It’s Just About Time…

It’s cruising season up here again … One of our cruising criteria this season, unlike other seasons, will be to travel to places where social distancing is easy to accomplish. The great glaciers that scraped their way across the Pacific Northwest landscape carved out a labyrinth of fjords, channels, passages, bays, and estuaries leaving an immense convoluted coastline. The coastal areas of the Salish Sea have been colonized by First Nations people for ten to fifteen thousand years. Over the past 200 years, migrants to the Northwest have built large city populations, towns, small hamlets. There still are areas with little commercial or residential development.

As Canada will most like be off limits for Americans this year, the little coves and anchorages of the Olympic Peninsula, the many islands of South Sound and the less developed islands in the San Juan group will be our areas to explore. Our plan is to anchor out often. We will visit small towns where social distancing is not as easy to accomplish only when essential and when we need to re-provision. Port Townsend is such a place. We needed to have a 200 foot length of anchor rode spliced to our 300 feet of anchor chain giving us 500 feet of anchoring capability. Ian, of Brion Toss Rigging, performed the splice yesterday and we are now back in Port Ludlow for a few days of final provisioning.

While in Port Townsend I took a little hike on the beach that starts at the Point Hudson Marina. A few short steps from the marina I found this:.

After meandering no more than a quarter mile up the beach to the North, I stopped to look back. There was no one to be seen. Looking North… again, no one to be seen. What do they know that I don’t know? Tsunami warning that I missed? Rabid marauding sea otters? The beach cobbles that made some of the walking more of a balancing act might have stopped those less intrepid. No matter… there was enough post glacier sand and gravel to make it easy for my hiking shoes to tackle.