I want to relay to you the events of the last few weeks of our September trip up the Salish Sea. Because I’m adding to this log every other day or so, I might switch between past tense and present, depending on how I feel at the moment. Sorry about that. Just live with it. I hope you enjoy it. Here goes:
In 2010 when Connie and I bugged out and headed south together, we bought this 1981 Passport 42 cutter in San Diego and after a refit, sailed her down the Baja coast and into the Sea of Cortez where we spent some years cruising Mexico waters south to Zihuatanejo and north to Bahia de los Angeles. In 2015 we sailed to Hawaii and Alaska, eventually making our way to the furthest south you can get in the Salish Sea to arrive in Olympia Washington. She surely lived up to her name… SV Traveler. In all those miles of wind and waves she took care of her crew, seeing us safely to our destinations.
Here we are again, sailing Traveler north into Canadian waters, taking a month to get to know our boat again after spending too many years running short charters in the Olympia area and too many years getting caught up in life’s challenges.
This morning as I lay in bed blinking sleep from my eyes, I can see an oval shape of light dancing on the bulkhead and remember those other times when the rising sun flowed through that porthole marking progress on the teak wall paneling. The lower the oval, the higher the sun. The more the oval dances, the rougher are the seas. Thus, I awake, learning the direction we are facing, the altitude of the sun and the morning sea state.
As I move through this boat, even at night, in the dark, my body knows every hand hold and step. Lying in the berth, half asleep, I automatically reach up to that grab rail with my right hand so as to flip my body upright and then reach out with my left to connect with the door frame. I’m like a spider moving about with hands and feet knowing just where to go. Same for on the top deck. My body has its ways of moving about using hand holds, shrouds, stays, and lifelines.
It’s only Connie and myself on this trip and we’ve just once this last week had guests aboard and that only for a glass of wine and a snack. It makes me think of all those gatherings we’ve had in the cockpit or down below. Our Mexico years were filled with folks coming over for “sundowners” or bringing their instruments for a night of music and conversation. Oh, how many glasses of wine were spilled and then sincere goodbyes as our visitors paddled away in their dinghies. Often, we’d not see them again, but occasionally we’d find them years later, far away in a different anchorage. Back in the day, we exchanged boat cards. I’ve got a stack of them here at the Nav station. Going through them is a walk back in time.
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| Coupeville Wharf |
Cruising these northwest waters, we search out anchorages we’ve never been to and small towns we’ve never walked. A few days ago, we returned to Winter Cove on Saturna Island with the goal of improving a bad memory of that shallow bay. Years ago, we chose an inappropriate anchor spot and ran aground TWICE the following morning trying to get out of the bay. Now we have the pleasant memory of a safe anchorage, a good hike, and the horror (and fun) of watching a powerboat run aground on the reef. He got pulled off with a bruised ego and the ignominy of being towed back to port.
One thing that is different now, since the times we cruised here twenty years back, is the sheer number of large power boats and the lack of traditional sailing vessels. Back in “the day” it seemed there were more mom-and-pop boats that were shorter in length and of less horsepower, and whose crew were more willing to paddle around and visit other boats in the anchorage. At night, in Winter Cove, as we sit on deck to watch the sun set, we see big screen TVs lighting up the interiors of the power boats.
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| Whipping Boat Lines |
In the salon on Traveler, we have a couple of built in book shelves stocked with cruising guides and nautical books on piloting, ocean voyaging, boat repair, seamanship and tide/current tables. A lower shelf is reserved for paper charts and chart books. Trip planning brings out all this paper and we pour over them asking “Where shall we go today”. Sadly, all this paper has been replaced with a smart phone. On one of my sailing discussion groups someone bragged about using AI for his trip planning. Such a bad idea. But who am I? Just an old fart, set in his ways.
