Tuesday July 10th – We left Edmonds at 7:44am and set our speed so we would arrive in La Conner at 12:30 for a scheduled haul out. The boat needed a new propeller shaft seal and the only what to do it is to take the boat out of the water by sling.

We arrived on schedule and hauled the boat where the American Tug crew quickly replaced the seal while we walked to town for lunch. 1.5 hours later we were back in the water working on installing a new air filter system. A custom metal fabricator had to come and template for a bracket that evening. He was awesome! He did the templating and built half the bracket that night then finished it in the morning and had it all installed by 10am! Very thankful for his efforts to get us back cruising so quickly. Kurt at American Tug was just as quick getting everything installed in record time.

Ava’s PLOP was easily extracted by Kurt with a shop vac, and she was very thankful. We got to hang out with Kurt (one of the owners of American Tugs) his wife Kristen and daughter Grace that evening. Ava and Grace get along great and we always have fun with Kurt and Kristen.

Wednesday July 11th – After the final fitting of the air filter, we had lunch on the boat while waiting for the rising tide. A minus 1.5 tide would have been a little sketchy leaving the Swinomish Channel. As soon as we thought it was safe to head out we started north through the channel. 12’, 10’, 9’, 8’ came up on the depth sounder. Hmmmm…. Not what I wanted to see, and I know we were not even in the shallowest spot yet. We turned around and slowly motored back toward town killing time as the tide came up. About 45 minutes later we turned north again and had a fantastic cruise across Rosario Strait, through Thatcher Pass and into a little anchorage on the south end of Decatur Island called Kimball Nature Reserve. New to us we studied the charts for a good anchorage then dropped the hook.

What a fantastic place, we couldn’t believe we haven’t been here before. We were the only boat in the anchorage and it was beautiful. After some exploring in the dinghy and beachcombing we cooked dinner on the boat then settled in for the night. More exploring tomorrow.

Monday July 9th – All the preparation is finally done, but not without some serious stress trying to find the time to get ready for this trip. The last 9 months have been a lot of work. Not only are we running Dillanos as usual, we have been planning, designing, constructing and moving our whole business to a new facility. All new 26,000sq foot offices space and all new manufacturing space complete with a lot of new equipment is a lot to organize and stay on schedule. But, we did it!! We are in, everyone all together (we were in 4 different facilities) in our new 125,000sq foot building feels awesome. In addition to the Dillanos build we are also in the process of completely remodeling two rental houses, working on those until late in the evening almost every day.

Somehow, we found time to get ready for this trip and now we are off for the next 7 weeks!

We finished the final packing on Monday morning then we cast off at 1:00pm one man/boy short. Skylar decided to stay home for an extra week and keep working at Dillanos where he is becoming a master packager. He is going to fly into Roche Harbor on Saturday and start the trip with us there.

The 3 of us left Tacoma cruising north up to Edmonds. The wind grew stronger the further we went hitting a constant 18-22 knots as we entered the Edmonds breakwater with waves and wind pushing us in. They gave us a funky slip away from the normal guest dock area and I didn’t know exactly where it was. Luck would have that the slip was just inside the breakwater giving us no time to prepare the lines and fenders. I struggled to hold our position while Julie readied the boat. Then PLOP, one of the fenders slipped off the rail into the sea. No time to get it in the chop and wind, I told Julie we will deal with it later, let’s get into the slip with 3. Julie has 16 years of boating experience and is the best deckhand I could ever ask for. She felt bad, but this was the only time she has ever dropped a fender!

We got into the slip without incident then we dropped the paddle board into the water where paddled on my knees to retrieve the fender that had blown into the breakwater.

We made dinner and settled in for the night. Ava was in the bathroom when she dropped a plastic screw cover in the toilet, luckily it had not gone all the way down in. Foreign objects in marine toilets are not good, they must be taken out or risk wrecking the grinding mechanism. No big deal, just stick your hand in there and grab it, I told Ava. She was grossed out and complained. No, I’m making you do it, just wash your hands after, I told her. More complaining gave way to her using 2 Qtips to chopstick her way out of this mess. Of course, it slipped off the Qtips and that’s when the second PLOP of the night occurred sending the object completely down the toilet. Major tears came shortly after, feeling bad she hadn’t just grabbed it in the first place and now “I wrecked the boat”. No big deal, we will be at the American Tug factory tomorrow and they will tell us what to do. Tears settled down after a while and we all went to bed while it started to rain.