Wildflowers

Wildflower meadow on Turn Island

Several promises have been made about posting some photos of wildflowers.  It seems as though this might be a good time.  Sailing early in the season has definitely given us the opportunity to see wildflowers we've never seen before.  A wonderful treat. These are some of the wildflowers that we have seen throughout the San Juans in May and early June.

Beach Pea at Ewing Cove on Sucia

Silverweed or Potentilla

Serviceberry on Turn Island

Self-heal on Sucia

Paintbrush

Nootka Rose on Sucia Island

Broad-leaved Stonecrop which we saw EVERYWHERE!

Sea Blush on Turn Island

Fairyslippers on Turn Island

Field Chickweed

Chocolate Lily on Turn Island

Death Camas & Common Camas

The roots of the Common Camas were a staple of the Native American diet.  The roots of the Death Camas were not a good thing to eat -- hence the name!  Unfortunately, once the distinctive flowers have died away and the bulb ripens, there is no way to tell the two plants apart.  And they like to grow in the same areas.  It is estimated that at one time, death by consuming the wrong camas was the leading cause of death amongst the native people of the west.  Communities apparently used to farm the camas, weeding out the death camas when they were in bloom and guarding their plots to ensure a supply of Common Camas roots without fear of a stray Death Camas root.  The flower of the Common Camas does not live up to its name -- having one of the more stunning colors of blue you will ever see.

Common Camas in bloom on Sucia

Honeysuckle

Fiascos

May 28, 2009

Those of you who know us are probably wondering when you get to read about our many fiascos.  It is hard to go boating without experiencing fiascos, no matter who you are.  But when you are a Mundt and you normally experience fiascos on a regular basis in your everyday life - well...it goes without saying that there will be marine fiascos.

For the most part, this trip has so far been remarkably trouble free.  Excuse me while I go find a piece of wood to knock on.  Sailors are superstitious.  The boat has worked very well.  We haven't visited a single shipyard.  In comparison, on last year's "vacation" we spent the first two weeks of our sailing trip visiting most of the shipyards of Anacortes and Sidney!  So we are very happy and haven't really had a single fiasco of a mechanical nature.  I've got to go find that piece of wood again.  

However, on a boat there are many things that can go wrong.  Not all of them of a mechanical nature.  In sailing they alwa

ys say that there are two kinds of sailors: those who have and those who haven't.  Run aground, that is.  Well I guess now I have to say that we have joined the former group (we had, in fact, been aground many years ago...but that was on a different boat, so we don't count that).  I can't say that we ran aground, but we did indeed "find the bottom" in Echo Bay the other day.  I (Jude) was at the helm and apparently I was a little too smug the other day when I maintained that I could steer and navigate at the same time!  Carl had just raised the anchor well off South Finger Island and we were slowly making our way out of the bay when we bounced.  That's really about the best way to describe it.  We bounced over what must have been a rock.  As we were heading towards a -3.5 tide that day, it was pretty obvious that we would need to steer clear of areas we wouldn't ordinarily even think about in during a time of higher tides, but even so there was considerably less water in the spot where we touched than was indicated on the chart.  At least that's my position!  After checking out the bilge to make sure we weren't taking on water and using our rudder in a normal fashion, we decided that we could breath a sigh of relief that the fiasco hadn't occurred an hour later in the day when even less water wold have covered "Jude's rock".  If any of you Northwest sailors out there want me to identify said rock on your chart of Echo Bay, I'd be happy to.

Jude at the helm

Fiascos tend to come in pairs (or more) and sure enough, a couple of days later we found out why you don't try to leave Fish Bay on Lopez Island in full flood current.  We have been boating for many years.  So many that I'm sure a lot of people consider us to be experienced boaters.  I consider ourselves to be experienced boaters.  But...an experienced boater is reminded time and time again that there is no such thing!  You are constantly finding yourself in new situations that you don't know how to deal with.  Today in Fish Bay we had such a situation.  The current was flowing so strongly inside the Lopez Islander docks that we literally couldn't back the boat into the current without being thrown crosswise in the slip.  Our inflatable dinghy served as a fender for us while we tried to figure out what to do!  We needed all three of us to get the boat turned lengthwise in the slip again (albeit with the other side "to" this time!) and the lines and fenders moved.  With Liz and I on the dock and Carl gunning the engine we managed to get the stern swung around the piling at the end of the slip and leap on board as the boat was heading out to open water.  