We found a grocery store a quarter mile upland from the Port Browning Marina and there we stocked up on fruit and vegetables, having depleted our stores so as not to cross the border with contraband. Likewise, we found the package store where I chose to buy some Cuban rum simply because it is illegal to purchase or possess it in the U.S. I chose that moment to offer my sincere apology to the Canadian people for recent actions by our government. The shopkeeper at the Liquor store had on a green uniform so I asked her if she would stand in as a representative of the Canadian people. She agreed, so with a flourish I sincerely apologized to her, the store, and everyone in line. She accepted, shook my hand, and gave me a receipt.
I gotta say, these Canucks sure are friendly. At the grocery store, the manager gave us a lift the quarter mile back to the marina. The marina manager offered the swimming pool, BBQ grill, and the hot tub for our use and all we did was show up and park for free at the guest dock. The gals at the pub were very sweet to us. The customs officer at Pender Island came aboard to view our two bottles of wine and then stayed telling us whale encounter stories.
It’s kind of crazy that we have these lines drawn on a map where vegetables and certain alcoholic beverages cannot cross. Just today on Spencer spit, we half assed searched for a special tree where years ago our friends buried their little stash of Canada marijuana so they would not get busted coming back into the country at Friday harbor. Likewise, they have a stash location on Sucia Island in U.S. waters for banking their pot before crossing into Canada. Now if we know people who do this, I’m sure there are lots of other folks traveling back and forth across the watery border who do the same. Think about all the little furtive stashes out there on those windswept islands and islets.
Ostensibly, when asked the purpose of our trip, I reply that we’re out to stock the freezer with Dungeness crab. Of course, it is way more than that. It’s a return to our favorite haunts and a search for new experiences. But I am pretty serious about getting crab. The more packets of crab in the freezer, the easier it is for us to survive the forty degrees and drizzle which is our typical Northwest winter. Thus far, our Washington state crab license (only $23.00) netted us four at Hope Island near Deception Pass and seven at Spencer Spit on Lopez. Then we crossed over into Canada and put our $130 crab license to work. We’ve tried and tried here in Canada and have only been rewarded with one barely legal male crab this entire week. And so we are turning tail tomorrow on the barren waters of BC and heading back to the San Juan Islands, home of plenty. That one $130 crab is in the freezer now. We’ll save it for a special event. We note that a fisherman at the Portland Island dinghy dock told us that the burgeoning otter population has been wreaking havoc on the crab harvest. Connie suggested that we cultivate a taste for Otter stew.
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| Princess Margaret Island |
On Sidney Spit we sit. A nice hike ashore and back on board doing an inventory of our ship’s store. Turns out that we have too much alcohol and too much vegetable matter to legally enter U.S. waters tomorrow. So, let’s stay an extra day and make a run to Sidney, the town. I want to pick up some Maple Leaf Crème cookies, a good loaf of bread, and some leaded crab float line. We lost 300 feet of weighted line attached to a shrimp trap that walked away from us off Princess Margaret Island. I hate to think of the poor shrimp who are now bouncing their way down Haro Strait in a cage that is attached to my little yellow float. But looking back at my previous failures finding spot prawns, that little trap is most likely unoccupied. I will need another 100 ft of line if I want to partake in the crab bounty that awaits us in the San Juans. So that’s a good enough reason to visit Sidney British Columbia.
Culture shock going ashore at Sidney. Again, everyone is so very nice in Canada. Passing someone on the boardwalk, they say hello, we say hello back. And it is fancy. Nice shops, well designed public spaces, public restrooms, benches to sit on, artwork everywhere. What a civilized place!
As we sat at the Pier Bistro on the Beacon Harbour Pier next to the Satellite Fish shop we gazed upon our sturdy vessel Traveler, at anchor not 100 meters off shore. The fish and chips were perfect, the crab cakes sublime. We watched folks using our boat in the background for selfies.
A dinghy push into the chop brought us back to the boat. Wind against waves troubling the water. Ploughing into the wind we motored back to Sidney Spit to drop anchor in the slight shelter of the lagoon. And there, while Connie played music below, I had the pleasure to sit, wrapped in a blanket to observe the comings and goings of the little public anchorage.
