Welp, we left the dock at close-enough to slack tide on August 1, as planned. Not one for tempting the gods of docking or undocking (?)  on the first day of the trip, I was fairly insistent that we wait until the currents were not gnarly before we pulled out. Michael is, if not amenable, at least resigned at this point, so we were in agreement. It was a good move anyway as it gave us time to take the car up to the house, do one last pass through the old place to see if we had missed anything and give our daughter one last squeeze goodbye. These are the cuts that are the deepest, these leavings of loved ones.

Walking to the marina we gave a wave to Left Bank; the French pastry place on our corner. I imagine they’ll still be there when we come back, judging by the lines of customers that are always out the door and sometimes around the corner. Down the hill to the marina, stopping at the marina office to turn in our keys and parking pass. They will mail us a check for our deposit. That was a little bit of a surprise, considering we had automatic payments. I guess they want to keep that money as long as possible.

On the dock, Richard from S/V Firefly and the other Richard from S/V Soirse were on the dock waiting to cast us off and wave us bon voyage. We’ve come to love this dock community and all the sharing of tools and information, even gossip, if you will,  that goes back and forth in such places. We have a special place in our hearts for young couples like Richard and Ashley on Firefly who are living aboard, working, and making their bigger plans. Firefly Richard got certified as a marine electrician and recently started his own business. He is already really busy. We are thrilled for him. Hit us up if you are down Olympia way and need the contact info of a good, local marine electrician.

Headsets on, Michael gave the boat a little push to get the stern going in the right direction, I gave the engine a tiny bump of reverse, and we floated out of the slip one last time. I always breathe a big sigh of relief when the stern is in the right direction and the current is low enough to manage. We still had enough current to need to finesse the leaving; floating back, cranking the wheel, moving forward, cranking the wheel, floating back again with more cranking. Then Mike said the bow was clear of Richard’s Hunter 50 and we were off, steering clear of the marina and into the fairway with the lowest water under the keel that we have ever had in Olympia. At times the depth meter read 3 feet under the keel. Yikes.

Farewell, for now, Olympia.

All the way through the channel, we commented on how low the water was and how easy it would be to run aground. In my own mind I harkened back to the days when I would have literally been panicking about this. How far I have come in managing that dreaded anxiety. Now, in a muddy area like Olympia, I am just thinking; ‘Welp, if we hit mud we will just get more coffee and wait it out’.  To be clear, rocks are another issue altogether.

As I write this, I am connected to Wifi via our nifty new Starlink system. This has been working great so far and has been a real treat to have aboard. Except for the power draw. Although it’s not really that much, it’s enough that we unplug it at night, and if we don’t have sunshine to keep the batteries topped off, we can’t really afford to use it without charging the batteries with the engine. This was not an issue until I brought out my brand new crockpot to make some carnitas.

You scoff.  Surely she doesn’t use an electric device to cook on a boat? Yes, she surely does and has done forever since we have had this boat. I love my little crockpot and bought a brand new small one with a locking lid so that we would not have a repeat of the famous sweet-potatoe-stew-on-the-floor fiasco that occurred at the beginning of the passage to Hawaii. You haven’t lived until you have been on your hands and knees in large swells and decent wind cleaning up tomato-based inedible stew.

Anyhoo, we were going to entertain Andrew and Jill and my sister, Amy, in the cockpit with some of my world class and probably famous carnitas tacos and my plan had been expertly thwarted by Michael who said we didn’t have enough battery power for that. We had been sitting in Gig Harbor at anchor for a day and a half and the batteries were not keeping up due to the insidious trickle of juice being used by the Starlink. Out came the pressure cooker, but this was surely information that is now recorded as part of this shake down part of the cruise. Can we manage this draw on our precious electrical power? Sure. Do I want to manage that? I do not. We need to put on more solar, something we talked about before we left. Where to put another panel is the issue, but we may have a plan for that. We’ll see, but it’s possible we need to add “bring solar panels currently residing in the basement” to our list of items the kids will bring us at some point before we head south.

Two of my favorite people in the cockpit eating yummy carnitas tacos.

The other thing we’ve discovered, although the only proof I needed for this was the way water pools in the forward port corner of the cockpit settees, is that we need more weight in the starboard stern. Our boat has always been a bit bow heavy, mostly because we carry 300 feet of 3/8” chain and a big anchor. When we put a new engine aboard all those years ago, we lost weight toward the back of the boat because we put in a smaller Beta Marine engine to replace the really big Ford Lehman that was in there. At one point this boat also had a genset in the engine room and I imagine that also weighed something significant. Once we took the mizzen mast and all of its bits off and stored them at home, we lost more weight aft. Adding the radar pole helped some, but not nearly enough. So I have observed our boot stripe with, as they say, a gimlet eye.

