It’s been a little while since I updated here, and lots of animated gifs have been piling up. Too many to load on one page without causing problems, so I’m going to split this post into 4 pages. I’ll just put a “next page” link at the bottom to keep things simple.

Right now we’re in Deer Harbor but when we last left off, we were still in Fox Cove on Sucia Island. And we were just about to go look for fossils in the area they recently found T-Rex dinosaur bones.

So we got in the dinghy, went to shore and started hiking along a path that someone on shore told us about.

It was a bit of a hike, some significant up and down action with steep cliffs off to one side.

Jackson was having fun. But falling a lot, probably due to his legs getting tired.

I didn’t see anywhere you could find fossils, and the mosquitoes were scary intense so we turned back around and went to the bottom of the trail, along the beach. That seemed much more promising for fossil action.

We didn’t find any dinosaurs, but we did see some fossilized tree trunks.

And some super old sea shells lodged into the rocks.

Speaking of dinosaurs being found in this bay, the rocks on the beach look like dinosaur skin. Check it out.

On our way back to the dinghy we stopped at a big open field, and Lucky and Jackson ran around.

The next day we had breakfast. Jackson and Clover shared a bowl of blueberries.

Then we headed out away from Sucia.

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On Friday morning we finished up on Eastsound, got back in the dingy…

Jackson and Lindsey pulled up anchor, and we started making our way to Sucia island.

I think out of all the places we’re going to stay on this trip, Sucia is going to be the longest. (3 nights.)

It took 5 hours to get here from Eastsound, and we motored almost the whole way to accomplish two things.

1. To get there in a reasonable time frame.
2. To charge the batteries. (Motoring helps bring back up the voltage.)

The view of Mt. Baker was awesome again.

Jackson was on lookout with the binoculars.

Here’s where we went and where we are now.

We were hoping to stay in Shallow Bay (the sunsets there are awesome and they have a cool little beach there) but two things prevented us from doing so.

1. All the buoys were taken, and there wasn’t much room to anchor either due to other people already anchored. (It’s a small shallow bay as the name suggests.)
2. The weather report for the Straight of Georgia (where Sucia is right next to) had a strong wind advisory saying that it could blow 25 knots from the northwest, and Shallow Bay is exposed to that direction of wind.

So we moved to the next cove down, Fox Cove, which surprisingly had the deepest buoy available. Although their deepest buoy was still a little scarily shallow. After checking the tide tables and comparing them to the charts it looked like we should be good, but barely. So we went on shore and paid our mooring fees.

Jackson wanted to stay on the beach so we let him until he realized we were gone and ran to catch up with us.

Back on the boat we were greeted with a flock of geese, and we had fun feeding them.

However, looking at the depth finder, it showed that when the tide was down, and we were being blown to the east we had only 7 feet of water. And this boat goes down 7 feet below the waterline.

So that was a little unnerving.

If the wind was going to blow us even more to the east during low tide, it looked like we would be potentially scraping bottom. I didn’t really like that idea. So I got out the map and looked for other possibilities. It’s a busy weekend for Sucia because of the nice weather, and it’s a weekend not a week day. So the spots were limited. And if we left our buoy in search of another, we may lose our spot, and not even find another.

In a search for ideas, I thought it might be fun to go explore in the dinghy and find another spot. So Jackson, Lucky and I went on an adventure out on the outside of Sucia and trolled around in the dinghy.

Lindsey and Clover cast us off.

And we were on our own.

Soon, I realized how far the other coves are on Sucia when trying to travel with a 2 horsepower engine on a small dinghy.

The scenery was incredible, and it was a ton of fun.

But it also got a little scary when the waves started to get bigger, and Jackson wanted to start exploring the dinghy and playing with the engine.

And some boats weirdly wanted to get super close to the dinghy

Incredibly close.

And Lucky was trying to go up on the sides of the boat to get a better view.

One rogue wave and he could have flown overboard.

Combine that with the strong wind warning, and I thought that if we winds did pick up sooner than expected, we might have a very stressful trip back. So after about half an hour I turned around. It was still fun, but we didn’t find another deeper spot that was more protected from the wind.

My alternate plan was to try and verify the depth that we got from the depth finder. Sometimes if there’s kelp or other seaweed stuff on the bottom the depth finder will bounce off that and give an inaccurate reading.

So, after looking around for something to drop down to the bottom, I decided on a can of soda, filled with rocks, tied to a string.

After a few attempts, it worked. And while the depth finder said 7 feet, the string-and-soda test said it was closer to 11 feet. That’s plenty of room, 4 feet to spare between the bottom of the boat and the bottom, at low tide.

We’ve been pretty lazy on Sucia, just taking the short trip on the dinghy to the beach right by us, hanging around in the water, and Jackson playing with bugs. Or “ah-mommys” as Jackson calls them. (For some reason he’s always called bugs “ah-mommys” not sure where he picked that up, but he’s a huge fan of ah-mommys.)

The ah-mommy even came back to the boat with us.

We played on the beach.

In the water.

Saw an otter.

Threw rocks.

And some awesome sunsets.

And Jackson’s getting pretty awesome at getting from the dingy to the boat all on his own.

So far, our menu has been pretty uncomplicated. Just more hot dogs, and grilled cheese for lunch.