A blue hulled sailboat with three young men aboard arrived. We could hear one of them on the foredeck yelling “We’re coming in too hot!”. The captain spun the boat around and approached a mooring buoy. The two young men on deck attempted to hook it as it swam past. They missed. The captain came around again for a second try, this time at reduced speed. The dinghy was trailing behind on a long painter. As the boat stopped then backed, the foredeck team grabbed the buoy. I watched as the dinghy caught up to the ship, the slack line dipping into the water. I grabbed the VHF radio, “Intrepid, Intrepid, Intrepid , pull in your dinghy line before it gets caught in your prop!”. He replied, “Thanks.”. and I watched him take in the line.
The sailing vessel Normande is flying the French tri color flag under the peace symbol flag off the starboard shrouds. A woman in a course knit sweater gets in a small wood dinghy with a little fluffy dog and slowly rows to the public dock. Later she returns with the dog and a short, bearded man who sits very still in the back of the dinghy as there is only about three inches of freeboard keeping the little boat afloat. They see me looking through the binoculars. I wave. They wave back.
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| Orca |
Another small sailboat comes in. Two young men approaching the mooring buoy very slowly. He lays on the deck reaching down with his hands and just barely grabs the ring, passing the line through and securing it on deck. They sit in the cockpit and look at the western horizon.
An old motor launch with two bald guys takes three attempts to set the anchor in very shallow water. The finally succeed and then retire inside.
The boat next to us has a couple and a dog. The man and the dog take multiple trips ashore and back. The dog looks very happy and expectant every time.
As the light fades, a small white sailboat comes in and drops anchor right next to a mooring ball, saving himself the $23 mooring ball fee. I take this to heart because that’s exactly with we did earlier.
Morning comes, noon approaches, and it’s time to sail east and cross into U.S. waters. We’ve depleted our vegetable and alcohol matter and we’re ready to head back into the land of plenty. After we cross that imaginary line on the GPS that notes the separation of our two countries, I pull up the CBP (Customs and Border Control) Roam app on the cell phone. I’ve previously entered all our information there so we should be all set to check into the country remotely instead of running all the way into the Friday Harbor customs dock. I tap in the details and submit my request. The connection is made and supposedly an agent will be right with us. We wait a half hour, just bouncing around the imaginary line on the chart plotter. Two other boats are also nearby, also just bouncing around, presumably waiting for their check in. I even hail one of them on the radio and sure enough, they are waiting. After a half hour waiting, I stop the request, restart the phone and do it over again from scratch. This time, I wait for an hour. Still no reply. We crank up the diesel and head towards Friday Harbor. OK, we’ll just check in the old way, right at the customs dock.
Two hours later we arrive at the customs dock and I visit the unmanned kiosk, pick up the phone and connect to Customs and Border Control. The gal says that I need to use my smartphone and the CBP Roam app to check in. “Can’t you just do this on the phone now that I have you?” Nope. She suggests I uninstall the app, reinstall the app, reenter all the information and try again. I wonder why they don’t have the Friday Harbor kiosk manned with real people to process incoming vessels. Could it be that most of the CBP folks are busy busting migrants and harassing U.S. citizens instead of manning our borders?
Back to the boat I go, look up the password, uninstall the app, reinstall the app, reenter all the information and finally… finally, the phone connects me to an agent. She is a very nice person who checks us into the country and the offers a few free hours at the customs dock there in Friday Harbor so we can walk to town and reprovision.
We take her up on her offer, hit the grocery and restock vegetables, meat, wine and beer. Then we walk to the laundry to get change for the showers. The laundry now only takes an app for the machines. So… no quarters for us. Then we go to the showers. They have an app for the showers, just in case you have no quarters. We install the app and it wants us to establish yet another method of payment which is not Venmo, Paypal, or Zelle. I’ll be darned if I’ll start up an Apple Pay account just to take a shower. We walk back to the boat cursing all apps and wishing for a simpler time when we didn’t have all these apps to make our lives easier.
