Wednesday, September 17
Walt and I both rested well overnight, and we raised our anchor in the late morning of another “perfect fall day,” motored out of Blind Bay, and arrived in the marina at Deer Harbor, an unincorporated community of about 350 full-time residents on a southwestern shore of Orcas Island, at noon. We have taken Braesail out of charter service after eight good years of sharing her with other boaters, and she will now be moored in the small, charming Deer Harbor Marina before we head north for however long we like in the spring of 2026, and so we wanted to speak with the harbormaster to make sure that our arrangements for docking the boat in a suitable marina slip after this autumnal excursion were all in order (we found that they were). Deer Harbor has nice sturdy docks, a pump-out facility, a fuel dock (prices are high!), a pleasant general store/cafe/ice cream shop, laundry facilities, well-kept, clean restrooms and showers, a harbor-side restaurant, hotel accommodation, many water-related leisure-time activities, some parking above the shore, and mooring fees that are half those charged by the Anacortes Marina!
After treating ourselves to ice cream cones (filled with the excellent products of the Lopez Island Creamery), we left the Deer Harbor guest dock with the information we needed AND very happy mouths! We motored to spacious Reid Harbor on Stuart Island at the northern rim of the San Juan Archipelago, a long, lovely, well-protected anchorage we have visited many times over the years, and were met by a harbor seal whose sleek head popped out of the water as we slid by. The harbor provides “linear mooring”—a lengthy stretch of cable, onto which small floats are fastened, to which boats can tie up their fore and aft docking lines and thus can spend time in the harbor without having to anchor. I noticed that, on each of these floats, one or two seagulls were perched; they looked to me like bird-shaped beads on an unclasped necklace.
After we had dropped anchor and secured the chain, I looked into the water on which Braesail rested and detected two tiny, mostly-transparent sea jellies spurting about near the hull. They resembled bubbles fringed at the bottom with white lace, and I attempted to take a picture of one. They moved startlingly fast, and were great fun to watch!
After good naps, a snack supper, and some computer work, a ten-knot breeze began to whoosh and hum through Braesail’s rigging, a sound we hadn’t heard since our last boat trip in June! We watched some videos (boat travels along the northern B.C. coast, cooking, and a Masterpiece Mystery detective show), and as the wind wandered away to bed, so did we.
Braesail - A grand yacht in the Salish Sea 