23-25 December 2018

Sunday the 23^rd was a grey, wet, and cold day in Victoria.  When we woke, we thought we’d have Adventuress around 4:00PM, nearly dusk.  Originally, when we thought we’d take delivery closer to lunchtime, we had planned to do a provision run after we got Adventuress tied in a slip.  Now those plans were out the window, and we rearranged our plan.  We’d grab provisions before getting Adventuress, drop everything at the hotel while we got Adventuress into her slip, and then afterwards, one of us would go back to the hotel and cab to the marina with all our stuff.  As the morning progressed, however, that delivery time moved up playing merry cob with our ability to make plans for a provision run and getting her ready to go.  Eventually, we got a firm unload time of 2:00PM.  Luckily, our shipping agent had a rental car and was able to pick us up gear and all, and get us to the dock.

When we arrived at the dock, there was a small crowd gathered, despite the weather and the holiday rush.  The yacht that had been Adventuress’ closest companion on the deck of the Adam Asnyk was being unloaded when we arrived.  Our shipping agent explained to us while we watched from the car that the loadmasters were all his crew, and they travelled the world to unload the yachts that they shipped.  Local union crane operators and stevedores provided extra hands, but were directed by the loadmasters.  There was an inflatable runabout on hand to ferry us and our gear out to meet Adventuress.

The operation to get Adventuress back in the water was smooth and practiced.  Within minutes of slipping the other yacht in the water, they had the sling back up on board and men swarming around Adventuress to get her in the sling.  Under the direction of the loadmasters, Adventuress was hoisted up high and then swung over the side and gently laid into the cold, deep waters of the Pacific Northwest for the first time.  Tied bow and stern to the Adam Asnyk, the sling was undone and the runabout pulled up alongside Adventuress.  We were transferred to our boat, and under our own power within an hour. 

Adventuress was filthy, having ridden the bow of the Adam Asnyk for thirty-two days through two oceans, the Panama Canal, and one monster Pacific storm.  She had some minor mechanical difficulties—a coolant leak having emptied the overflow tanks over the intervening time since September.  But otherwise, she was in good shape.    We got her engines turned over and soon we were on our way to The Nicest Marina in the Pacific Northwest.

The Nicest Marina in the Pacific Northwest is the brand-spanky new (as of a few months) Victoria International Marina.  The smallest boat they take is 50’ and slips are currently available for 39-year leases at a modest $2 million Canadian.  Everything was swanky, from the LED running lights all around the marina to the thirty-four security cameras to the screaming fast wireless.  They even had comfort rooms for crew.  We were literally the smallest boat in the marina (excluding tenders, and even then, some of them were giving us a good run for our money!) and the largest boat in the marina was easily a hundred feet.  It had a full-sized Christmas tree in a salon the length of our boat.  The swankiest touch, though, were the cleats.  Stainless steel.  (Eyes rolling…)

At the head of the marina was a “pub” named the Spinnaker.  I put “pub” in quotes not because it was divey.  It was the opposite of divey.  Comfortable and well-lit, the menu was all locally-sourced, amazingly prepared food.  The three-pig pizza had sausage, smoked bacon, and pulled pork on a bed of red and caramelized onions.  The grilled salmon sandwich had chipotle aioli, red onions and fresh greens.  The cheese on the truffle fries was made on Vancouver Island.  All of their beers and cidars were brewed on premises.  And as if that wasn’t enough, they made their own chocolate truffles.  Yum.

Did I say The Nicest Marina?  And the moorage was STILL cheaper than Fort Lauderdale!

The next morning, the sun rose piercing through cloud cover.  The water was calm and there was a light drizzle as we made ready to go.  That happens a bit in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve noticed.  Rain falling from the sky while the sun shines.  Quirky, but it makes for great rainbows.  And rainbows there were as we pushed away from Canada.  From there, it would a straight shot across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. 

The waters of the Pacific Northwest are deep and cold, and quite unlike the waters of the Eastern seaboard.  It is a beautiful (some might say delicious) irony that colder water supports more life because it can hold more oxygen than warmer waters.  In the dark, deep waters of the Pacific Northwest, we have salmon, halibut, and the larger Dungeness crabs.  Orca, sea otters, and sea lions feast here.  Oysters, clams, and mussels grow fat on our rich waters.  And the great Pacific octopus is fully large enough that the local aquarium moves their octopus in a fifty-five-gallon drum.  Sea monsters from some sailor’s fever-dreams for sure.  We don’t have gators, thankfully, but we do get toxic algal blooms.  And there are hazards here, as everywhere. 