Today we are anchored in Indian Cove on Shaw Island and the water is so clear that we rowed around the boat and could look down at the keel and see that there is no major damage apparent there from our encounter with "Jude's Rock".  We did amazingly little damage to the boat in our second fiasco - the dinghy seems to be intact even after being squeezed between the LIBERTE and the dock for a considerable amount of time.  Since most of our boating fiascos in the past have involved the dinghy, it is hard to believe that it didn't pop before our eyes.

Liberte at anchor in Indian Cove with the Olympic Mountains in the background

The one thing that has not been a fiasco in any way is the weather.  We are enjoying weather that couldn't be any better in July or August.  A little chilly overnight it is true, but beautifully warm days.  Today we took a great walk around Shaw - the least commercial of the 4 San Juan Islands that are served by ferries - 100's are not.  

Carl and Liz walking the roads of Shaw Island

There is only one small grocery store and no hotels, restaurants, B & B's, etc.  There is one campground and that is in the bay we're anchored in.  We walked to the school and library in the middle of the island.  The original schoolhouse, built in 1890, still stands with some newer buildings around it.  There are about a dozen students in K - 8.  

Shaw Island School

The library is across the street and one of the only private libraries in Washington State.  Carl and I have visited before, but today the library was open and we were able to get a look inside.  An annual membership costs $5 a year.  Why would anyone not want to join?

Shaw Island Library

Lopez

May 27, 2009

Lopez Island -- one of the regular stops on the Mundt cruising schedule.  Last night we came into Fisherman Bay, a large bay on the west side of Lopez Island.  The depth is adequate once you are inside but the entrance is very shallow at a low tide.  We generally try to time our arrival with high tide, or at least a rising tide!  Our friends Jim and Birte tell us that nearly every weekend they see boats aground in the entrance.  Having had one encounter with the bottom this trip we aren't taking any chances!  So we wait until nearly 9PM before entering. 

There are many reasons why we love Lopez, and since we are Mundts, many of them involve food!  We have already introduced you to our favorite farm on Lopez, the Horse Drawn Farm. Saturdays from May to October there is the Farmer's Market, located in a field just up the road from the village near Fisherman Bay.  In addition there is an old-fashioned soda fountain/cafeteria in the back of the drugstore, a 'world-famous' bakery, a wonderful natural food store, a couple of great coffee shops and various restaurants.  Our favorite restaurant is The Vortex -- a super place to get soups, wraps, smoothies and other tasty treats.  They have a great deck that is sheltered from the wind and we haven't missed lunch at the Vortex many times in the past ten years or so!  This trip was no exception.  The problem was that it was only 10:00 and people were hungry.  So we hit the drugstore for some bacon, eggs and pancakes to fuel ourselves for the main reason we come to Lopez....THE DUMP.  

Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays the dump is open to the public.  This is a dump like no other.  Everything is well-organized, sorted and FREE!  Liz used to be the main proponent of a visit to the dump.  But last year Carl went along and discovered a wonderful sweatshirt of a sort he'd been looking for without success and he became hooked.  The dump opens at noon and Carl and Liz headed down the road to see what sort of treasures they could find while Jude went to the library to use their free wireless to work on uploading blog posts.  Lopez has a great library and we spent quite a bit of time there using their wireless and browsing the magazine and book racks.  Liz was thinking maybe it was time to see what "Twilight" was all about, but all the books were checked out.  Surprise.

About 2:00 we were feeling a few hunger pangs again so we walked to the Vortex.  We felt right at home and Liz and the girl behind the counter bonded over their wrist braces and compared their overuse injuries.  The weather was nice enough to eat outside on the deck and as Liz showed her finds from the dump the girls working inside at the Vortex watched through the window and gave "thumbs up" for the items they liked.  Or were they recognizing something they had gotten rid of the week before?!

We left Fisherman Bay that evening, but that's a fiasco for another day.

25 de Mayo

25 de Mayo - el Reino del Reves

Another spectacular morning.  We retreived the anchor and motored the 20 minutes to Ewing Cove to get ready for the low tide.  This is the lowest tide of the cycled and at minus 3.2 feet it will be the best beach collecting for the next month.  

This is also Argentine independence day and we are thinking of all our friends down south where it is late Fall.

Sucia again

May 24, 2009

Having Lindsey aboard means that we are going to retrace some steps since she loves the same places in the San Juans that we do.  

