!

And lovely restaurants! and organic groceries!

It pretty much pushed all my yuppie-urban-culchie (YUC) buttons.

Also, we stopped by the Island Marine Center and I fell in love with this guy. Based on a display at the museum, I'm guessing Buster is a gillnetter. My dream is to restore him perfectly, and tool around Lake Union beautifully dressed, waving from the tiny pilothouse.

The Big Adventure, Day 5: Jones Island to Lopez Island

Day 5 started out awesome!

As I wrote in our last post, we walked around the west coast of Jones Island. The day continued bright and sunny, the skies were impossibly blue.

It looked like this:

Look at that hard sparkling water. I grew up by the ocean, and the constantly shifting sound of the sea is etched into my brain. It's so familiar.

We knew that wind waves tend to get higher as the day goes on, so after using up our leftovers for lunch we untied from our buoy and headed off towards Lopez Island, where we had reservations at the Lopez Islander marina.

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The marina is inside Fisherman's Bay, the approach to which is extremely shallow and also lined with the ruins of boats, which is super nice.

(image via familyyachtclub.com)

The day remained really bright and sunny, but suddenly (it was now about four o'clock) the wind started really picking up. This video doesn't do it justice, but listen to me when I tell you, it was very hard to keep that boat on track.

While we were trying to figure out how to get the boat into the slip in the wind, a seaplane came in to land. We moved into the mooring field to make room for the plane and a sailboat struggling to move upwind, and while we were waiting for the boat to pass, we felt the bump of a mooring buoy on the stern. Only a mooring buoy! But what we didn't know and couldn't see was that the buoy had a crab pot line attached, and what we soon realized was that we were attached pretty firmly to that buoy. Something (the buoy chain, we assumed) had wrapped around our prop and killed one of our engines, and we were facing the wrong direction into the wind with waves lapping over the stern. Things were not looking good.

Luckily there exists a channel we could use to ask for help! A channel that can be heard by anybody with a radio!

GOOD SHIP AISLING: Um, come in? We seem to be caught on a mooring buoy.
MARINA: OMG that sucks. Tell us how it goes.
GOOD SHIP AISLING: Any advice? Over?
MARINA: You should like totally call Vessel Assist.
GOOD SHIP AISLING: OK over
[pause]
GOOD SHIP AISLING: Um, we have no cell phone reception. Could you call Vessel Assist for us?
...
...

        [our huge thanks here to the marina for calling Vessel Assist for us. We really, really appreciate your help. You did an amazing job juggling phone and radio, and you saved us, and we are extremely grateful.]

MARINA: Hello Aisling? Vessel Assist wants you to know that this will be blurbitydurp dollars for a callout and another kudooper dollars if they need to dive.
GOOD SHIP AISLING: 
GOOD SHIP AISLING: OK.
GOOD SHIP AISLING: Aisling out.

But it's okay! Here comes Dane!

 


Dane's so cool!

Before he dives, he neatly lays out his instruments, which he bought used from a surgeon in Sherman's army:




He cuts us free from the CRAB POT OF EVIL!



After we'd said farewell to Dane! and finally docked our girl and walked into that marina, we had a bit of a swagger.

As soon as we sat down, a very nice group of people sent us over drinks to thank us for the show. They had been following it on the radio and providing their own captions as they watched us from the marina bar.

This must be what it's like to be a rock star.

Our big adventure, Days 3 & 4: Deception Pass to Jones Island

Deception Pass is a narrow channel that connects the Strait of Juan de Fuca (west) with Skagit Bay (to the east). It's how most boaters going north reach the San Juan Islands. During low tides, the current can lead to standing waves, large whirlpools, and roiling eddies (here's a video of a sailboat wrestling with the current), so you need to time your crossing carefully, with the slack tide - a short period of time either side of high tide or low tide when there is little to no movement in the water. In fact, powerboats can make it through pretty much any time, but it's still challenging to navigate and requires a lot of concentration on the part of the pilot.

Once through the pass, we were greeted by four or five porpoises who danced around us as the skies cleared and the sun came out.

Related: Why do we not own an actual camera?

We stopped at Deer Harbor on Orcas Island to fill up on water. It's a nice place with lovely friendly people. Aside: Look at this beautiful boat. It's shorter than ours but looks like it's built to cross oceans.

We anchored that night at Jones Island, a tiny uninhabited nature reserve and a state park. It has composting toilets and water taps but no showers. It has the loveliest campsites I've ever seen, some of which are reserved for kayakers.

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Instead of anchoring out or tying up at the tiny dock, we used one of the mooring buoys. So easy! (Tip: Hook onto the buoy from the stern.) Check out the amazing seaweed underneath the buoy that makes it look like some sea monster.

Phil set up our solar panels. These give us enough power to run the fridge, and the wi-fi (where available - in other words, when AT&T doesn't assume we're in Canada), power our lights and heat, and charge the dinghy engine without having to turn on the generator. They worked great!

Jones Island is beautiful. It's so small, and yet it's packed with wildlife. Over the two nights / three days were were there, we saw eagles (including a dramatic seafull-eagle takedown), seals, otters, crows, woodpeckers, jellyfish, leaping fish, pigmy deer, and so much more. (Again: NO CAMERA WTF?) The flora is equally diverse and reminds me so much of the botany of western Ireland, which is on a similar latitude: the mosses, daisies, thistles, little orchids ... the grasses, the lichens. And of course the trees. In 1990 a huge storm took down thousands of the trees on the island. Some of the fallen trees were dragged away, but many remain and have sunk back down into the forest floor, covered in moss or serving as the soil for new straight trees.
To see life in all its exuberance, its tenacity, variety, and adaptability, in such a tiny, self-contained place, was intensely moving.

Over the course of two days, we walked around the island in each direction. Going east from North Bay, you come to these perfect little coves, which provide great access to a beautiful green lawn and lovely camping spaces.

The west side is drier and sunnier, and has the only cactus found in the San Juans:

Have you ever seen a lovelier camping spot?

Here's the view from the west side of the island, looking towards Stuart Island on the left.

Sunsets were nice.

Goodnight!

The Big Trip, Day 2: Langley to Deception Pass

It's official: Phil is on vacation.

After breakfast today (black beans, avocado, and salsa - my favorite thing), we left Langley and headed up towards Deception Pass. We went slowly to save gas and because! we have time! It was another perfect day, with a blazing blue sky with just the right amount of cloud to make it interesting. In other words, about four hours of this.

We ate lunch on the way and arrived in Deception Pass about five. It's so beautiful.

Phil is definitely on vacation now.

This is Good Guy Keith, who runs the dock.

Keith gave Phil a just-caught Dungeness crab for his dinner - much to Phil's surprise and delight! We have no crab-cracking implements, so Phil improvised with a can opener. This went well with the salad I made in a Ziploc bag because I forgot anything that could be used as a salad bowl.

The animated images in this post come courtesy of Autoawesome - magic that just happens to your Google+ photos. I love it!