First day in Friday Harbor: Today I’m giving my boat a ride on a boat. For our five-day trip, we decided on the crazy idea of trailering the boat on the ferry rather than driving it across, even though the weather is amazing this week. Rosario Strait looks like a pretty large body of water to cross for such a small boat and inexperienced skipper, and there’s no guarantee that the weather will be the same when we leave. When we booked this a month ago, I wanted to be able to get some experience exploring the San Juans with assurance of a safe return no matter what the weather.
Unfortunately my expensive navigation system went belly up while we were out crabbing last Saturday. I stressed a lot about it yesterday while trying various things to fix it. I got up at 5 a.m. to talk to customer support on the East Coast, but it looks like I’ll have to send it in for repair. So today I had to resort to what mariners have done for ages: rely on the Navionics app on my phone. I have reserved a slip at Friday Harbor Marina for the week, but it turns out that the only boat launch is two miles away at Jackson Beach. It’s much farther by water (about five miles), but we enjoyed the ride around Turn Island in to the marina. My phone app worked great for navigating, but I don’t have a depth sounder anymore until my system is fixed. In the meantime, I’m using the “Sonar Chart” feature in Navionics, which gives me the high-resolution underwater relief chart. We had to take a taxi back to the boat launch to retrieve my car. It was a bit of a hassle, but all part of the adventure.
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