Fisherman Bay on Lopez Island is a marvelous place. It has a tricky entrance with a narrow, winding channel and only 12 feet of water at high tide. Once inside, there is ample room to anchor a hundred boats. The Islander Resort overlooks the bay. Because we arrived early, we were able to score a free reciprocal moorage with them. Our days start with the temperature in the cabin at 55 degrees, warming almost to 70 by mid-afternoon. We are used to it and dress accordingly. Visiting friends on the island, both Connie and I kept stripping off clothes until we were down to our skivvies. Warm kitchen, normal for most people.
After hot tub, showers, and laundry, we were ready to head north to Orcas Island. Up in West Sound, we found our old crab spot and the little Orcas Island Yacht Club dock where we took all the time in the world to just putter around, talk to our fellow sailors on the dock, and, of course, to catch and process endless crab.
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| Orcas Island Yacht Club Dock |
Around the corner in East Sound we find the public dock at sleepy Olga where we catch an enormous amount of crab. After the trap has soaked overnight, we head over to the float and I suit up in my bright yellow Grunden’s bib overalls. When I pull up the trap full of those orange beauties I can tell by the amount of effort it takes to haul it to the surface that I’ve got a good load. Once hoisted on deck I shake the trap around and identify the big males that seem like keepers. Then I carefully reach inside, grabbing the little ones between thumb and forefinger on their rear ends, avoiding those powerful front claws. Back into the water they go, to swim another day, to reproduce, and to grow bigger. What’s left then are the big males. I use the measuring stick to make sure they are at least six and a quarter inches across the shell. If not, back into the water they go. If so, I carefully grab them from the rear and toss them in a bucket of salt water. Sometimes they really fight to take my finger off so I have to be on my game. I count them out and when I reach the limit, five crabs, somebody gets liberated to swim another day.
Once the catch is caught and is in the bucket, a big pot of water goes on the stove and the murder begins. There is nothing pretty about it. I use our heavy winch handle to fish the crab out of the bucket. He comes out claws snapping, on high alert, in attack mode. Before he can scramble off the deck and overboard, I flip him over and give him a few quick thumps on his underbelly. The aggressively waving limbs slow down and curl in and he dies. Then I flip him over and crack the top shell. Even though the limbs are still moving, I know he is dead. Then I hold him over the water and rip him in half with my bare hands, spilling the guts into the water. I pull off the shell and the guts until all I have left is the legs and body meat. He’s made the transformation from a live being to meat. I thank the crab for his service.
Twelve minutes in the boiling water and the crab is cooked. It goes into cold water to cool down fast. Then we set the bowl of crab parts into the top of the freezer to chill it down even further. Back on deck I go and murder again and again, until anyone who recently came aboard either escaped back into the sea or found its way into the cook pot.
By the time we left sleepy Olga, the refrigerator was full of unpicked crab. That is cooked crab, but still in the shell. The side deck is smeared with crab innards. The galley is all steamed up and smells of cooked crab. The refrigerator smells of crab. My Grunden’s are a mess and I’ve got a stink under my fingernails that will take days of hand washing to leave me.
For the next three days we powered our way south towards home, and each day spent a few hours picking the beautiful crab meat out of the shell. As we motor south, with no wind to help us along, I clean out the crab traps, coil the leaded line, and rinse off the floats. We stow the electric outboard motor and the paddleboard then take buckets of water from Puget Sound and rinse the mud and crab detritus off the cabin top and side decks. The freezer is pretty full. We caught twenty-five crab this trip and are bringing maybe twenty of them home. As we clean the boat, I marvel at how beautiful she looks. Starting as a junky mess of line, traps and gear, when straightened out, she’s a sleek, teak decked, super ship that I do love terribly.
Connie is up deck singing and playing the accordion and I’m watching the sun over the trees as we sit at anchor in Port Blakely, forty-five nautical miles and about two days away from our snug home in Olympia. October is upon us and soon those wet, chilly days will come and we will celebrate with our weekly dinner of homemade crab cakes.
