Winners

Before I get into this little update, I want to respond to a couple of questions that keep popping up in my email's inbox. I have heard from various people in the past year and a half that they can't seem to figure out how to leave a comment on the blog. Well, the bad news is that I have no idea how to do it either. We've tried to leave a comment of our own just to see if it can be done, and we've tried to respond to the comments that other people who are smarter than us have left, but for some reason, we can't figure it out. It just doesn't seem to work when coming from our computer. I've been told it has something to do with our security software, but really, I don't know what that means or how to fix it???  We do however love to hear from those of you who have figured it out so feel free to comment all you want and please don't be offended when we don't respond...we don't know how.

The second order of business that we should discuss has to do with our plan. This seems to be the most common question that we get. What's next? Well, as always, the plan is loose. It's so loose that I hate to even mention what we are thinking because that tends to lead to more questions down the road that go something like “Weren't you were going to be in xxxxxx right about now, doing xxxxxx??? What happened, what's the deal, what gives???” Even though I am setting myself up for questions like that next year, I am going to fill you in on what we are thinking. For the short term, we are going to be sailing around the Northwest on our boat for the rest of the summer. We have no date in mind yet for when we are going to be off of the boat because really, when the weather is good in the Northwest, there is no better place to be than on a boat in the Northwest. So, we are going to be floating around until the weather tells us it's time to move on.

After pirating the high seas in the Northwest, we are going back in the RV for another round of exploring the States and possibly some of the interior of Canada. Again, no time frame or route has been firmed up, although we have some destinations that are calling our name (Banff, Glacier National Park, Rocky Mt National Park, Washington DC and some of the East Coast, the Everglades, etc... the list is long and there is no easy route to see the whole list). The big problem that we have is the fact that we had so much fun skiing in Bend last winter that we want to do it again. Why is that a problem you ask? Well, it's not really a problem, but it does make it hard to see everything else when we are knee deep in fresh powder shushing down a mountain.

After another round of a road trip, we are planning on sailing up to Alaska on the boat next summer. After a few months of exploring Alaska (and hopefully not ending up as Grizzly food), we are shooting for sailing down the coast to Mexico where we are thinking we'll spend a year or so eating tacos, surfing, exploring, and hopefully speaking better Spanish than we do now. Again, the plan is loose. Don't hold me to any of that and don't be disappointed when we don't get to somewhere we said we were going to be, because really, the funnest part of our adventure so far has been the surprises and twists and turns along the way.

Now that we have the business portion of this meeting out of the way, I can fill you in on what we've been up to. We have officially arrived in Seattle after spending 2 months cruising around the San Juan Islands. The San Juan's were great. The best part of the last 2 months has definitely been the time we have been able to spend with friends. We had some friends hop on a ferry and visit us, we ran into former boat neighbors purely by chance, and we had some planned rendezvous with other former boat neighbors and friends. For the last couple of weeks we've been palling around with John and Jeanie on Seascape and Craig, Krystle, and Emily on Small World (if you enjoy reading about other people's adventures, check out Small World's blog at www.kraiglessmallworld.com they are great peeps and it looks like we may be drag racing Small World to Mexico next year...we both have racing boats so a drag race is definitely in order).

After our time in the San Juan's hanging out with friends, we decided to sail over to Sequim to visit with my Mom and good buddy Ron. We spent a few days in Sequim catching up and reassuring my Mom that we are perfectly safe (don't worry about us Mom, we are perfectly safe). We had a great time during the reassuring and even saw a surprisingly good band in town. Who knew Sequim would have good live music? Not me.

From Sequim we were Seattle bound. The trip for us to Seattle will go down in history as one of the finest sailing sessions known to man. We had 20-30 knots of wind on our stern that had us flying down the Puget Sound at break-neck speeds (it's still a sailboat so break-neck is a loose term and really means about 9 miles per hour) which cut our estimated 8 hour trip down to 6 ½ hours. Not too shabby.

Our good friends on Seascape had planned on being out on the high seas on their boat for a little while longer so they graciously offered up their slip on our old dock until they came back to Seattle. What this means is that we were going home...if only for a couple of days. What this also means is that we were able to take care of some much needed boat maintenance while we were tied to a dock in the big city with all of the big city boat part stores that go with it.

E dock at the Shilshole Bay Marina in Seattle is a funny place. It's not funny as in “Ha Ha, this place is hilarious” kind of funny. It's funny because it's unique. There is something special about this dock in particular. It's not built any different than any other dock in any other marina, it's just that it has collected an unusual number of great people in one tiny geographical location and the only thing that most of these people have in common is that they live on boats and they live on this particular dock.

E dock has right-wingers, left-wingers, doctors, lawyers, musicians, construction workers, social workers, retirees, parents and little kids, software moguls, teachers, and just about everything in between. There are Thursday night bar-b-ques where all of these loony-toons tell tall tales of boating, dock box socials where the worlds problems are solved, impromptu gatherings that start with nothing more than “hi”, and more talk of how to fix a boat than you can shake a stick at.

During our short stay at home (E dock), we had 6 people offer us their cars, more people offer us rides, offers of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, offers of help fixing our boat, and more than anything, offers of a friendly “hi” that have been missed in the last year and a half. We didn't get much of our needed repairs and maintenance completed, mainly because of all of the catching up that was more important, but it was great to see everyone, even if only briefly. Even though we didn't get much accomplished, we did stock up on a huge amount of boat parts that will be installed in the weeks to come.

Now for the most important part. I have a couple of pictures to show you of us sailing. I love these pictures mostly because I love sailing and it shows us sailing, so what's not to love? The photo-cred goes to our good friends on Small World who took the pictures as we parted ways during our last day together up in the San Juan's. The biggest reason that I love these pictures (other than the fact that they are great and they are of us) is because it shows that Small World is behind us. Simple math will tell you that our racing boat is in front of their racing boat, which simple math will also tell you, means that we are winning. And this family likes winners.  

Yeah, we're definitely winning.

Still winning.

You guessed it, we're still winning.

Sunset in Sequim