It’s the last weekend in April and it’s not pouring down rain. This is amazing. We left Foss Harbor this afternoon to sail up to Blakely Harbor, expecting the usual slow motorboat to China routine with the wind directly on the nose. Boy were we wrong! We had an incredible sail and, in fact, I wondered if we might have our first ‘close encounter’ with the water as we rounded Point Robinson. Good thing we don’t really take the wind report seriously around here, at least not completely. The radio told us that we were experiencing winds out of the southwest at 3 knots. They got it half right. The winds were out of the southwest all right. But with Moonrise going against the tide at a pleasing 6.8 knots with her rail mostly in the water, I am almost completely certain that the whole ‘3 knots’ thing was bogus.

To be succinct, the sailing was excellent: just gusty enough to make for some exciting wheel work and to have Mike ‘man’ the mainsheet in case we needed to spill wind fast. Sure, we were working with more weather helm than was probably efficient, but screw that because we were having so much fun. Plus, my arms got a great workout. That’s got to be good for me, right? Moonrise handled the gusts with her usual grace, only laying her main close to the water a few times. It was like cowboy sailing!

Just when we though things couldn’t get better, I spotted whales off the starboard side up by Three Tree Point. Actually, I spotted ‘whale’. I’m fairly certain there was only one, and it was not an orca. Probably a grey whale. It surfaced 4 times, then disappeared. We waited and Mike called it to come back, singing his excellent whale song.

Mike making like a whale.

Alas, the whale was not impressed. It showed up next pretty far behind us.

We pulled into Port Blakely just as the sun was going down, dropped the hook, and Mike had a beer. We’ll be up bright and early for the Puget Sound Cruising Club’s ‘circumlocution’ of Bainbridge Island tomorrow. It’s our first cruising club event. They don’t know it yet, but they are our new friends. Hope they don’t talk circles around us.

Our view of Seattle from our anchorage. Our view is much less grainy than this photo.