The day we left Victoria also happened to be the day of the 2018 Victoria Dragon Boat Festival in Victoria Harbour. The dragon boats began racing at 8:00 a.m. and would continue all day until about 4:30 p.m., so getting out of Causeway Floats between a race (every 11 minutes) took a little bit of planning with harbour security. We got instructions and an escort for part of the way … Read more
The beautiful weather continues! We awoke this morning to bright sunshine and our group was so excited to get going that we left Roche Harbor by 8:00 a.m. — an hour earlier than originally scheduled. All but one of us has Nexus (the trusted traveler program that lets us clear Canadian customs by phone most of the time), so one boat had to stop and clear customs at Pender Harbour … Read more
Winter in the San Juan Islands is our favorite time for cruising up here, and this is why: This is Fossil Bay on Sucia Island, and there’s no one else here. No one on the dock. No one on the mooring balls. In the summer, this place is absolutely packed (so we hear–we’ve managed to be in Alaska every summer since we bought Airship). Today, the sun is shining, the … Read more
We’ve been in the San Juans for just over a week now as we work to get Airship ready to head to Alaska next month. We’ve been gathering spares and checking things off our Boat – To Do list, but we got enough done and the wind finally settled down so we headed out to Sucia Island for a night in Shallow Bay on Monday night. Aerial photo from Kevin’s Mavic: We met up … Read more
If you want to know what Deception Pass looks like at max ebb (in this case, about 6kts of current against us) we’ve got some video for you! We knew we’d be arriving around max ebb, and Sam had been through before and wasn’t worried. Great to see how these boats handle the conditions. (Here’s where the Nordic Tugs’ semi-displacement hulls come in handy!) On Airship, we increased power to 64% and were … Read more
We’ve been cruising around the San Juan Islands for a week or so with Sam on Safe Harbour. We’ve all been working hard creating and recording more webcasts for you as part of our “Mastering the Inside Passage” series. You may have already seen our first installment is “Clearing Canadian Customs.” This will soon be followed by “Clearing US Customs,” “Overview of the Inside Passage,” “WiFi in the Wilderness,” and “Flying Drones from … Read more
The last week has been super busy. Finalizing the watermaker install, tinkering with systems, provisioning, saying bye to friends and family… Yesterday I moved the boat around from Skyline Marina to Cap Sante Marina, fueled up, picked up Kevin Monahan (my crew to Alaska for the third year in a row), and met with the flotilla folks who are departing from Anacortes. A busy and productive day. Read more on … Read more
We left Roche Harbor this morning after a lovely evening with near perfect weather. Check out the light on the chapel last night! At sunset, the Roche Harbor Color Guard does a flag ceremony where they take down the flags (the Washington State flag, the Canadian flag, the British flag, and then the United States flag), complete with soundtrack: Oh Canada, God Save the Queen, Taps, etc. Oh, and a canon … Read more