One of the most dangerous hazards in the Pacific Northwest are deadheads, waterlogged logs that hang vertically in the water column.  They might look like nothing so much as a little blip on the water, or nothing at all, if they’re but a little bit submerged.  In the Pacific Northwest, higher than usual tides can float driftwood logs from the beach, and after Thursday’s storm, there was more than the usual amount of debris in the water.   Some of it was land-based debris, but some of it was great strands of kelp ripped from the sea bottom.  Some of the debris was so large, we saw sea birds gathering on them, taking their ease and gossiping.

Motoring along about an hour out from Victoria, light chop made spotting debris difficult.  Both of us were on watch.  There was a sudden and loud thunk on the hull.  Throttling back immediately, I was in position to see a Michy-sized log emerge in our wake.  Oh-oh.  We throttled up slowly first on one engine and then the other.  A check below decks to make sure we weren’t taking on water, and whew!  We were OK.

Another thirty minutes later, I was on the helm.  I’d throttled down to weave our way through another debris field, when we a grating rattle started from below.  Pulling back to full stop, we drifted through the remainder of the field and then tried revving up the engines.  When we throttled up the starboard engine, we had a short moment of smooth running and then the awful rattle.  Bah.  We’d bent something. 

Robert and I both being data center engineers, and redundant design being a must to keep a data center up and operational every millisecond of every day, we had chosen Adventuress and deployed systems partly based on her very redundant design.  Two engines.  Four fuel tanks, two radios, two chart plotters, two helming stations.  You get the idea. 

Now we were very glad to have been so … well, so redundant.  We weren’t dead in the water.  We had one operational engine.  And so, with one engine, we made our way across the border.

Did you know there’s now an app for that too?  No joke!  The Border Agent could see from our GPS position where we were and could pull up our immigration information and clear us to cross into the U.S., all without us having to put into a port.  He called us within minutes, and a few more minutes after that, we got a text that we were cleared.  It was awesome!  (It also meant that we needn’t have been so conservative with our food shopping.  Ah well…)

We made the crossing quite a bit slower than we had originally calculated, because we’d throttled back our one remaining engine in an abundance of caution.  But boaters being boaters, when we got to Port Townsend (the Point Hudson Marina), fellow boaters set aside their holiday festivities to help us dock.  Bless their boater hearts. 

We had maybe fifteen minutes of daylight to spare.  Who was worried?  Not us!

Our food stores were very low.  We had tea and coffee, and the fixings for PBJ.  Oh, and a bottle of micro-brewed bourbon.  You know, the important things.  We had to get to the grocery.  Before it closed on Christmas eve.  One helpful Chatty Cathy on the dock, watching the doings and happenings volunteered that the food co-op “at the end of the Main street, only ten minutes’ walk” had a decent wine selection.  Great!  Sounds like out kind of grocery!

It was not “ten minutes’ walk” away.  Let me just say.  But it did have a good wine selection.  And cheese.  Meat, not as much.  But we would not starve.  Actually, we ate pretty well.  Grilled pork chops with sautéed apples and blue cheese, corn pudding and some Thai black rice from the deli, and yup.  A bottle of wine.

While we walked back from the food co-op, we discussed our next move.  We could stay in Port Townsend and seek repairs in Port Townsend after Christmas. Or, we could try for Seattle on one engine. 

In favor of staying in Port Townsend was the fact that we’d have to push against tides nearly the entire way to Seattle.  In waters closer to the equator—like the Gulf of Mexico—tides don’t vary that much.  But farther away from the equator, the tide swing can be much more extreme.  Combining the tide with our interesting local geography, and tide push was definitely a factor you had to consider.  The first time we came into Admiralty Inlet with Safari, for example, we got a such a sizeable tide push that we topped 23 knots, almost twice Safari’s cruising speed.  Tuesday’s tide was supposed to swing something like ten or more feet. 

But the weather spoke against staying in Port Townsend.  The Pacific storm that had whipped up such havoc last Thursday had died away, but in the wintertime, winter storms can and did march like soldiers one after another through our area.  We’d have a calm weather window until Tuesday, but not much after that. 

