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.
Continue reading “Last Port Before Home”Category: People
Posts that focus on people. Generally, people we have met while sailing, but not always. We generally identify people with as much information as we have, but often times we leave out their surname, sometimes because we don’t know it, other times because it wasn’t something we thought to include.
Floating Southward
Eagle Island, WA, 20-SEP-2024 – We’ve been floating southward with little urgency and less stress. Jennifer does not want to sail at all, but when there is wind I’ll set sail and we’ll sail for as long as it lasts.
Continue reading “Floating Southward”Midcentury Star
Rebecca Spit, BC, 21-AUG-2024 – We’ve run hell-bent-for-leather to get south and now that we’re here we have two weeks to get a week’s distance. We’ll relax a bit on the pace, and then get there a few days early – we hope. The weather next week looks wonderful.
Continue reading “Midcentury Star”Ketchikan, 2024
Ketchikan Yacht Club, Ketchikan, AK, 07-AUG-2024 – The world has changed since we’ve last been here. StarLink is the major yachting change and the cities quest for more tourists is the other.
Here in Ketchikan, we’ve started speaking to the boats we’ve seen along the way. Everyone stops in Ketchikan. There are the groups that travel together, either from a yacht club, or a tour led by a manufacturer. These seem to be the normal number moving back and forth.
The power boats are oftentimes aging sailors who sold their sailboats and opted for a power boat. They seem to enjoy them. Other power boats are working people, who in years gone by could never have come here, but now with StarLink and no need to go to the office, are here. During this summer Ketchikan harbor became completely full with no slips available.
Continue reading “Ketchikan, 2024”Thirteen days in Seward
Puffin Cove, 60º 11’ N 148º 20 W, 27-JUN-2024 – Tom, who so nicely pulled our mast, told me not to rush things, I’ll be in Seward for three or more weeks and he hates guys who have a date in their mind and work hard to make it. Tom was very nice loaning his building jack to raise the deck, using his bucket truck to remove the mast, and bringing me the blank RectTube to build the new compression post, but I always have a date and I work hard to make my dates.
Continue reading “Thirteen days in Seward”Three weeks in a Homer Boatyard
13-MAY-2024, Northern Enterprises Boat Yard, Homer, AK – This is day nine here. Wednesday or perhaps Thursday will be two weeks.
Things are going well. Projects are being completed, or abandoned as not feasible, others defiantly refusing to behave as they have. The many packages continue to show up… some early.
30ºF -1ºC
11-MAY-2024, Northern Enterprises boat yard, Homer AK – It was thirty degrees Fahrenheit last night. The coldest it’s been since I arrived nine days ago.
I’ve been getting good, steady work done and finally decided to make a few phone calls to friends outside of Homer and one inside.
Continue reading “30ºF -1ºC”Christmas is near, Jennifer is leaving, friends are coming and I start to think about boats and boating.
Port Townsend, 8-Dec-2023 — Tuesday, I’ll go down to Gig Harbor and install two additional solar panels on John Riley’s boat, this will give 320 watts, which is roughly what I have on Caro Babbo. Instead of two one hundreds, he’ll have four fifties to aim as he wants, in addition to the 130 on the dodger. It’s cold here and cloudy, there hasn’t been any sun in a few days and his house battery has died. I’ll buy him a new deep-cycle house battery for Christmas.
It is Christmas, at least for me. I’ve started shopping…on line… and figuring out money. I’ve spent a lot more this year than I had intended. I’ve helped friends, and have family to attend to. Jennifer is off to Berlin and Flora may come to visit for a day or two (or perhaps a week or two). My stepdaughter Samantha arrives on the 21st, with all the attendant flurry that accompanies her, as well as her boyfriend.
Continue reading “Christmas is near, Jennifer is leaving, friends are coming and I start to think about boats and boating.”I’m still here
Port Townsend, WA 16-NOV-2023 – I’ve lost my sense of time: the unique feeling of how many days passed, or when something happened in the past, has left me. I attribute it to the stroke, but who knows? Like Billy Pilgrim, I’m adrift in time.
Continue reading “I’m still here”Last Week
Homer, AK, 12-Aug-2023 — lt’s dark here, it’s not night, the weather has changed, it’s blowing in Homer harbor. We’ve been up here four summers, and it’s difficult to say what typical Homer summer weather is.
The first year, 2020 was the lovely year, the year we based everything on. The next year we went to Prince William Sound, and the weather wasn’t bad, occasional storms blowing through. Year three was terrible, we sat and hid half the time. Year four we find we are tired of this: the weather hasn’t been bad, very little wind, but we find were just tired of being here.
Today it’s blowing, may be 20 in the harbor. It’s not bad. We don’t have a car this year, so we’re sort of stuck here, which isn’t bad, Jennifer and I like being together.
Continue reading “Last Week”