Some time on the water, some on land

October 2-5

Thursday, October 2

Rain doused the Union Steamship Company Marina all night and into the morning. Braesail and her crew left the dock a little after 9 am and motored for 6.5 hours, at first in the rain and in slightly choppy water and then under clearer skies, to Annette Inlet on Prevost Island (we’d stayed in James Bay on the same island earlier in our trip). Winds blew until afternoon, but Braesail’s autopilot wasn’t functioning properly, so Walt worked on, and didn’t fully succeed at, re-calibrating it so that it would follow a plotted course and not simply a compass heading, and we decided not to attempt to sail. As we motored through narrow Active Pass, we passed two BC ferries passing one another, and I was able to document the activity.

There was only one other boat in long, shallow Annette Inlet, and we had no trouble anchoring. After taking refreshing naps on a tranquil afternoon, we did computer work and I cleaned out some of Braesail’s more remote storage areas and sorted their contents; Walt watched sailing and cooking videos after supper while I did some writing. Annette Inlet is known for its spectacular sunsets, but on this night the clouds weren’t in the right place at the right time, and there was very little color; the light of the waxing gibbous moon WAS lovely, though, as it trickled slowly into the inlet’s glassy waters.

Friday, October 3

We left serene, wind-free Annette Inlet at noon and motored for about four hours over the silky pewter-gray water and beneath equally gray skies, among the Canadian Gulf Islands and back into the San Juan Islands.

A floating house in Annette Inlet–no yard work, no lawn-mowing!

We had no difficulty crossing the US border using an entry app and our passport and trusted-traveler card information. We passed by Patos Island with its incredible shoreline sandstone “sculptures” (to find that there was no room, as usual, in its small anchorage), and we therefore decided to spend the night in huge, nearly-empty Fossil Bay on Sucia Island. At one point during our journey, I spotted the small dorsal fin of one, then two, and finally three whales of some sort—probably minke whales. We watched them for a short time, but they never showed us more than the tips of their dorsal fins. We WERE very pleased to encounter them–even small parts of them! Reading, writing, sharing supper, and performing clean-up tasks filled our evening, and we looked forward to another calm night, the last of this trip.

Saturday, October 4

On this final day of this trip, we rose at about 7:30 am and were motoring out of Fossil Bay by a little after 8 am so that we would have favorable currents. Again, the sea and the skies were quite uniformly steel-gray with occasional spills of filtered sunlight staining the water near the horizon. There was no wind yet again, and so we motored for about four uneventful hours, pumped out our holding tank, filled our fuel tank, and docked Braesail in her long-time slip in the Anacortes Marina for what will be the last time for a long time, as we move her to much-less-expensive moorings in Deer Harbor for the next half-year.

Walt had to borrow a jump-starter from the Anacortes Yacht Charters office in order to coax our Prius, parked in the marina lot for nearly three weeks, into awakening, and thereafter we carted garbage and laundry and some other items up the docks, loaded the car, stopped at the Lopez Island Creamery for waffle cones, and drove back to Everett after stops at COSTCO to pick up medications for Walt and some food items, at Best Buy to purchase a StarLink set-up for improved communication when Braesail is in very-remote locations, at Harbor Marine to buy a small boat-hook that will allow Walt to spin our anchor into its proper “docking” position after raising, and at West Marine for mounting clips for the boat-hook so that it can be installed in Braesail’s bow near the anchor cradle.

Home at last, we unpacked, found that our mail had NOT been held as I thought I’d requested (how many solicitations for charitable contributions, flyers, ads, newsletters, etc., had JUST been returned to their senders because we weren’t able to pick up our mail on Friday afternoon?), napped for a while, caught up on email, went out for burgers and salad, picked up some items at Safeway, and at last settled into the condo for the night and for Sunday, with our next departure from Anacortes planned for Monday morning. We’d had an excellent excursion, and were looking forward to returning to Vancouver BC to celebrate Canadian Harvest Thanksgiving on October 13 with our son Martin and some of our mutual Vancouver friends with whom we’ve been singing, for five-and-a-half years, the service of Compline online on Sunday nights using Jamulus software. An in-person gathering will be a great treat and blessing!

Sunday, October 5

The visit of our diocesan bishop to St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Marysville was a wonderful occasion with a good-sized congregation, great hymn-singing, a thought-provoking sermon, and a coffee hour that featured many tasty treats and lots of conversation. The small parish had not had a visit from a bishop for many years, and we were glad that we were present for such an auspicious occasion! We spent the afternoon and evening preparing for our return to Braesail on Monday, which involved Walt’s shopping and preparing to install the new StarLink communication system on the boat, and my doing three weeks of laundry and packing bags of clothing, food, and miscellaneous supplies.