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!