This morning we looked around Friday Harbor a bit and had some coffee and rolls in a WiFi coffee shop.  Then we cast off and headed back up San Juan Channel toward Sucia Island.  We had a strong flood current behind us and our average speed for two hours was more than 9 knots.  That meant that the current was flowing in our favor at more than 2 knots per hour.  At Sucia we decided to anchor in Echo Bay as it is the Memorial Day weekend (a beautiful one at that) and there are boats everywhere.  A week ago there were three boats in Echo Bay.  Tonight Liz has counted 75!  By tomorrow afternoon there will probably only be a handful once again.  Although May and June have long days and the possibility of good weather, the boating season in the northwest really doesn't begin until around the 4th of July.

So far on this voyage we have been tied to a buoy or a dock every night.  But don't get the idea that that pattern will continue much longer.  As we move north, the buoys in public parks will peter out and then the docks will disappear.  By the time that we get to the Cortes Island mentioned in the title of this blog we will be anchoring every night.  Cortes Island is found at the northern extremity of the Straight of Georgia adjacent to Desolation Sound, which is a Canadian marine park, and it is not named after the Cortez who conquered Mexico.  Rather it is named after someone on one of the Spanish expeditions to the Northwest..  Some of our readers, the cultured ones, will have already  figured out that the title of the blog is a play on words to a famous John Steinbeck book.   If you can't figure it out, ask a cultured friend.   But the play on words aside, Cortes Island is one of our favorite islands and we'll tell all about it when we get there - which may not be for quite a long time because it is far away and because we have some obligations that may delay us.

Once our anchor was down and set we put the outboard motor onto the dinghy and went ashore for a hike out to Johnson Point - about 2 miles each way.  There are more than 25 miles of trails on Sucia Island and even though there can be up to 500 people on the island on a sunny summer weekend, we hardly ever see anyone on the trails.  The people cluster on the beaches at the head of the anchorages.  So we feel that we have the island to ourselves.  The end of the trail to Johnson point is a sloping exposed bluff with views out to Matia Island and 12,000 foot Mount Baker to the east - a perpetually snow capped semi-active volcano.  There is a marker at the point that recounts that the island was first explored in the late 1890's by US surveyors.   Their markings on the rocks are still visible.

Camus and Orcas Island from Johnson Point on Sucia

Carl and Jude at Johnson Point

Lindsey's wrist is in a brace and we'll just have to see how fast it heals up and she can return to work.  Last night she came walking off the ferry in Friday Harbor burdened down with her clothes and bedding.  We sympathized with all the weight she had to carry one handed until she unpacked her back pack and pulled out hard back copy of War and Peace!  Unabridged.

            LIz with dreads

She has been living at home so that she can save as much money as possible as fast as possible.  Once she has her nest egg replenished she plans to go off traveling again.  But with a bad wrist she is not going to be scooping too much ice cream.

Change of Plans

May 23, 2009

Up early (0800, that's early for us) and we headed to the beach for the low tide.  Everyday the low tide gets a little lower until it reaches a nadir and then the low tides begin to rise each day until a peak and then the cycle begins again.   Today and for the next two days we have what are called "minus tides" which means that the water is very low and exposes rocks and tide pools that are normally hidden from sight.   It will be a rare chance to see some exotic sea creatures.  We have knee pads for kneeling on the rocky shores of the San Juan Islands and a magnifying glass in case we need to get a better look at something.  We also have a blue bucket for bringing specimens back to the LIBERTE.  Jude and I spent a happy hour turning over rocks and crawling about on the beach discovering small creatures and plants. 

   Scientist preying

We hurried back to the boat with our little blue bucket and got the microscope out into the cockpit where the sun was bright.  We took turns looking at Petri dishes containing small interesting things.  This first time, we are really just getting used to the microscope which is on loan from Dr. Bruce Miller of the University of Washington's College of Fisheries.   Dr. Miller is a world famous authority on the early life history of fishes, an ever useful field of knowledge, and he was generous enough to loan us one of his microscopes.  The scope has three powers - 6.5, 10 and 40 - and is used for looking at objects that have some size to them.  It is not really powerful enough to look at single cell organisms but is great for objects one finds on a beach.  It took us about an hour to figure out how to use the microscope and its various adjustments.  The best thing we saw was a tiny copepod, fully formed but nearly invisible to the naked eye.  Under the microscope we could see it's feelers, tail and segmented body.  We didn't try to identity which species of  copepod it was because there are thousands.  

 Scientist scoping

After playing around in the cockpit with our scientific instruments we decided to take a hike out to the lighthouse at Turn Point.   The round trip hike to the lighthouse is 6.5 miles and involves some climbing as Stuart Island is quite hilly.  One the way one passes the one room school schoolhouse that is one of the last active ones in the U.S.  The route takes one past many a pastoral view across the small farms over the sea.  