Eventually, we decided to make the push to Seattle on one engine.  We would push from Port Townsend at first light and if we made five knots, we’d be able to put into our slip in Seattle by 3:30.

Christmas morning, we awoke early from slumber because the burgee started flapping.  The burgee—a triangular flag sporting the design of our yacht club—flies from the bow of our boat, and the sound of the flag flapping transmits through the hull.  Adventuress was telling us that the wind had started kicking up. 

We got up then, and after coffee and some breakfast, we assessed the situation as the sky gradually lightened.  The wind, we decided, would make pulling from our slip a little tricky, but not impossible.  As was our usual procedure, we had our pre-launch conference and made ready to go. 

Boats with a single screw tend to track to one side.  This tendency is called prop walk, and it is the product of the rotation of the propeller.  Boats with two working engines track straight.  An experienced captain can use prop walk to steer a twin-engine boat just by engaging each engine independent of the other.  Adventuress, now a single-screw engine, couldn’t be engine steered out of the slip, but luckily, we had a decent bow-thruster that could be relied upon to help us avoid collisions.  With Robert on the upper helm for the best visibility, and yours truly doing the eyes-everywhere thing, we made our way out of the slip, and safely back into the open water.

Ironically, the conditions were… amazing.  Our early morning fear that the wind would be untenable proved to be totally unfounded.  The water was mostly calm, with barely any waves, making spotting debris easier.  Sometimes the water stilled to silvered glass. Sometimes the sun broke through the cloud cover to splash golden hues all over our blue and grey winter world.   The only challenge was the tide, that slowed our pace from our usual cruising speed of seven knots, to somewhere around five.  In a few spots, we even dropped to below four knots.  But we weren’t anxious to get to Seattle quickly, only safely, so the last leg of Adventuress’ maiden voyage was pleasant. 

At 12:28 on Christmas Day, we crossed the ferry lane between Kingston and Edmonds and Adventuress had her first sighting of Shilshole Bay.  Home waters were at last in sight! 

As we approached closer, we worried that the government shutdown (the third in 45’s not even two-year administration) might mean that the Ballard Locks were closed.  Certainly, even if the Locks were open, the lockmasters weren’t getting paid.  And working on Christmas Day to boot.

But again, we needn’t have worried.  As we came within sight of the locks, we were signaled into the small locks by lockmasters happy and jovial.   The small locks, unlike the large locks and almost every other lock we’ve been through, is a box that is designed to float as the water level is raised or lowered.  This means that the bollards you tie to move with you, eliminating the need to have crew standing by at your lines to take up or let out slack as needed.  But the bollards in the small locks posed another challenge.

The bollards are about the size of a small ham or two fists if you’ve got meaty chops, and in order to secure your boat to a bollard, you gotta get out your cowgirl skills.  That is, you need to throw a line around the bollard in such a way as to catch the line. I got the line around the stern bollard pretty easily, as it was closer, but the bollard in the bow was five feet or more away.  The lockmasters—plural, there were something like six of them all cadging about—offered all sorts of “helpful” hints:

“More slack!”

“Try aiming for the wall!”

“More slack!”

“Go slower.”

“More slack!”

“Slower!”

“More slack!”

All the while, I was thinking, “Not helping guys!  Shut up already!”  Eventually I wrangled that troublesome bollard, and the peanut gallery cheered.  That was the least they could do.  Riding up the locks, we chatted with the selfsame lockmasters.  They were such a happy lot for having to work on a Christmas Day and for not getting paid, that we gave them truffles for their troubles.  With cheery “Merry Christmas” they gave us the OK to lose our lines and we were on the way.

We had a great surprise in store for us as we pulled from the lock wall.  Our friends Bill and Peggy standing at the rails to welcome us home.  When we finally came in sight of our slip, more friends lined the dock to help us tie up and welcome us home.  It was wonderful, to be met at the dock by so many friends.  The glow of Christmas cheer was quite enough to chase away the chill of a wet December evening, and the first night in her new slip, Adventuress played gracious hostess to a Christmas dinner filled with friendship, cheer, and love.

Finally, on Christmas Day, some five months after we had started Adventuress’ maiden voyage, we were glad to be home.  At long, long, long last.