We had no idea how much weight we needed to add. So we did a small experiment while at anchor in calm Gig Harbor. We let out all of our chain and watched the bow. Yep. The bow was significantly higher without all that chain. This gave us a rough calculation that adding 300 pounds would be enough to balance her out so that her nose is high enough to not plow into the waves. When we add the 80 pounds worth of Liferaft that is currently living in the forepeak and will live on the aft deck during ocean transits, we figure we will be fine. We are currently at anchor in Bellingham and while here we are going to work on solving this problem. We hope to end up buying additional chain and storing it in the aft lazarette. The sailboat wrecking yard also sells buckets of lead shot from recycled boat keels that we could get in a pinch. But extra anchor chain would not come amiss. Yesterday, crossing the Strait of Juan de Fu*^ You, we experienced proof of concept that our bow is, indeed, too low to be plowing into rough seas. Enough about that. It was not fun for anyone. Fortunately, the north end of Whidby Island sported smoother water.

Galapagos, with her boom to one side to take advantage of all the sun power hitting the solar panels (making the boom appear short). With no chain left in the chain locker, she looks almost right. Not quite, but almost.

As shakedown cruises go, this one is definitely working to reveal potential issues. We had the hydraulic steering rebuilt this year and while that is working fine, if a little stiff, we have had a couple of hiccups with the autopilot. To be brief, twice during the trip up here it has briefly stopped working, giving us an error message that said the motor for the unit had stalled. It’s a Raymarine Smart Pilot, which has a heavy duty motor and has worked for these years without even a hitch in its giddyup. So we are a little flumoxed about what might be happening now. Raymarine has an article on their site that Michael is referencing in terms of what might be going on and we’ll go through those possibilities to see if Michael can get it sorted. We do not know if it is related to the rebuild of the steering. Perhaps not. But whatever it is, we would like that sorted before going to ocean sailing again. Although we use our Hydrovane almost exclusively on passages, we use the autopilot on inland waters anytime we have to motor and would rather fix that while in the US than try to fix it in Mexico.

Yesterday we noticed yet another little issue that, while irritating, we know how to address. We got in about 30 full seconds of sailing via headsail today before two things happened: the wind died, and the bolt rope on the headsail started coming out of the track on the furler. Honestly we didn’t even have time to tweak the sail shape. This was dead irritating because that bolt rope has always been just small enough to do this and cause irritation. Of course, we sailed for years with it like that and Michael had worked a fix at the foot of the sail to keep it close enough to the furler that it wouldn’t pull away. It was just one more thing to keep track of and watch carefully. But we just had that sail up at Ballard Sails in Seattle to be looked over and that would have been the perfect time to have that bolt rope replaced with something just a little larger where this would not be an issue. Had we recalled this was a problem. Which we did not. We were reminded today when as soon as the sail was unfurled it started coming loose at the bottom. Curses. Many curses.

Michael and I are getting in the groove out here. We are already playing our favorite games of cruising: Log Dodge (whereby you steer clear of anything that might be a log in the water), What’s That Noise? (whereby you get irritated by a repetitive noise and try to locate the source), Wind/NoWind (whereby Mike gets excited because we still haven’t sailed yet and he believes he has felt wind and gets the headsail ready to deploy only to be thwarted because it was only someone exhaling somewhere), Kill the Fly (self explanatory) and Hot, Then Cold. This last one is the game that comes up after you’ve put away your cold weather clothing because you inconveniently forgot that you are actually moving north first, not south, and a cold front is coming in. Also, Pacific Northwest. Meh.

Our new radar pole and engine lifting system. Works great! This added some weight in the back, but not enough.

We will be here in Bellingham for another few days while I work from the boat and Michael locates more anchor chain. Bellingham is a really fun place to visit by boat. Great dinghy dock and the anchorage is close to all the fun things Fairhaven has to offer.

Where we anchored off the south end of Marrowstone Island. It was a peaceful night. No, this is not in the guidebooks. Remember, you saw it here first. The bottom is smallish rocks and sand with the occasional kelp. We dug in and held fast in about 20 feet under the keel.

S/V Galapagos, standing by on Channel 16a.