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.

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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

When the hell will winter end?

CB 2 April, 2009
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I for one don’t care. While the first part of this winter really sucked (Snowboarding wise), the last half has really picked up some steam. It’s been dumping in the mountains, and the snow keeps piling up. So I keep heading up.

Last weekend Tawn and I got up early and met Danno at Steven’s Pass ski resort. Actually, he met us, since he over slept a little. Normally we’d all drive up in one car, but he had to be back to work on Monday and Tawn and I decided we were going to go snowshoeing and stay the night in a NSF (National Forest Service) ranger cabin for a few days. We had never done this before and it sounded pretty cool.

Snowboarding on Sunday was great. As you can plainly see by this awesome action photo of me flying through the air on my board:

Tawn couldn’t go cause she tweaked her back at work a few weeks earlier. So she went snowshoeing instead. Sunday afternoon, instead of heading back to Seattle and home, we headed east and down in to the little town of Leavenworth, Wa. (Towns website) As you’ll gather from their website, it’s a cheesy little tourist town that models it’self after a little German Alpine village.

A few days before Tawn had found this site: www.recreation.gov and further in she found this Ranger cabin  and we reserved a night to stay there.

We woke up Monday morning and started heading towards the cabin. It was only 50 some miles way to drive so we got there about 11am. Parked at the trailhead and unloaded the packs and snowshoes from the Jeep. The trail to the cabin was actual pretty well packed down. So we did not even need to put on the snowshoes, even though the snow was probably 2-3 feet deep.

The hike to the cabin was only 2.5 miles and we got there in about an hour or a little more. Here are a few pictures of the outside of the little cabin:

And of course a few pictures of the inside for balance and closure….if you need that sort of thing:

As you can see we had to hang our packs up off the floor as there were a couple very industrious mice that lived in the cabin. They worked there little ass off all night trying to get into everything. Tawn kept throwing boots at them during the night as they rattled around in the kitchen trying to get into the pots on the stove.

That little stove may not look like much, but we got a little over zealous in the loading of the firewood and got the tempature in the cabin up to 90 degrees F. We had to go outside and stand in the snow to cool off and open the windows a few times. :)

We mostly sat around, read some books or took a few hikes, oh and tawn found a small piece of an old sleeping pad or something under one of the bunks, so she decided to climb up the hill behind the cabin and slide down on her new found ‘booger’. And as luck would have it, I had the camera with me, and turned on:

On tuesday we were going to do some more hiking and try to find a few Geocaches that were in the area, but when we woke up. It had snowed 6 inches over night and was still dumping. So we decided to just cook some breakfast and head out. We did not want to get stuck on the East side of the Pass if they closed it due to avalance danger.

This is a picture of Tawn getting ready to leave, wearing her Snoopy hat that she has had since she was 5 years old. Her head is still the same size!! WTF :)

And one last shot of Tawn, Me and the cabin……Thanks cabin!

My hat is not that old and my head size is steadily increasing in size….! WTF indeed.

Posted in Adventures, CB, snowboarding, Tawn, videos | Leave a comment

A little work around the house.

CB 27 October, 2008
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Nobody likes house work (no normal person anyway). And even fewer people like watching videos of house work being done. But I thought this one was pretty cool.

I’m not going to go into all the details of why a boat has zinc plates on them. It’s part magic and part science as far as I know. But basically, the zinc is a weak sauce metal that corrodes faster than the other more expensive more important metals on the boat, like the prop shaft, prop or through hulls. So as with most things in nature corrosion takes the path of least resistance and corrodes the zinc plates first before attacking the other stuff. This of course mean that from time to time, usually about once a year, we have to replace our old worn out zincs. They are cheap, $20 buck or so each, but it has to be done.

In order to be effective they have to be under water. The easiest, driest way to change them is to do it while the boat is out of the water. But since that only happens maybe once every 4 years, the other options is to pay someone to SCUBA dive down and do it for you or, if you have your own SCUBA gear, do it yourself.

Since we have our own SCUBA gear, we did it ourselfs. I did it last time and this time was Tawn’s turn.

So with nothing to do while she worked, I grabbed the camera, stuck it underwater and filmed her as she replace the old prop zinc with a new one.

Posted in Adventures, CB, Dock, Palarran, Scuba, Tawn, videos | 1 Comment