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, 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.

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! 

The Big Trip, Day 1: Seattle to Langley

Yesterday, a little later than we'd planned, we left Seattle on our big trip: three weeks in the San Juan Islands - by far the longest we've ever been away on our boat. And the city has rarely looked so beautiful - it was in the mid 70s, sparkling and sunny. We were ready for adventure!

Lake Union has bright and sunny, but windy, which was a bit stressful at Morrison's fueling dock. But we gased up and through the locks we went:

Oh, it was so beautiful on the other side. I've never seen the Olympics so clear. The cruise to Langley was perfect: sparkling water, waves no more than a foot, seals popping up their sleek little heads to stare at us go by.

The Langley marina is cosy and sheltered, and a very short walk from the town, which was holding an arts festival. And the first tent we saw was that of my lovely ex-coworker Sella, who has left the heady world of technical communication for the more sparkly charms of making and selling her own beautiful jewelry. Sella is at the Redmond farmer's market - you should check her out.

Langley itself is a charming town, full of restaurants, galleries ... you know the drill.I fell in love with its tiny movie theater and immediately resolved to one day manage a repertory cinema in a small seaside town.

We stopped at the lovely wine tasting room for a glass of rose:

And then on to dinner at the Inn at Langley. We went here last year, and I'd be happy to go here once a year for the rest of my life. It's definitely a special-occasion dinner.  They have a set menu (vegan options available), much of which is based on the principles of molecular gastronomy. The food is delicious, playful, and beautiful.

This was a wonderful first day. I am going to take the opportunity here to say that the boat was the tall fella's idea, an idea that I resisted for some time. Now I am so grateful for these experiences and memories. Thanks, Phil, for seeing it through and working so hard to make Aisling ready for our adventure of a lifetime. You're the best.

More pictures here.