Next Stop Chile!!

CB 10 October, 2009
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In about 24 hours we will be getting on a plane and headed south to Chile.

The first leg is leaving from Seattle around noon to Atlanta Georgia. Then a overnight 10 hour flight from Atlanta to Santiago, Chile. Then on a bus for a 12 hour ride down to a town called Puerto Montt. From there, we have no plans. No reservations. Just 3 weeks in which to hangout and see what it is we can in that short amount of time. Most likely will be renting a car.

I plan to update the site at least a couple times while we are down there. But I”m not taking my laptop. So, it will be short sweet updates from my phone as we can find Wifi. Most pictures till we get back will be phone pictures.

See you when we get back.

Posted in Adventures, CB, Chile, Tawn | Leave a comment

Wow! What a summer!

CB 19 September, 2009
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Summer time is obviously not the best time for me to be updating websites. Not with weather like we’ve had this year.

My last update was back in May. It is now, somehow September and we are planning for our big trip to South America next month. But more on that in a bit.

Normally we take a 2 week or longer cruise on the boat and go north to the San Juans or Canada, during July/August. This year however, we did not. We wanted to be able to take as much time as we could on our trip to Chile this fall. So we limited our sailing trips to just weekend outings. And trust me, we had some doozies.

We had some great, trips this year. Hit all the usual spots and a few new ones. The weather out here has been spactacular this year. Super warm and really good wind for sailing. We spent the 4th of July rafted up with a great bunch of friends in Poulsbo for the fireworks, and Laborday with the same group rafted up in Port Gamble Bay. And tons of anchorages and weekends in between, up and down the Puget Sound. There are more than a few pictures up on various “friends” facebook pages to tell the story of my 42nd b-day, and laborday, and other random weekends in between……up and down the Puget Sound. Yeeeeesh!

I don’t think i’ll go into the details of each trip. I’d be typing for days. I did however want to get this post started and the webpage in general updated.

As I mentioned earlier, our big trip this year is three weeks down in South America. Chile, to be more specific. And to all you non boat people reading this. We are NOT taking the boat down. We are flying.

Leaving here on October 11th and flying into Atlanta, then on to Santiago, Chile. From there we are taking a bus down to Puerto Montt, which is about 700miles further south. There we will rent a car and see the sights. Other than that and the fact that we have to be back in Santiago to catch a plane home on November 4th. We do not have any plans or intenerary. No reservations, no schedule, no checked luggage to carry around, no nothing.

We do have a small back pack each with a couple changes of clothes, a guide book, a brand new camera and 3 weeks to see as much as we can. I or Tawn will be updating this site and our facebook pages as often as we can when I can find a free Wifi hotspot.

Posted in Adventures, CB, Tawn | Leave a comment

I just realized, my digital camera has become part of my memory.

CB 9 May, 2009
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I was sitting here thinking that I should do a better job of updating this site, and as I was trying to recall what we had done since the last time I updated, and drawing more than a couple of blanks.

I thought to myself, “hmmm, maybe I’ll look at the pictures on my camera”.

And then it hit me. Each weekend was sitting right there, in chronological order. Mostly out of focus or poorly framed, but there none the less. So instead of racking my brain trying to remember details from 2 or 3 weeks ago, I’ll fire up the camera and take a trip down memory lane.

The weekend after the last update, Me and Tawn sailed down to Quartermaster Harbor, which is on the south end of a Vashon Island. There was almost no wind so we ended up getting there a little later than we thought we would. We had brought our mountain bikes with us this time, so we went for a  bike ride after we had tied up at the docks. The sun was setting just as we got back.

We woke up the next morning to a little more wind and a nice sunny day. We sailed out of the harbor and headed a short distance away to a little town called Gig Harbor. It had been 5 years or so since we had last visited Gig Harbor. And that was on Thanksgiving on our little boat “Strange Crew”.

The wind was actually blowing pretty good, but as we got out of Quartermaster Harbor, we had to go against the tide. And while the wind was not blowing very hard, it was enough to push us along at 2 knots, however, the tide was running against us at 3 knots. The net result was us moving backwards at 1 knot. That was not very productive.

Gig Harbor is probably the most protected harbor in the entire Puget Sound. The entire anchorage is surrounded with the exception of a small opening on the southern side that requires a tight “S” curve to get in. It’s even tighter at low tide, which is when we just happened to come in at.

