May 18, 2005
It is Thursday night, 7:30, and the sun is still high in the sky. It was a beautiful day with just a little wind. There is still some snow on the mountains in the distance. They really had very little snow this winter. That may make for a high fire season. I cooked me a trout tonight that I bought from the store. It is really good. Just fried it in the skillet. Barry does not eat them very much as he really hates the little bones.

He has already gone to bed as he will get up at 2:30am to help a friend take his 44' sailboat about a mile away to a grid at high tide. They will tie the boat to several pilings and let the tide go down. The boat has a full keel and will sit on it out of the water. They will come back to this marina in his smaller dinghy (actually is quite large with a big engine compared to ours), and get several hours of sleep. About 8am they will go back when the tide has gone down below the level of the boat bottom. They will power wash it, and repaint the bottom and a few other things. They will then come home to sleep for awhile and go back to get the boat when the tide comes back in enough to float her. They will bring the boat back to her slip here about 3am Sat. morning. They will be very tired. One other man will help them paint.

Barry spent some time in the bosun's chair up our smaller mast this morning drilling holes in the mast to mount a round tv antennae and a hailer speaker. He had to run wires down inside the mast and into the boat. It all went very well. He will not get time to finish the inside part for several days.

It is new moon time and just today we started noticing lots of moon jellies again. They are white and about 1"- 4" diameter. They look so fragile but just pulsate around eating whatever they eat. They are really pretty and fun to watch.
We have been really hunkered down most of today and yesterday as an intense low is moving through with loads of wind. May last a couple more days. Pacific Voyager is really straining at her dock lines. So glad we are at our slip in the marina. Earlier this morning we visited a 42 ft. sailboat, a ketch (2 masts) like ours. They are headed to Alaska. Was good to visit each others boats and get ideas for change.
I am trying to make a new staysail cover. I'm using the old blue cover as a pattern and changing it here and there so the new one will fit better. I do not totally know what I'm doing but think it will be ok. The green will match our boat better.

Our first trip was to Rebecca Spit where we went for our first trip last year. It is on the east side of Quadra Island, the island adjacent to Vancouver Island. It took us about 4 hours to get there. We were the only boat in the anchorage, but Herriot Bay is in the distance where the local boats are docked, and the ferry from Cortez Island arrives every hour. Many people walk with their friends and dogs on the trails on the spit area (a long narrow peninsula). A couple of eagles were coming and going to get food for their babies up in a tall tree. Many harlequin ducks sat asleep on the log anchored near us. They have such beautiful colors and patterns. We now call them "little squeakers" because that is what they sound like. They are always fussing or playing and diving for fish. The first morning Barry found part of a fish in our dinghy that was tied on the side of the boat. It was all messy with blood and fish parts where the crows tore it apart. He cleaned the boat, and I used the remainder of the fish as bait. I caught a few little sand dabs and one almost legal size dungeness crab that just held onto my hook. It was fun but I threw them all back. There were a few small moon jellies swimming around. They look so fragile. At night we could see the lights of the small town nearby. In the daytime you could hear the trucks going up the hill and big equipment building something. The trip home was really rough the first 2 hours as we pounded into high wind and steep, choppy seas. The spray was going over us, and we would slam down off the wavetops into the troughs. Getting into the slip was interesting, but with some prayer and help from 2 folks walking by who took our lines, we made it back ok.

The wind is so loud here at the docks that it is a bit scarey for me. It is shaking the boat a lot. I do not like it.