This is the cruising blog of the sailing yacht Mabrouka. The Favorites in the side bar allow those with discriminating taste to filter for just the stuff you want to read. Thanks for visiting, Roy.
Due to an unforeseen lack of foresight, I am now embarking on the third attempt at writing this blog entry for Wednesday, June 5th. The risk of losing it in the fog of my increasingly "senior" memory is becoming greater than losing it to a loss of power or to an unreliable internet connection, so I've decided to make a temporary record and transfer it to the blog site when possible. I'm sure this will happen soon, at which time you should get a barrage of back-dated entries. Stand by.
So, with no further adieu...
With the advice of the marina's dock master, I overstayed my required 12 noon departure time from the Gig Harbor YC reciprocal moorage 'til 1:30 to let the tide come in and gain clearance over an underwater "hump" on the way out. Though it was a lovely day, other than having to dodge a couple of clueless kayakers playing in the current in the restricted channel at the mouth of the bay, it promised to be an uneventful exit.
I girded myself for a long, dull, windless motor up Colvos Passage (the north-south body of water separating Vashon Island on the east from Kitsap Peninsula on the west), while working to stay out of the way of a north-bound Island Towing tug pushing a load of sand up from Dayton. Happily, the wind came up just as I entered the passage's southern end and Mabrouka had to do a little bit of a dance to avoid the tug as we idled the engine and hauled up sails.
The breeze was northerly and, due to the relatively narrow channel, it slacked a bit approaching either shore, but if there's one thing I've got these days it's time, so the promise of a day without the noise and vibration of the engine was appealing. Besides, the physical exertion of tacking back and forth up the channel comprises a major part of my plan for regaining some of the upper body strength I've sacrificed to so many years in a cubicle. See the YouTube Video below for a short clip of one of our tacks up Colvos Passage:
Island Towing must have a lucrative contract hauling sand north, because my tacks twice more had to be choreographed around their tug-barge combinations and the day continued with a moderate breeze varying around 8-10 knots until the very northern end of Colvos.
I'd begun to develop hopes for clearing the ferry terminal at Southworth without any more tacks when the wind began, contrarily, to simultaneously increase in strength and become more fickle in its direction. Mabrouka, searching for a consistent heading, had to endure a couple more tacks, but emerged dramatically from the north end of the passage in her approach to Blake Island on a close starboard reach with a bone in her teeth.
We had a good half-hour romp searching for the lee of the island and a calmer place to take down the sails, but the wind continued to fill in ahead of us so I finally decided to start the engine and douse the genny and the main. After a ruckus of flapping sails, Mabrouka quieted down and we motored up to one of the buoys on the southwest side Blake Island State Park to moor up for the night.
It was around 6:30 and I was tired enough to leave the mizzen up while I cooked dinner and relaxed a bit, but afterwards I put Mabrouka away for the night and went ashore to pay the mooring fee. Back aboard I spent a quiet evening with the ritual sunset watch and some reading.
The picture accompanying this entry is of one of the trees (a cedar?) near by. It attracted my attention as a bit of a stand-out from the others, seeming to have shouldered a little personal space in the island forest that other trees had not.
Mabrouka and I have been partners in crime since October 1998, hanging about in West Coast waters, first in San Diego, then in Seattle. All of that time we've lived together aboard. [...] Even though I have a couple of pretty tame deep water transits under my belt, most of the sailing I've done since the age of 17 has been coastal cruising. Having grown up with the Channel Islands as my cruising grounds, the years of living in Seattle since 2003 have opened my eyes to what I'd been missing. Puget Sound and, more expansively, the Salish Sea offer limitless harbors and vistas within which to expand our experience. As of April 1st 2013, Mabrouka and I embarked upon the culmination of our life adventures, shaking the kinks out of our knowledge and equipment cruising the PNW into the summer of 2014, then heading south for the foreseeable future. The horizon, as far as it is visible, encompasses the South Pacific, ...who knows, maybe beyond. This is the story of that adventure.
I've called this blog "Blessed Lady" because that's my preferred translation from Arabic for "Mabrouka". She's a 1980 CT-41, one of several clones of the original Bill Garden design Mariner ketches. At 50 feet from the tip of her mizzen boom to the tip of her bow sprit, she's 16 tons of [...]
fiberglass hull molded into a classic shape with her wineglass stern, her clipper bow, and her full keel. There's plenty of teak to keep me busy varnishing and off the streets and two previous owner's worth of sea miles under her hull. I've added quite a few miles of my own living aboard and cruising locally since 1998, first out of San Diego, then out of Seattle.