      Pastoral view on Stuart Island

The  lighthouse lighthouse itself is perched on a bluff at Turn Point up above where  Haro Straight and Boundary Pass come together.  There are always large ocean going freighters to be seen going to and from the port of Vancouver, British Columbia.   From the lighthouse one can look across to the West and see Vancouver Island in the distance and dozens of smaller islands in the foreground as Stuart Island is the last island in America - from here it is only about 4 miles over to Canadian waters.   Being so close to the border our cell phone is confused as to where it is and we have poor cell and E-Mail service.

  Lighthouse at Turn Point

When we got back to the LIBERTE about 1530 we got a garbled message on the phone from Lindsey.  She has suffered an ice cream scooping injury to her wrist that will prevent her from working for the next week at the place of her employment, the ice cream shop on Bainbridge Island, and she wants to come up to the boat to join us!!!  We got a message back to her saying that that would be fine.  But this new plan means that we will have to be in Friday Harbor at the dock this evening when her ferry from the mainland comes in at 2235.  We untie from the buoy and steam for Friday Harbor about 2 hours away.  We got there in plenty of time to get the boat ready to house another person and to cook one of our favorite dishes - tuna pasta.  Lindsey is a vegetarian (except for bacon and sausages) so we are going to be eating a lot of vegetables for the next week while her wrist recovers. 

Ewing Cove

May 21 - 22, 2009

Sucia Island has something for everyone.  The island is made up of a series of long fingers with anchorages in between.  The best anchorage, according to us, is Ewing Cove, a 1/4 mile long indentation that is only 3 or 4 boat lengths wide.  On either side of the cove are rocky sandstone walls topped with large trees - Douglas Fir and the red-barked Madrona, a deciduous species.  Ewing is the most isolated of all the bays and coves on Sucia and you have walk about a mile along a trail that skirts the high bluffs to get to the island proper.  In the morning of the 21st we hiked to Echo Bay, which is the largest anchorage on the island.  In the summer it can hold 150 boats but today there were only three as we are well before the boating season.

Ewing Cove Rock Formations 

The weather has really taken a turn for the better and there are blue skies and temperatures in the high 60's, quite unusual for this early in the year.  We are still on the lookout for wildflowers and in a later post we'll put up our pictures.  It's amazing how you can notice things if you put your mind to it.  Normally we would walk right past the flowers but because we have decided to devote this cruise to SCIENCE we are seeing things that we would have missed before.  The number of different wildflower species is enormous and if you stop for a moment and get down on your hands and knees you'll find all manner of delicate and beautiful flowers in the height of bloom.

Another thing that we are noticing is the birds.  There is one in particular called the pigeon guillimot which is abundant in Ewing Cove.  This is a little pigeon size diving bird with red feet that dangle awkwardly behind when it is flying and a bright red inside- of -mouth.  The birds apparently fly better underwater than through the air and we get a kick of how they plop into the water when they are trying to land.  But they come up with a fish in their black beaks almost every time they dive.  They mate for life and they nest in the sandstone walls that border Ewing Cove.

Friday the 22nd of May is a special day for us because it is Lindsey's 23rd birthday.  When we woke up we sent her an E-Mail of congratulations and then began to enjoy the amazingly beautiful day.  Clear blue skies, not a cloud in sight, lots of dew overnight on the boat and a fresh breeze from the North where our good weather comes from.  We motored over to nearby Matia Island and caught a buoy.  Then we went ashore in the dinghy for what is the best 1 mile long hike in the San Juan Islands.  The trail winds through old growth Douglas Fir that somehow escaped the loggers 130 years ago when the Northwest was scalped.  It has not been so lucky as to escape the bloggers.  Matia also has a number of quiet little bays and coves that are too small for anchorage so they are empty - but beautiful.

View of Mount Baker from Matia hike
 

When the hike was over we decided to move on to Stuart Island which contains a small State Marine Park, but mainly is an island where people live.   However, Stuart is not served by the ferries so there are very few residents - probably less than 200 and the island is about 10 miles long and 2 miles wide.  So no one is rubbing shoulders with anyone else.  There was some wind and we sailed briefly but in the end we decided to high tail it with the engine as Stuart was about 2 hours away.  We took a buoy in Prevost Harbor, one of the two anchorages on Stuart and  settled in for the Memorial Day weekend.