Last Weekend

We had a great time this last weekend. It makes me realize that even though I'd like to get a sailboat, I really do have the perfect boat for this part of the world. The trip we did in a few days would have taken at least a week on a sailboat, and since there wasn't much wind, we would have been motoring rather than sailing anyway.

On Thursday we went to Port Ludlow, about 25 miles north of here. The next day we went up to Sucia Island in the San Juans, about 40 miles north of Port Ludlow. I had never been to Sucia before, but I will go again. It's a boater's paradise with lots of mooring buoys and good anchoring. Except for a couple of park rangers, the island is uninhabited and has no commercial businesses, but it does have lots of trails and lots of fossils. We were anchored in the aptly named Fossil Bay where it's hard for even the casual observer to miss all the fossilized shells in the rocks on the beach.

On Saturday we went to La Conner, an interesting town on a narrow channel east of Anacortes. One does have to pay attention to the channel markers to get in there! On the way there, I was relying on my electronic charts that told me I should have at least 10' of water under me, while my depth sounder was telling me I had 2'! I very gingerly headed across to the channel markers and had no problem after that.

But boat ownership is not without its hardships. Before we left, I did a routine oil and filter change on my boat. There are no Jiffy Lubes for boats, and if I hired someone to do it, it would cost me at least $1500. But being mentally retired and being too cheap to spend anymore than the $250 for oil and filters, I've done the last three oil changes myself. But now that I've been there and done that, I think I'll hire someone next time. It took two full days for me to change the oil and to replace all the fuel and oil filters. And it makes a hell of a mess. This being the third time I've done this, you'd think I'd become more efficient, but not so. There's just no way to avoid spilling oil and diesel. I spent almost as much time cleaning up the engine compartments and the bilge as I did actually changing the oil. And even though my boat has a better engine layout than most, one still has to be a bit of a contortionist (and masochist) to get at everything. To get at the transmission filter screens, I had to wrap myself around the driveshaft to get a socket wrench on the extremely tight release nut which I could then turn about a 16th of a turn at a time. Ah the joy of manual labor!

One of the good things about being out on the boat for me is being out of the news and internet loop. Then when I get back, I get the big rush of news events that happened while I was gone. The events this time were probably bigger than normal with the resignation of that bat-shit crazy moose-killer, Sarah Palin. But I'll save my comments about Palin and Sanford and the dismal state of the Republican Party for another post.