Distance traveled: 48 miles
Excited to get to Anacortes to meet up with Cathryn's sister Susan and her husband Bob, we woke at 5:40 and pulled the anchor at 6:45 after coffee, saving showers and breakfast for later while underway. It was cloudy and calm with a forecast for great conditions.
Bob says that with all new (since last summer) electronics: chartplotter, rudder angle indicator, depth sounder, radar, AIS, autopilot, compass and more, we hardly have to drive the boat: Garmin and Apple do it for us. There's a Garmin 741sx Chartplotter installed at the lower helm in the salon, and we use two iPads at the upper helm, one mirroring the chartplotter, the other running Garmin Blue Charts, a mobile app. It's nice to run one iPad scrolled in close up to see all the detail (rocks, kelp beds, rip tides and every mark or buoy) and the other scrolled out to large scale to get the big picture of the lay of the land and our route. In the photo below, on the right side of compass is the Garmin GHC 20 Autopilot with the remote just below and to the left of the compass. And in case we don't have enough, if you look closely we also have two iPhones, an iPod and a handheld Garmin GPS. Cathryn thinks that Bob is a techno-geek (but she doesn't seem to mind that it's all there.)
Near Deception Pass we came upon a sailboat race and found ourselves in the thick of 30 or so boats, threading our way carefully among them as they all had the right-of-way.
The pretty lighthouse north of Deception Pass means you're getting close to Anacortes.
Inside Guemes Channel approaching Anacortes, it's a busy place with lots of huge commercial shipyards, including giant dry docks. Some even hold Washington State Ferries for maintenance.
The first half of today's travel the tide was running with us, so we made 8- 10 knots. The last 2-3 hours we bucked the current and ran only 3.5 - 6 knots.
Mammoth yachts, and funny little boats like the one above are fun to see.
At Cap Sante Marina, we found Terri and her daughter Savannah selling live crabs from their working boat. Terri's husband is a diver who harvests sea urchins to ship to China and sea cucumbers to ship to Japan for sushi. We just wanted Dungeness crab.
So the veggies got shoved aside and 4 live Dungeness crab found an overnight berth in the drawer of the refrigerator. Dinner tomorrow.
At 4pm sister Susan and her husband Bob arrived and collected Bob to attend an orientation for their charter boat for the week. They have a beautiful 36' Grand Banks, "Allure", well-provisioned, well-maintained and comfortably appointed. The guy giving Bob Shaffer'sorientation was sufficiently impressed with Bob's experience and intelligent questions that he skipped the usual "on the water check-out". Woo hoo! Tomorrow we take off.
