We bought Blue-J last fall, but unfortunately she needed a little bit of love to be able to actually take out and sail. She’s all sorted out and it’s time to go sailing! Jason and I finagled 18 whole days off of work to devote to our big adventure. Due to the newness of the boat we didn’t feel like trying to make it all the way up to Desolation Sound or Princess Louisa Inlet (maybe next year…) so in our usual fashion, we didn’t plan anything at all and have decided to just go where the tides and our whims take us! We’ve been packing the boat up all week long because if we wait until the night before we’re always up until midnight, and on a voyage of this nature, that wasn’t going to cut it! So with the boat fully stocked (food, sleeping bags, and every camera lens I own) we left our home dock at the Port Orchard Marina early Friday morning to catch the tide out with Port Townsend in mind as our first destination.
We were headed up along Bainbridge Island through Agate Pass to fully utilize the outgoing tide when Jason realizes that there’s a bridge at Agate pass and we don’t know how tall it is.. or how tall our boat is. After careful calculations (Iphone searches) we decide to go for it. There was another sailboat following us and I saw him stop and wait for us to go under the bridge just in case it didn’t quite work out. Their boat was a similar size. (honestly, I was hoping they would pass us and go first as their boat was much faster). After a few minutes of holding our breath, we made it under the bridge with about 15′ to spare and a subtle reminder to research our routes more thoroughly. 😉
So with that drama behind us, I got fidgety and started taking photos of all the interesting waterfront homes. They’re all so unique!
Fidgety turned to boredom. Not really boredom, but only so many people can screw with the boat GPS at the same time, so I took some detail photos of Blue-J.
It was NOT a very pretty day. Not raining, which was nice, but overcast and hazy. Not conducive to gorgeous panoramas of the open ocean like I had in mind. Drats!
We had planned to pull in to Port Townsend around 2-3. Not too bad, pretty easy day. But the weather forecast started talking about “gale warnings” etc etc for tonight and we started talking about how maybe we should just go ahead and get to the San Juans. So we went for it. It was only a couple more hours across the Strait of Juan de Fuca and up through Cattle Pass at the south end of San Juan Island. I’ve seen Port Townsend a lot, might as well keep going and see something new! The weather even cleared up a bit! It’s a good sign.
The weather stayed pretty nice but the current had switched direction by this point and was now at maximum flow through the pass. There were just sections of standing white capped waves and places that looked calm and flat but were really just water boiling upwards from below. It was pretty intense. I managed to get photos of a few of the breaking waves, so I was happy with that. 😉
We ended our unintentionally long day with a delicious homecooked meal (brought from home because cooking is hard!) and glorious evening sun overlooking our nameless little harbor we chose to anchor in.
Day 1 of 18 was pretty successful! We made awesome time! No idea where we’ll be tomorrow! 🙂