Feeling Lucky


Summer sail of '08 is winding down. We're in Penn Cove (famous for their mussels) at Coupeville, a quaint little town half way down the east side of Whidbey Island. We decide to try sailing the "inside route" through Deception Pass back to Seattle, rather than across the Strait of Juan de Fuca as part of our "tourist in our own backyard" approach this year. The sun is showing some strength of heat (finally!) this evening as we settle into dinner and relaxation on our sun porch (cockpit). In the morning, I'll walk to the top of the ramp where we are docked and pick up fresh baked scones at the coffee shop where the friendly owner suggested I name my favorite flavor and he would have them ready.

It's been a rewarding trip in many ways. Our philosophy this year was to shrink the scale of area to explore. The San Juan Islands would be our area of interest, as last year we bypassed much of this area in our haste to get north. We slowed it down...enjoying and appreciating the things so close to home. We meandered about with great spontaneity, the wind, the weather and our mood as guide.

Of course, they call it the Evergreen State for a reason. The beautiful lush state parks among the island group receive their fare share of rain, as we can vouch for first hand. It has been an unseasonably cold and wet spring. The Seattle Times ran a headline the middle of June titled "Colder than Siberia", but for us...it was bliss. Clyde and I would hunker down below, with the stove pipe sputtering, the rain drops pattering. Books, blankets and tea. Yet another loaf of banana bread in the oven. In these moments, and there were many, I had not a wish or a thought of anything else.

During a break in the weather, I'd dinghy to shore for my run. I'd find a wooded trail, feeling like a lucky leprechaun dancing in the forest as the spongy forest floor gave off its heady earthy smells. Deer sauntered calmly off the trail as I approached. Jack rabbit hopped by. Bald eagles watched from their tree top nests. Wild berries, song birds and flowers decorated my way. Four foot tall fern and coal black slugs dotted the trail. Mothernature cast her spell, and I succumbed.

It's felt a bit like a month long summer camp, recapturing the carefree and whimsy. On occasion, we'd have movie night, where we deemed it feasible to draw from our house battery bank for a two hour show. This reminds me to tell you of a story of last summer's sail when we were anchored in Desolation Sound in a crowded little bay. The boat next to us had their stern speakers blaring, "sharing" their choice of music with the rest of us. After shaking our heads at their inconsiderate nature, a few hours later in the quiet of the evening we went down below to watch a movie...The Godfather. We, of course, didn't discover until the next morning that we had forgotten to turn OUR stern speakers off, and had transmitted all the drama and soundtrack of that classic through out the bay late into the evening. Ooops!

But back to the point at hand, which is this: We found that although we still had the element of discovery, it didn't really matter whether we where in Tacoma or Chatter Box Falls on our vessel, Fathom. One may assume we are taking her to new places, but in the end it is us who are transported, finding contentment and happiness in the simplicity of life afloat.

It is June 2008 and we are a month into a sojourn on Fathom that has ranged from Gig Harbor, Quartermaster Harbor, and Tacoma south of Seattle to Port Townsend and the San Juan Islands in the north. Everything about this trip has been serendipitous, or at least it seems that way. When we cast lines from the marina in Elliot Bay four weeks ago our overnight destination was a mooring buoy on the western side of Vashon Island for a visit with friends who live there. Since then, every day has been open and every destination the product of whim and weather, all of it the result of not engaging in long range planning.

Another way to put it is that we were determined to not have a rigid schedule and that approach to our outing evolved (or devolved) into simply not having a schedule at all. I've gotten settled with reaching places and not knowing how far I've come, but remembering what I saw along the way. Learning how to relax without set goals and a purpose is more difficult than it might seem. Part of the difficulty is learning to reward yourself for doing something that maybe only you and you alone value. For me it can be everything from staring long and hard at something that is beautiful and exists right before my eyes to paying attention to the noises on Fathom in the midst of a gale or taking care of things that break on the boat. But no matter what I am doing, the difference is that I am the one doing it. Typically, no one other than Carolyn is dropping by to offer encouragement or to tell me that it is worthless and she is far too wise to ever opine that I might be better off pursing something else, especially when I am staring off into space with puzzlement. This may be the only unexplored territory that is still out there - the moments we get to ourselves to let our minds roam and seize on whatever we find that interests us. You certainly don't need a sailboat to engage in that sort of exploration, but it doesn't hurt to be forced to slow down the way you do when you are out on one.

Some of those sorts of moments this trip have been occupied with pondering why we are compelled to give names to the objects that we depend on and even to some things that are flat out undependable but that we like anyway. In that vein, we have named not only this boat, but some of the more important parts of it. The Perkins 4-108 diesel has been dubbed Steady Eddie. The inflatable dinghy is now Wilson, after the basketball that nearly stole the show from Tom Hanks in the film Castaway. Wilson's little six horse outboard is Putt Putt. There isn't one reason for this festival of nautical christenings, but I at least comprehend some of the impulses behind it.

Part of it is atavistic, harkening back to a time when names were given because so much was nameless and people were still superstitious enough to believe that a fine tuned sobriquet could improve the chances that all would go well. Maybe that is why we skipped the opportunity to name Fathom something like Over Easy, Miss Direction, Stormy, or On the Rocks. You never can tell what happens if you tempt the powers, but I decided that conservatism was the better part of valor. Maybe another reason is just practical. It is so much easier to talk about Wilson than "the dink" or "the dinghy." And then there is that judeo-christian, mythical impulse for names - that the first and real power given by the gods to humans wasn't fire, but the ability name the constituents of the natural world and thereby establish dominion over it - shorthand for the proposition that any creature that could communicate with language had a leg up on the ones that couldn't. Finally, I probably like to name things because then I can anthropomorphize about them, and in so doing scribe little fictions that may have larger truths behind them. Take Wilson's and Putt Putt's recent rebellion for instance.

