Last Port Before Home

Eagle Island, WA, South Puget Sound, 26-SEP-2024 – In my past posts, I’ve tried to keep you up-to-date with where we’ve been as a setup for talking about the people we’ve met. People who I thought I would keep in touch with. People I thought were fascinating and worthwhile – a small subset of the people we’ve met.

I’ve failed on two counts: writing the factual things/never getting to the interesting parts, and never contacting the people I want to stay in touch with. The danger in the latter is that those people will not remember me.

We’ve slowed down a bit, though we have a date we want to get home for. This target date overshadows everything and Jennifer makes plans with that in mind. I’ve gotten so hands-off that I don’t object when they don’t match the things I want to do. I’m not sure why I don’t object, why I don’t push for alternate plans. I suspect it is because Jennifer’s plans are quite good, but either way, I haven’t been. Once we’re back in PT and the boat is emptied of blue water sailing equipment and supplies, we’ll take a look at one-week ventures this winter when the garden is no longer the item that needs attention.

I look at the amount of time we have before next May. It is months and months, and then I start overlaying all the other things we want to and need to do. I need to go to Atlanta to work on my house for a week or nine days. We have a winter road trip to New Mexico, we have a spring trip to Europe to visit friends and to go somewhere new. Then we have Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Years. Suddenly the eight months is getting pretty skinny. It’s odd to bitch this way. We have much stuff to do and the means to do them. It is merely arbitrating what needs to be done.

We left John Riley and sailed to Tacoma, where John met us, showed us his plants at the YMCA. We only stayed one night in Tacoma. We walked with him to the bus stop. Jennifer and I went to the Elks Lodge, which is owned by a company that buys historic buildings and turns them into bars and restaurants (and hotels). The next morning we visited the waterway museum, parked on their dock for a few hours, and learned that it costs much less than Dock Street – with no security and in a lesser part of town – but it is something to keep in mind.

We spoke with the people at Dock Street about moorings in 2025, which was one of the reasons to go there.

Then onto Eagle Island and a mooring ball on the west side of the island and then down to Olympia to see Flora and visit Swantown marina. It turns out, I’ve been to Swantown before, but by car, so I didn’t recognize it. Like Tacoma, Olympia started its climb upward only to be laid low by COVID and everything that followed. John did his bottom work there. Jennifer and I helped him, separately, one year. I worked with him before I left for Homer and our boat, Jennifer continued getting his boat ready for the water before joining me.

Olympia has a walkable downtown, a wood mill, and buildings from the turn of the last century that have not been updated. Many of them are bars and ‘antique’ shops that will disappear should Olympia’s revival take off. Olympia is also the capital of Washington State and has Evergreen State College, which is small but exerts its influence. Olympia is a college town, not a university town. (Tacoma has a University of Washington campus.)

It is past Labor Day and everywhere we go is accessible and lovely. It is perhaps the last week of summer, as it is starting to get cold and rain and winds are starting. The visitor dock at Swantown was almost completely empty. We stopped at the pump-out station on the way in to pump out, the second time in five years, and then Jennifer docked us at our slip, #109. Tied to the end of the finger dock with a piece of wire around its neck was a dead seagull. I commented to Jennifer that we’d have the management take care of it for us. It is a lovely setting (seagull excepted), walking distance from downtown. At the dock management office, we dealt with Inaca, a Dutch woman who booked our two-night reservation. ‘‘The seagull is there intentionally to keep away live seagulls, notice how there aren’t any. We used to have hundreds.’’

Huh.

Some government agency (I’ve forgotten which) buys them frozen and attaches them to the dock. The crows and otters eventually take them.

Son-of-a-gun.

Flora and her friend Chris came by and we all went for a walk around the town, then down to the railway tracks, and finally the farmer’s market. It was a good time. Flora is doing wonderfully at school and is enjoying the hell out of it.

That next day when Jennifer and I were planning where to go next, we asked Flora and Chris if they’d like to join us: they said yes.

At the marina, we learned that a number of people from Oregon keep their boats here, and the pricing of slips. It is $2000 per year less than Port Townsend and $3,000 less than Lake Union, but three days farther away. Much to think about, but we have ten months or so to do so.

We’ve stayed on the west side of the sound this trip. I had thought we’d cross over to Seattle to see Karen and Erik in Shilshole and Claire, who bought David’s Maxi 95, in Elliot Bay. Claire took too long to respond and that crossed out the trip across the sound. I’d like to do it this fall.

I haven’t been in touch with Karen and Eric and I should. We have other friends also living in Shilshole who I should contact, if we go there.

There is a list of people who I should contact from the trip. I’ll start either Wednesday the 2^nd, or this weekend. There is the couple who we walked around in the mud with. He was a teacher from the Comox area and she was one of the Gumboot Girls* who knew Ian and Linda from Grey Publishing. We met some people on a dock, while we waited for the current to change, who had to have been his students.

There was the wonderful couple from Ganges who invited us to visit on the way down. At the time, we weren’t certain of the weather and needed to get across the strait to Port Townsend. I have their names somewhere.

There was the woman who kayaked over when we were anchored in BC. She was marvelous and a good sailor. I can’t quite remember her name, but Jennifer knows her boat name. They anchor with a nylon rode and kept a good distance from us. We weren’t unloading the dinghy at that time, an easy habit that we lost and regained as we lost our hurry to get anywhere.

There was the man in Nanaimo with the boat named after a wine level, Grand Cru, Premium Cru… his spouse was a consulted in wines. These are the people we met in BC. There are the Alaska people, south-central and southeast. How many of them did we make the impression they made on us?

I did see Betsy Davis at the wooden boat show. She again didn’t remember me. She asked how many times we’d met before. I told her. She said what did we speak about. I told her. She remembered me for the rest of the show. I like Betsy a lot. She has a lot of responsibility and deals with many people, I don’t show up on any of those lists. There’s no reason for her to remember me at all.

This afternoon we’ll sail, we hope, to Quartermaster Harbor. We’ll meet with John for dinner and then work on his boat tomorrow. Then on to Kingston, the old Port Townsend (weather determining) and then into Point Hudson Marina.

Then, in parallel, by time of day, we’ll empty the boat of the things we’ve collected and stuff that shouldn’t be on the boat any longer, I’ll start to contact the people we’ve met, I’ll start transcribing the logs Jennifer’s written over the past 11 years, Jennifer will start working on her garden… that will keep her busy for the next few months; we’ll plan our trips for the coming eight months: car, boat, plane; we’ll plan Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years, we’ll have people come visit and make a busy life.

In there, I’ll continue to write this blog about Caro Babbo, the refinishing I’ll do, the people whose boats I’ll sail, the trade shows I’ll visit, and things that become more and more distant from Caro Babbo.

Thanks for being a reader.

BTW, I’ll probably change the requirements for making comments. I have about a thousand awaiting approval and need to be deleted. I’ve combed through them and approved those from people I know. I’ll change the requirement to require the commenter to be a registered reader to comment. At this writing, the database has been hacked. John Vins and I are restoring from a backup.

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* A book written by a bunch of women about their time in the Prince Rupert and Haida Gwaii (then known as the Queen Charlotte Islands). The book is published by Grey Publishing, which makes this a typical sailing story. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20468066-gumboot-girls

I thought I had written and referenced this book, but apparently not. Another thing to remedy.