Destination: San Juan Islands
We are nearing the end of a vacation week that took us to the San Juan Islands. Late Friday afternoon we sailed in some pretty solid breeze of 18 kts all the way to the Port of Kingston marina where we had a reservation for a slip that night. On Saturday we made our way to Point Hudson marina in Port Townsend and enjoyed pandemic-time takeout from Banana Leaf Thai Bistro. We spent some time studying our Canadian current atlas and used our newly printed custom log books (we used Printivity, really great customer service there!) and our paper charts to choose some waypoints that would optimize our path up to Mosquito Pass on Sunday. The planning paid off and on Sunday we rode currents up to 5kts between Lime Kiln and Mosquito Pass.
We anchored Sunday afternoon in lovely Garrison Bay, home to English Camp National Historic Park. The bay stretches south past a small island and extends into a narrow channel past what looked like a private camp or retreat with a giant yurt on one side and some cabins on the other. The bay had many boats Sunday night and many left and were replaced Monday. One replacement Monday was a boat chartered by our friend John and some of his sailing buddies from California. John was one of the other crew on the Mahina Expedition with us last October and we hope to have him aboard when we can finally sail Pasargada south to California after the pandemic restrictions are eased.
We stayed three nights in total in Garrison Bay which included being invited aboard the roomy charter boat for a couple meals and staying up late talking with John and his long-time friend on Tuesday night. Tuesday we explored some of the trails around English Camp Historical Park walking all the way over to the nearby shellfish farm on Westcott Bay. On Wednesday morning we planned to pull up anchor at 8:30 AM and head north around San Juan Island and try to hit Wasp Passage with minimal current. Nojan smelled some melting plastic when doing an engine compartment check which led us to needing to replace a cable to the alternator (luckily we had a spare) and re-tension the alternator belt.
We checked that all was well and were underway only two hours later than planned. We fought the currents through Speiden Passage under motor and made it to Wasp Passage and say really no more than a knot of current against us. We noted that Pole Passage also didn’t look that bad and considered it for future trips. Sadly we did not stop at Deer Harbor Marina for ice cream. We explored West Sound of Orcas Island and felt that the only clearly secure and inviting looking moorage was the bay south of Victim Island. We have an older Gunkholing in the San Juans book by the Nybergs that made the north end sound inviting but it really seems that more sediment and population has set in so we didn’t take their advice of anchoring north of Skull Island, either.
The bay south of Victim Island was fairly full and had some steep dropoffs so we decided with expected southerly winds the safest bet would be to try Blind Bay on Shaw Island. It was a pretty short trip to motor over and find a nice anchorage in 20 ft of water near the local mooring balls and private floats.
We spent a night in Blind Bay and enjoyed the calm water for using the SUP in the morning then headed east to meet some friends at James Island. We initially tied up to a mooring ball and walked around the island a bit but then when the currents died a little we went to the more sheltered west side of the island and rafted up with our friends and their boat Marie who had a space on the dock. They are normally our neighbors on our starboard side at EBM so it was like being at the home marina.
Friday morning’s weather was supposed to be 15-20 knots according to all forecasts, but as we started to head south we were quickly registering up to 33 kts on our boat. Around 11:30 AM the marine weather included a gale warning and we were already on our way back north, surfing waves in Guemes channel, to get up to a protected anchorage on Cypress Island.
So Saturday we ended up sailing all the way from Cypress Island back to Elliot Bay Marina. We had the current with us for a good part of the journey but the winds started dying quite a bit when we got to Edmonds and the currents started to change. We finally turned the engine on after sunset when we were at about the same latitude as Shilshole. We stayed on the boat at our marina overnight and did cleanup on Sunday.
The trip was great testing the solar panel output and learning that the freezer really needs to be at -18C, not -17C to keep things good and frozen. I also got one layer of varnish on the teak around the companion way and designed a pattern to sew a storage caddy to hold water bottles and other things on the back of the steering pedestal so they aren’t rolling around underfoot in the cockpit.
More solar panel!!