Return from Friday Harbor

Day five in the San Juan Islands. After a visit to the famous Friday Harbor Whale Museum, we hitched up the boat trailer, towed it back to the Jackson Beach boat launch where we could pick up the boat, and got a taxi back to the marina. We hopped into the boat right before noon, just as I got a phone call from the marina office telling me that my slip rental was expiring in two minutes. They really wanted me out on time. We took a leisurely cruise back to the boat launch, passing places with names like Turn Island, Danger Rock, and Pear Point. We made unnecessary circles around various small islands just for fun. When we arrived back at Jackson Beach, we found that the entire floating dock was lying limp on the beach. For some reason I had been getting in the water just exactly at low tide all week, and today was no exception. I had neglected to check if the tide was too low for the dock to be useable, and worse yet I hadn’t bothered to even look at it when I had been there an hour before parking my car. I checked my tide app. It showed a huge dip right at my current time. We were going to have to wait a while. If a watched pot never boils, then a watched dock never floats.

Just to kill time, we slowly putted over to a nearby island at no wake speed. It’s a National Wildlife Refuge called Dinner Island, where we saw quite a few harbor seals sunning themselves on the rocks and looking back at us with suspicion. When we returned to Jackson, we had to decide on a plan. We probably didn’t have enough fuel to just drive around for two hours. My girlfriend noticed that there was a line of white mooring buoys all along the shore, including two within sight of the boat launch. These are big floating buoys which are tethered to the bottom, eliminating the need for boats to drop anchor. I had never used one before, but it was time. I motored up to one as slowly as I could, and she grabbed it. I tied a line to it from the bow and shut the engine off. I didn’t like the way it kept banging against the underside of my bow, so I rigged a fender horizontally to cushion it. We were good to go nowhere for the next 90 minutes.

Finally, we saw two impatient fishing boats manage to put in, and decided it was time to take our shot. Knowing that the water was very shallow and I still had no depth sounder, I carefully watched the path of the outgoing boats and made sure to follow their route. For the first time on our trip, an overcast had blown in and it started to rain on us. I gingerly approached the dock, my girlfriend grabbed it, and we carefully kept the boat at the very end to make sure I didn’t scrape my gelcoat on the ramp. This was the messiest ramp I’d ever seen. It was covered with driftwood chunks large and small, which I had to roll out of the way. It was matted with all manner of kelp and algae, which was slippery to walk on and actually made the car slip as I pulled the boat out. When the boat and trailer emerged from the water, it had many species of seaweed and eelgrass hanging from it as well as greenish brown goo all over the hull.

Fortunately we still had a couple of hours before our ferry home. With our remaining time I dropped my girlfriend off at a deli to grab us a very late lunch, while I went to a car wash to hose down the boat and trailer. It felt good to clean up the boat as soon as possible, and while we had time to kill. Finally we got in the ferry line and rested until our boat came. Although the ladies were getting weary of all the ferry crossings, I never tire of this scenery, especially on evenings like this. I could have taken hundreds more photos.