Day 3

WOW. What a wild three days! We knew there would be hiccups along the way… and we were right. Let me preface our theatrical stories by saying that despite our troubles, we’ve had a fabulous three days full of beautiful scenery, an array of wild animals, some hysterical laughing, and perhaps a tiny bit too much wine.  It’s off to a good start!

We’re currently spending our second night in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island and it is jaw-dropingly beautiful. We love Friday Harbor in the off season. It’s quiet, and we lucked out with sunny (although a bit cold) weather. Why are we on our second night here you ask? The San Juan Islands are great… but don’t you need to be on your way to Alaska? More on that later.

I’ll just list our “highlights” thus far below:

What is the water witch??? :  Only a few hours into day 1, there is a loud obnoxious beeping coming from somewhere up on deck. After some frantic searching, we find that the “water witch” alarm is flashing. We turn it off, but have to look up the alarm in the manual. We find that it has something to do with the bilge, which pumps water from the boat into the sea. We change the setting that needs to be changed, and move on. It’s cool. Crisis averted.

Docking (?) in Port Townsend: We arrive in 25 knot (very fast) winds with plans to dock at the city dock and go into town for dinner. That didn’t happen, because as far as we could tell, the city dock didn’t exist, and even if it did, we might not have been successful at docking anyway. We tried once at what we *thought* was the city dock, but we couldn’t get close enough and as we were circling around to try again, we noticed the 4 signs warning us not to dock there… oops.   So instead we would drop anchor. No big deal… that’s easier than docking. We find a nice spot right next to where the charts plopped a big fat anchor symbol (indicating that this is a GOOD place to anchor). Which leads to our next highlight…

The crazy anchor man:  It’s windy. We’re cold and hungry. We’ve just let out 150 feet of our anchor chain and are about to dig it in -the last thing we need to do before settling in for the night. And this man comes whizzing by in his sailboat screaming at the top of his lungs to us. In a nutshell: Don’t you even think about anchoring there. It’s dangerous. You’ll lose your boat. It almost happened to me. Did I mention DANGER? I’m warning you… don’t freaking do it. We did it. We watched our location for hours, and it was a solid anchor. We were fine and very happy we didn’t listen to this guy, but he did give us lots to laugh about.

No water? : We learn when trying to make dinner in Port Townsend that water tank two is no more. It was full this morning, and now it’s completely empty.  After Captain Diana (who in another life was certainly a mechanic) has dissected the entire water system and come up with several plausible theories that could be the problem, we discover that some of the 80 gallons have flooded into the food compartments (thank heavens the chocolate wasn’t ruined). I, being the 23 year old (already a running joke – being young and “fit” (that’s the real joke), I get to do all the work),  start pumping out the water using a plastic cup and a bucket. It takes me an hour or so, while Captain Diana and Paula continue to try to solve the problem. This is not the glamorous way we thought we’d spend our first night on the boat. But we’re laughing anyway. One of Captain Diana’s theories as to how this all began? One too many baguettes. We’d stuffed 28 Costco-bake-at-home baguettes into the compartment with the water system, and perhaps it just couldn’t handle it. We couldn’t get enough of that.

“At least it’s not an engine problem:”  Paula tried to make everyone feel better about our water problem by saying that it wasn’t an engine problem thank goodness. We’re learning not to jinx ourselves. After a lovely, - normal – day of boating to Friday Harbor, we set off for Nanimo. We make it just barely outside of the harbor when SMOKE comes out of the exhaust. Bad smoke that smells like burning rubber.  We freak out a little, cut the engine, calm down, and put up the main sail. At least we’re a sailboat so we can steer using the wind. After seriously considering trying to sail back into the harbor (Captain Diana totally could have done it, but man would that have been stressful), we call the vessel assist people who come and tow us back (that’s a new experience) to the harbor after about a half an hour of us circling around engine-less.  Now we’re back, hanging out in the harbor waiting for the mechanic to pay us a visit tomorrow. What an adventure!

For anyone joining us on a different leg of this trip… please don’t be turned off by our fiasco of a sendoff. This isn't typical, and if there’s anything I’ve learned so far, it’s that my mom (Captain Diana) really knows what she’s doing. And we’re still holding to the idea that we’re getting all of the hiccups out of the way in the first week. We’ll (probably) be back on track tomorrow!