We had made the turn north from Tacoma and were on our way to Port Ludlow. The wind wasn't cooperating. It was dead on the nose from the north and only blowing three to five knots. Steady Eddy had the ball and was chugging along on an ebb tide. We were making such good time that at Point No Point, where we would have turned to the west to make for Port Ludlow we decided to continue on to Port Townsend. We had even made the call to the marina at Port Townsend and secured a berth for the night when I happened to look back and notice that our tow line was in the water but it led back to nothing but . . . water. I pulled up the line to see that it had come undone from the bridle and then asked Carolyn, who was driving at the time, when the last time she remembered seeing Wilson was. Neither of us could think past Apple Tree Cove, which was a good eight miles to the south. You know that sinking feeling that comes from simultaneously realizing something is missing and that it is likely to stay that way no matter how much you look for it even though you will spend a lot of wasted time looking? It was one of those moments when you are compelled to undertake what appears to be a useless wild goose chase. There were a lot of factors leading to that wrenching conclusion.

We were in a vessel traffic system with very large ships passing us, all of them traveling at a rapid clip. Wilson and Putt Putt wouldn't have made the sound of a feather hitting the floor if they had wandered into the southbound shipping lane and been run over by SS Monster of the Container. Admiralty Inlet and the waters south of us accounted for a fairly expansive area compared to the real estate occupied by a small dinghy like Wilson. The more we looked the larger it seemed. There were also a lot of pleasure craft toing and froing along the way and neither Wilson nor Putt Putt had any identifying marks that would even allow a finder who was inclined to not be the keeper to contact us. And then there was the problem that we had a lot of false positive contacts when scanning the shore. I don't know how my eyeballs could transform every floating object from small, jagged pieces of styrofoam to fairly large deadheads into something shaped like a dinghy with an outboard attached, but they did. Even the aids to navigation and a couple of houses along the shore looked good enough to investigate the further south we traveled. It was a disheartening lookout for a couple of hours before I sighted something that looked like Wilson in someone's backyard on the south side of Apple Tree Cove.

Sure enough, sitting high, proud, and dry on the beach bordering several backyards, the mutineers had almost made it to sanctuary in someone's garage before we spotted them. But now that there was no mistaking that what we had found was our little Gang of Two, the problem got to be how we would retrieve them. I could only pull to 50 yards from shore before the risk of grounding was too great. But Carolyn saved the day. I was still pondering the problem when she was on the stern in her bathing suit with a life preserver strapped on telling me how much she loved to swim in cold water and diving in. The next thing I knew, she was on the shore and two people and a dog had come out of one of the houses to help her portage Wilson and Putt Putt back to the water. She was soon on board and we tied the knot to end all knots for the tow back north. We turned around and late in the evening anchored in Port Ludlow.

The trip back up was splendid. We questioned the Gang of Two about whose idea the mutiny had been, but they were close mouthed and stood up well. Carolyn's money is on Putt Putt feeling like he never got to go where he wanted to go. I think Wilson was just being a normal adolescent and wanted to establish his independence so we would appreciate him when he hauled the trash to shore or made supply runs to the dinghy dock. We will probably never know the truth, but luckily the truth is no obstacle to convicting them of conspiracy. We were so glad to have them back with us, their sentence was commuted to time served on the beach. Maybe we should rename them Scooter. But then they would simple vanish and be of no use to anyone. So it is long live Wilson and Putt Putt. May they forever be our friends no matter what wild goose chase we undertake on Fathom.

Since the last time we posted on this site we have been on several excursions, some by water and others by land and air. Shortly after docking back in Seattle in August last year we took off for the Mediterranean to join John Kretschmer for training aboard his sloop, Quetzal. We were lucky to have the time to bookend that sailing excursion with some freewheeling, largely unplanned tours in Italy and Morocco.

It was thus that over the course of six weeks beginning late in September 2007, our travels connected Seattle, London, several Italian cities and towns (Rome; the Tuscan towns of Sienna, Montelcino, and Montepulciano; the precarious cliff town of Positano on the Amalfi coast south of Naples; the ruins at Ercole/Herculaneum near Naples; and Ostia del Roma - the port to the west of Rome), several islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea lying west of the Bay of Naples as we sailed south from Rome, (Ponza, Ischia, and Capri) as well as Messina and Syracusa on the island of Sicily standing just off of the toe of the boot, the Ionian Islands of Kefalonia and Lefkas that lie west of the Peloponnesian Peninsula of Greece, and then Athens, Paris, and a variety of cities and villages in Morocco (Casablanca, Essouira, Marrakesh, and Telouet) followed by Paris and Seattle.

We were so impressed by our two-day breeze through Paris that November that we returned to spend a month at a small apartment in February 2008. After that, we hunkered down in Fernie, B.C. for the remainder of a ski season that was heralded by the most snow seen there for the past 20 years. In April and early May we drove south to Santa Fe on two lane roads that took us through Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and northern New Mexico. I then made my way back to Seattle on another set of state byways through New Mexico, Utah, and Oregon.

As I write this in June 2008, we are moored in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. We have largely been reprising our trip north from the summer of 2007. After spending some time in Reid Harbor on Stuart Island, we decided to come to Friday Harbor to wait out the rain, chill, and fog before sailing north to Sucia Island. Another magical mystery tour is in progress. Maybe we will finally meet the Walrus after all. Even if we don't, there is always the Eggman.