Plop Plop

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.