Lucky is Jackson’s best friend when he’s eating hot dogs.

Jackson is a fan of the grilled cheese.

Breakfast has been oatmeal and eggs.

Eating oatmeal and eggs on a boat in your Superman and Cookie Monster pajamas is pretty awesome.

Jackson likes to feed me cookies.

Recently they found the fossil remains of a T-Rex right next to where we’re floating right now. So after it stops raining (yea it’s raining right now, the weather has been really weird, super sunny, windy, and now cloudy and rainy.) I’m going to see if I can find some cool fossils of my own… maybe 🙂

And tomorrow we’re headed to Patos island. That’s the plan.

See ya!

The last couple days have been fairly lazy. But in an attempt to keep updating this blog and “web log” this adventure, I’m going to post about it anyhow.

I don’t have a ton of pictures, as last night I messed up and formatted my card before I downloaded the pictures into my laptop.

Whoops!

I got the videos but not the pictures. Oh well…

Worse things could happen right?

Like your anchor not working… we’ll get to that in a minute.

But first, we’re in Eastsound on Orcas Island right now. We stayed an extra night in Spencer Spit on Lopez Island before this.

BTW, I’m going to try animated gifs instead of pictures, because I have video but not many photos due to my formatting blunder.

We didn’t plan on saying 2 nights in Spencer Spit, but we didn’t plan on anything really. It was overcast and rainy the second day at Spencer Spit so we just decided it was a good day to do pretty much nothing.

I went on shore with Jackson, but just for about an hour.

He had fun though.

Jackson paid for the mooring buoy.

Then we climbed on the driftwood.

He found the dinghy.

And tried to start it.

And to sponge out the bottom of the boat.

He’s a good helper.

Then we went back, made dinner (a potato hash with soft boiled eggs, but I cooked them a little too long.)

Watched another movie, and went to bed.

In the morning I made us some breakfast burritos, (beans, chillies, bell peppers, onions, cheese, eggs, salsa, sour cream and tortillas.)

Then we set sail and sailed away from our buoy without even turning on the motor. That was kinda fun.

But it didn’t last long because soon the wind died down completely, and we did want to make it to Eastsound on Orcas Island before the end of the day, so we turned on the motor and kept the main sail up to speed us up and keep us more stable.

The views of Mt. Baker were awesome.

Once we got to Eastsound, we knew we had to anchor, as there’s no docks or buoys. So Lindsey and I were doing our best to avoid the rocks the cruising guide mentioned, and maneuvering to find a spot to anchor between boats. And right when we thought we had it figured out, Lindsey went to the bow of the boat to drop anchor, hit the down button, and… Nothing…

You have to anchor around here, so without that option, we were adrift.

We cut power and decided to see if there was anything we could do to fix it.

None of the normal stuff worked. We worked as the wind and tide carried us away.

I called my dad, maybe he could help. We tried everything we could think of. I was sweaty and frazzled from being upside down in cramped dark spots with a flashlight trying to troubleshoot electrical wiring.

No dice.

The shore got further and further away.

I called the marine service center. They had their main guy and their electrician walking me through everything. Fuses, connections, controllers, power on, off, engine revved, engine off.

Drifting away.

They couldn’t figure it out.

In a last ditch effort my dad suggested opening up a front panel I didn’t even know existed. I was hoping to find a blown fuse. But nope, all the fuses were good.

And right before I was about to close it up and walk away two little tiny ends of an exposed black wire caught my eye.

I twisted them together and yelled to Lindsey to try again.

Baam! Like magic it worked.

Once we finally calmed down from the anchor incident, and successfully anchored, we headed into town.

We had an awesome chocolate muffin and an almond filled seasonal fruit topped cookie thing.

Then Jackson ran around town until he passed out in the grass.

Afterwards we had dinner (burgers).

And Jackson licked his shadow for desert.

We went back to the boat and Lucky was super excited (as always) to see Jackson. He almost always climbs the ladder and jumps up against the glass to greet him.

The next morning (this morning) we went into town for breakfast and got some baked goods goodness and coffee (I got a mocha) at an incredible little shop there.

We also needed ice for the freezer, and some odds and ends. I thought there was a gas station in town to refill our dinghy gas tank reserve, but there wasn’t. The closest one was about a mile away.

I almost decided to skip the gas, but last minute thought it’d be fun for Jackson and me to go on a run. (I haven’t gone on a run in a long time.)

So I told Lindsey we’d be back in about 25 minutes, and we took off running. At first it felt great. Then about 200 yards in I was like,

“Wow! Why do people run again? This sucks!”

I pushed through and got a little second wind, and we were off running along the water. It was fun, although very hilly, and hot. I was super sweaty.

The guy at the gas station that I paid looked at me dumbfounded when I said, “OK, time to run back to Eastsound.” He was like, “What?! Run? Why?” Then he gave Jackson a little red vine licorice stick thing and we were off.

We loaded up with groceries when I came back and walked back to the dinghy. Once on the sailboat, we pulled up anchor and now we’re headed to Sucia island for a few days.

Sucia is awesome. (BTW They recently found a T-Rex bone on the island, the only dinosaur remains ever found in Washington state.)

Until next time!