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

Big trip to Canada Day 15 (CB)

CB 23 September, 2008
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Saturday 26 July 2008

We did’nt have very far to go today, so there was no real rush to get going all that early, plus we had to pickup the fresh cinnimon rolls we had ordered last night. They were very tasty! It was a little over cast this morning, but no rain. And as has been the case more times than not, no wind either. We motored north towards Teakern Arm with a final destination of Cassel Falls.

The scenery up here seems be getting wilder, if that makes sense. Probably just seems wilder due to the fact that there are less and less people, houses, boats…. The further north you go the less you seen signs of civilization. Which is very cool with us.

We did pass a tug boat pulling a freakin GIGANTIC boom of logs from some timber operation even further north. And as we turned into Teakerne Arm and made our way to the end, you could see huge log booms tied up to cliffs. The guide books say that tieing along side them is fine. And we did see one boat doing just that. But I could not see us doing it. Not so much cause it seem dangerous, but more becuase the tug boats that haul these things will show up when ever and unhook them and tug them south to the lumber mills. And I would hate to be woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of a tug boat and blaring lights and have to move spots.

So we continued on up Teakerne Arm till we found the area near Cassel Falls. There are a few little coves to stern tie in. Although call them coves is giving them a little to much credit. The spot we found was barely more that a small curve in the shoreline. But it worked just fine for us.

One we got settled in we hopped in the dinghy and headed for the water fall. Oh and we fired up the video camara to film the high speed approach.

The really cool thing about this water fall is, you’ll notice that it is set back in a sort of canyon. Along the walls of this canyon are a couple log boom rings. These have been here for years, but people will back their boat in this little canyon and tie thier boat in here. It’s actually to deep to anchor. So your just being held in place by four lines tied to the log boom rings in the cliff walls. A boat did it while we were there, but we did not think to take a picture of it.

This water fall was awesome, and super warm water. It was actual really warm water, but hurt like hell standing underneath it.

**WARNING** The following video contains pasty white boy with a beer belly **WARNING**

Actually, when I watch that video i’m reminded of that Bigfoot video for some reason??

After that little adventure we headed over to the marine park dinghy/float plane dock and followed the trail up to Cassel Lake. With the waterfall being that warm, the lake was even warmer and really clear. We did a little cliff diving and swam around a bit before heading back to the boat.

As we were getting ready to go to bed it started to rain. First time since we left, not bad for the PNW. It was not a lot of rain, but I went up on deck to just hangout and chill for a bit. It was insanely dark, but the rain drops were hitting the water and causing the bioluminescence to flash.

If you don’t know what bioluminescence is. It is basically, light that is created by a living thing. The thing most of you might know it as is the light that a lighting bug makes. But in this case the light is a light blue color and is created by billions and billions of little cells that hang out in the saltwater. And when they are disturbed, either by a fish swimming, splashing an oar in water, or like tonight the rain hitting the waters surface, they give off a spooky blue glow for a few seconds. It really is one of the coolest things you can witness. It happens more in the summer months than any other time of year. I guess that is due to the water tempature.

Posted in Big trips, Canada Trip, CB, Maps, Palarran, videos | Leave a comment

This post is for Tom.

CB 22 May, 2008
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He said he wanted more sailing videos…..so he gets more sailing videos…

This video was taken last weekend, we had sailed over to Poulsbo for the towns Viking fest……uh. Small town wierdness, who does’nt love that. But we did meet up with some friends of ours on their boat Hawkwind and had a good time and a few nightcaps.

This first video was taken on our way over on Saturday evening. Unfortunetly we were sailing west into the setting sun. So there is a bit of glare. But you get the idea. The wind was blowing about 22-25 knots gusting to 27 out of the south. Nice, sunny and warm. Enjoy:

And this second video was taken a couple days later on our way home. Actually, we had to wait about an hour for the tide to turn in our favor so we could get through Agate passage. Same south wind, just not as warm as it was on Saturday. Only blowing about 12-15 knots.

Posted in Palarran, videos, Weekend trips | Leave a comment