As usual, pictures just do not do it justice, but I’ll post them anyway to give you an idea of what it looks like. This is the entrance into Gig Harbor. The picture was taken about 100 yards from shore. As you can see, or not, it looks like there is no way in. The plan is to head straight ahead towards that little grey house in the center of the picture, then turn right towards that lighthouse on the right of the picture:

Once you get to about 20 feet from shore, you’ll see the entrance open up and it looks a little more inviting. The grey house is just out of the picture to the left and the lighthouse is just out of the picture to the right:

Since the tide was out, the depth in the entrance was very low, the depth meter showed we had about 4 feet of water under the keel. Tawn was on the bow keeping an eye out for rocks, just in case I got out of the channel. Once inside the depth increase to a respectable 15-20 feet. While Tawn was on the bow, she shot a quick little video of the entrance as we came through:

We headed home on Tuesday, unfortunatly there was not a puff of wind, so we had to motor the whole way home.

The next weekend is the cheesiest boating related weekend in Seattle. It’s called “Opening Day”, and it’s basically when the retards with the blue blazers and scramble egg “Captian” hats parade their boats up and down a piece of water called the Montlake Cut, to much pomp and crapenstance. It really is very stupid. I’ll not speak of it again.

Posted in CB, Palarran, Weekend trips | 3 Comments

Ooohh! Summer like conditions…for a couple days at least.

CB 23 April, 2009
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Things, weather wise are warming/drying up. For short periods of time at least. Easter weekend, however, was not a good example of good weather, but we untied the boat anyway and headed over to one of our favorite anchorages (Manzanita Bay) for just chilling out and relaxing in. Our friends Dave and Jen on their boat Epic, and Phil on his boat TipToe, with Rhonda & Jason along as guest were gonna be there waiting on us. We all rafted togather for optimum fun.

Since Tawn and I had to work on on Saturday, we would be a couple hours behind them, and by the time we got there, dinner was almost ready. And holy crap was it good. A big ass ham and scalloped potatoes….and a bunch of other stuff.

After dinner we sat around with a few cocktails and ended up talking each other into trying our luck at Squid fishing. Either our luck was lousy or we had no clue how to catch squid. And in all actuality we did not really give it that much of a try. 30 minutes tops.

We woke up on Sunday morning to some spectacularly shitty weather. It was absolutly pouring rain. The plan for easter was to have B-fast on our boat, then a boozy easter egg hunt. Tawn made our traditional Easter B-fast, “Eggs Germeraad” for everyone. They were a huge hit…oh and bacon….mmmm bacon…

The second part of the plan involved hiding plastic easter eggs that we had filled with little bottles of booze. But since the rain would not let up, no one really wanted to go to shore and hid them. So we hid them on the boats and everyone looked for them and stayed nice and dry.

Everyone else had to be back to work on Monday so they headed back to Seattle around 2pm. Tawn and I headed south a short distance away to a little marina called Brownsville, that we had never been to before. Nice sleepy little marina, but since it was easter sunday. There was not a lot going on.

Monday we headed to Poulsbo and grabbed a slip at the marina there. In the summer time this marina will be filled to capacity with visiting boats. In the spring, fall and winter, we had the place to ourselves:

Tuesday found us back home in Seattle. The weather was awesome and the wind was perfect. Managed to take a very cool picture of Mount Rainer:

Word on the street was that the next weekends weather was gonna be sunny and warm. So we invited a few friends to go for a sail with us on Sunday afternoon. We also made plans to meet up with Phil and Kristy on TipToe again.  At first we thought we would all just pile in one boat, but the list of people kept getting bigger and since the weather was supposed to be nice, everyone showed up. So two boats it was.

Things got a little delayed, but we left the dock at around 2pm. The sun was out and the wind actually picked up to between 15-20 knots out of the North.

On our boat was Me and Tawn. A buddy of mine from work, Zach. A friend of Tawn’s from her work, Lola and her B-friend Josh. And Jen from Epic, Dave was down in California working, so could not make it.

We had a great fast sail over to Port Madison. By the time we got there, the other boat, TipToe, was already there and anchored. On board were Phil, Kristy, Jackson, Erin and Sam. Once we got tied up along side. The sun was even warmer and the winds were blocked. We had tons of food and drink. Holy crap was the food good. Zach grilled up some Thai chicken and Lola brought some sort of awesome ass rice salad freaking delicious good thing. Then Sam made these killer tacos. And and I don’t mean those bullshit tacos that you make at home. But those really, really good tacos, that you get from the taco trucks at construction sites. Soooo goood.

I stung up the hammock we all just hung out laughing and telling stories till around 7pm before pulling up the anchor and heading home. The wind had almost completely died by then, so we motored home.

I can tell already, It’s gonna be a great Summer!!

Posted in CB, Day Sails, Palarran, Tawn | 4 Comments