So this post is like the little hidden “easter egg” at the end of a movie.  I remembered that not only do I have an iPhone, but the darn thing also takes photos. 😉 I also have a few thoughts after  living on a sailboat for a few weeks:

1. I cook 1000 times more on a boat than I do at home. This is mostly to avoid having to drive the boat.  She has autopilot but it seems like every time Jason needs me to watch the boat for a minute all hell breaks loose.  Jason has to pee and suddenly there are 4 ferries, a log tow, and a typhoon.  So it’s better to just avoid that sort of thing. Hence the cooking.

2. Due to the above observation, there’s also a shitload of dishes to be done on a boat. Every meal requires the washing of dishes. Yes, it gives me something to do, but I’m so sick of washing dishes in a sink that’s the size of a large pan itself with the stupid faucet that’s hard to use when your hands are soapy and wet. Meh. Paper plates next time.

3. Turns out 2 engineers are pretty handy at fixing things that go wrong on a boat. So that’s good to know. I hope we got most of the major stuff ironed out, but if the shit hits the fan when we’re out in the middle of nowhere, I’ll be feeling pretty good about the situation.

4. Our little boat has no place to store clothes.  We lived out of a duffel bag for 2 weeks. It was essentially really fancy camping. Our next boat will have a closet or at least a few drawers.

5. Three books isn’t enough books. I even bought some books. Read them in an hour. So yeah. Bring ALL the books!

6. So many dogs. In Friday Harbor literally every single person was attached to a dog. If there are 5 people on a boat, there are 5 dogs. It was a bit ridiculous. …and they weren’t all small, portable dogs either.  There were labs and retreivers and german shepherds etc.  Where do they poop on the boat? I don’t want to know the answer to that.

7. There’s a distinct lack of graffiti in Canada. Maybe it’s just not in their culture to deface things? Japan is known for it’s politeness and respectfulness and there’s graffiti everywhere.  I had to search really hard to find some in Canada.  It’s always around the bridges though. But still… for some reason I really like to shoot it, and it wasn’t there. Super sad.

8. The Canadian grocery store was way way more entertaining than it should be. You’d think they’d just have the same stuff we get here in the US but there would be a whole row of maple syrup? Yes, there IS a whole row of maple syrup, but there’s a section of british food, Indian food, other European country food… and even a terribly hilarious “Mexican” section. That and all the labels are also in French…which I had fun trying to pronounce.  I made Jason read me the French on the bag of chocolate chips. It may have been the most romantic thing he’s ever said to me…but then again, I really love chocolate chips. 😉

9. I kind of assumed that cruising would just be sailing around reading books and relaxing etc.  Which is probably what normal humans do on sailboats (with a glass of wine for good measure!) but I can’t sit still for more than an hour unless I’m on Pinterest, so I cleaned the everloving shit out of the boat. A few hours every day.  I waxed the entire interior a couple times, cleaned the bilges, swept the floors, waxed the floors (slipped on the floors, and regretted waxing them but did it again because it looked nice), cleaned the kitchen counters, spent a few HOURS scrubbing the stained floor of the bathroom to make it look nice, reorganized the tool box, buffed the blue stripe on the hull, sanded and stained the wood brightwork, polished anything made of stainless, scrubbed the moldy white life ring (that stank!), scrubbed the canvas covers… it was seriously ridiculous. Then we went out to the boat AGAIN today and continued the cleaning… The other side of the rails that I didn’t get to finish while underway are currently drying and I’ll apply the final coat of oil tomorrow.  On the plus side, the boat looks about as brand new as a 1984 can look… but on the minus side I’m TIRED! 😮

10. Making coffee on a boat is hard… I never bonded with my French press, so I decided to boil water each morning for pour-over coffee.  Pretty tasty, but if the seas are ever rough I’m not going to be able to make coffee.  It would be a disaster.  I also want to buy a small 4 cup electric coffee pot for when we’re on shore power.  Although I’m going to run an experiment to see how many amps the little pots draw.  Maybe I can run one off the boat batteries.  It doesn’t really heat that much water and it doesn’t run very long. That would make my life easier.  I also had to buy a larger coffee cup.  I made my delicious morning coffee and added sugar and milk as usual… and realized that the cup was 97% full and if the boat moves any I’m going to get scalding hot coffee all over my face.  That sounds unpleasant.  More research shall be done on this topic.

11. I saw a fair number of boats with cats! Now I’m considering whether my cats would be ok on a boat.  Duster would probably be just fine on a boat once he realized he wasn’t, in fact, going to die.  Dart, however, is so dumb he would probably fall off the side of the boat in under 15 minutes. Maybe I’ll take them down there just to watch them walk around and see what happens.

12. Another thought about Friday Harbor.  It was fishing season and the marina was packed with fishing boats.  We watched our neighbors cooler of beer for him (we don’t drink, so whatever) and in return they gave us a plate of shrimp from their dinner feast. I guess it’s shrimp season. Either way, I’m contemplating buying some shrimp pots because those things were tasty!

So you may be wondering “but Ashley! I love following your adventures! Where could you possibly go next that could top this!?” Well, lets see.. We’ve already started planning where we want to go next year on the boat.  It was pretty easily actually.  Jason talks about “getting away from it all” pretty much every day and he kept spouting off about places like Desolation Sound and Princess Louisa Inlet and Alaska and whatnot. I usually stop listening.  However, as we sat on the boat in Nanaimo and looked out across the Strait of Georgia at the vast nothingness of open water with snow capped peaks rising straight out of it I realized that had we known it would be that amazing looking, we would have bypassed the Gulf islands and just gone for it.  There’s something tantalizing about the possibility of just getting in your boat and heading North to desolate and beautiful places.  The Gulf Islands were actually quite developed and the San Juans are a long weekend trip for us… So I suppose Jason was right.  Next year we’re definitely going to Desolation Sound and/or Princess Louisa Inlet because of the following reasons:

So that’s that I suppose.  Time to get back to my house and my cats and go scuba diving and mountain biking and whatever else we want to do all summer! It was a great trip and I’m glad we got to go! 🙂