The Vortex

If you are someone who is reading this bit of nonsense and living in the great Northwest, you are probably aware that this summer hasn't been much of a summer. It's been cold, gray, and rainy. If you are reading this and from some other part of the world, you may be thinking, “It's the Northwest.  Isn't it always cold, gray, and rainy?” Touche.

You may be correct, it's generally just like wintertime for almost the entire year here, except for a couple of short months we call summer. It's what a Seattle-ite looks forward to all year. Our pasty white bodies come out of hiding and become lobster red in about 15 minutes. We wear shorts and complain about the heat when it's barely above 70 degrees (21* C for you foreigners). But still, we love our summertime.

For Brenda and I, summertime this year will be a little different. Mainly because it will be our last summer in the Northwest for what could be years and years. We were hoping to be able to enjoy our last summer here while getting our pasty white bodies burned. We were hoping to not have to bundle up at night in our own home (we do have a heater that I could fire up, but it's summertime, so I am refusing until there is frost on the windows). A couple of days ago, it was so cold I could see my breath. What gives?

I actually didn't intend on complaining about the weather when I started typing this morning, it's just what came out. I'm sorry. I'm off topic. I had planned on talking about other extremely important things, so let's get to that.

There is a strange phenomenon with cruisers and certain locations. These places attract sailors and don't let them leave. A vortex if you will. We seem to have been sucked into one of these vortexes.

If you have been following along on our adventurer for the last couple of years, you may know that Brenda and I like to move. We don't sit still very well. We practice the “3 G's of traveling.” Get there. Get it done. Get out of there. It's very rare for us to stay in one place very long and it's even more rare for us to go back to a place we've been before. We like new and exciting things, mainly because there are more new and exciting things out there to see than we can fit into a lifetime...so we keep moving.

Friday Harbor on San Juan Island currently has us sucked in. We've been to a handful of islands so far this summer, but for some reason, we can't break free from the pull of Friday Harbor. It's the main hub of life up here and with it comes grocery stores, entertainment, restaurants, a post office, and most importantly, internet access.

During the last few weeks of our shakedown cruise, the boat has needed some love and attention and has burned through some of our spare parts. Without internet access, it's almost impossible to order replacement parts and without somewhere to ship those replacement parts to, we are dead in the water. So, Friday Harbor it is.

We can sit our butts in a coffee shop when it's pouring rain outside (it's summer after all), have a delicious cup of coffee, and order our needed boat parts. And then we can have those parts shipped to the post office here and pick them up via “General Delivery”. It's a miracle of modern times.

The other thing we've been dealing with is our cell phones. I'm going to skip the really long version of the story and just give you the punch line. If you are a traveler and want a phone that works in countries all over the world (perfect for us), then you might want to look into Google's Project Fi cell phone plan. It's a pretty amazing plan for wanderers, travelers, and vagabonds (us). Basically, you get phone access and data at very reasonable rates, without roaming charges, just about anywhere.

We purchased one phone as a trial, just to see how it would work for us, and what do you know, it works. It actually works really well. We've been to some of the outer islands where phone service is non existant, and bam, the Google phone is picking up some far off Canadian signal. We've also talked to friends who have one who have traveled in Mexico, New Zealand, and Australia (all places we are heading) and the phone worked flawlessly and with no international roaming charges. Perfect.

So the short version is that we've ordered another phone so we can both keep in touch with our connected lives without having to fight over one phone. So here we sit in Friday Harbor, the vortex, waiting for boat parts and a new phone for me to arrive (woo hoo!!! I love new toys!).

The good news is that between shipments, we are leaving the vortex, visiting with some of our boating friends who are up here on their boats, and cruising around to other islands. We've had some great days of sailing, a few days of sun, and have gotten some necessary improvements taken care of on the boat. It's not too bad being sucked back in to Friday Harbor, and really, we are pretty happy to have a place that allows us to warm up, dry off, and get stuff in the mail.

Sailing back to the Vortex.

Traffic on the high seas.  The morning commute is rough out here.

Anchored outside of Friday Harbor...again.