Hobie Tandem Island – Riveted

Deception Pass and Fidalgo Island/Bowman Bay

Laura Domela — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 01:47:12 +0000

Late this afternoon (after we finished a TON of work) we headed north to check out Deception Pass State Park. Again today, the weather was perfect. This is a lovely state park. Campsites are wooded and large. There's a lake (Cranberry Lake, good for kayaking and fishing, no motorized boats — electric okay) and nearby access to West Beach:

This is Cranberry Lake (totally mellow lake):

We headed back to the main road and crossed the bridge at Deception Pass, parked, and got out and wandered around a bit. Gorgeous.

We were down on this beach (North Beach) collecting more rocks to stick in the rock polisher when we're home next. (View from the Deception Pass Bridge):

View of the Deception Pass bridge from North Beach:

I loved this rock, but it was too big for the rock polisher (At least Kevin said it was — I wasn't totally certain). I opted just to take a photo of it and then threw it back. But now, as I'm posting this, I'm wishing I still had that dang rock. Call me Lucy. It's fine. Just look how cool those lines are…how they meet up and then don't meet up, interrupted by some dramatic geological event. Why didn't I keep that rock??

Okay so anyway…see this little island in the photo below? That's Strawberry Island. It's just past the bridge as you're coming in from Puget Sound. To the right of that island is Ben Ure Island. Well, I've got a story to tell you about ol' Ben Ure.

According to Wikipedia:

In the waters of Deception Pass, just east of the present-day Deception Pass Bridge, is a small island known as Ben Ure Island. The island became infamous for its activity of smuggling illegal Chinese immigrants for local labor. Ure and his partner Lawrence "Pirate" Kelly were quite profitable at their smuggling business and played hide-and-seek with the United States Customs Department for years. Ure's own operation at Deception Pass in the late 1880s consisted of Ure and his Native-American wife. Local tradition has it that his wife would camp on the nearby Strawberry Island (which was visible from the open sea) and signal him with a fire on the island's summit to alert him to whether or not it was safe to bring his illegal cargo ashore. For transport, Ure would tie the illegal immigrants up in burlap bags so that if customs agents were to approach then he could easily toss the bags overboard. The tidal currents would carry the discarded immigrants' bodies to San Juan Island to the north and west of the pass and many ended up in what became known as Dead Man's Bay.

Not a cool guy. At all. And interesting that they chose the term "illegal Chinese immigrants" as a euphamism for "slaves."

Seaweed in the current, taken from the bridge:

Deception Island and Puget Sound, from the bridge:

Under the bridge:

We kept on heading north for a little bit thinking we'd turn around when it was convenient. I looked at the map and noted there was a bay pretty close called Bowman Bay and thought we could check it out and then turn around and head back. We thought we might take the Hobie out at Oak Harbor and sail around there and Penn Cove this evening on the way home. But when we got to Bowman Bay, it was so pretty and it looked like there was a little wind picking up so we opted to sail here.

Here's what we did:

It was gorgeous. We saw a handful of harbor seals, a dozen or so Dall's porpoises, a huge bald eagle, and several tufted puffins!!! So cool.

We stopped and picked up a few more mussels and some clams for dinner tonight. I cooked 'em the same way I did the mussels the other night, and served with a salad of fresh greens and halved sun gold tomatoes from Red Dog Farm.

Tomorrow we're headed back down to Langley (with the Airstream this time) to visit some friends (friends with chickens!!) before we head back to Lake Pleasant/Seattle for the weekend. I've got a shoot on Sunday, and we'll be heading home on Monday morning.

Exploring Whidbey Island

Laura Domela — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 00:11:51 +0000

For our lunch break today we decided to do a little island exploring. First we drove back up to Oak Harbor and picked up some fresh Penn Cove mussels for dinner tonight (and some salmon for dinner tomorrow night), and a few clams I'll toss in with the mussels for variety.

Then we checked out the other state park I researched online (Fort Ebey State Park) to see how it would be to stay there. It's wooded, on a bluff but with no view spots, but very pretty. Sites looked like they had water/electric, and were large and pretty and private. We both had 3 bars of Edge from AT&T. There's a beach, and a gun battery, and lots of trails. Looks good. I'd stay there.

We also went to check out the Lavender Wind Farm (gorgeous, lots of beautiful, fragrant lavender, chickens, cool gifty things in the gift shop, including lavender cheddar and fresh eggs). Cyrus (whose blog is here), commented on one of our recent posts and told us about a very cool organization called Harvest Hosts. For $35 bucks a year you can stay overnight at one of many, many participating farms and wineries (as long as you're self-contained and don't require hookups) with no nightly fee. The stay limit is usually 24 hours unless you buy a bunch of wine/produce/eggs and maybe help out a little on the farm and then ask nicely if you can stay longer, please pretty please. Rockin' great idea, isn't it? These are the kinds of places we like to visit anyway, so I plan to be using this frequently. Anyway, the lavender farm looked lovely…the RV parking spot may even have a slight water view…couldn't tell.

After the lavender farm we headed south to go check out the town of Langley. Adorable little town! (Thanks Kathy H. for the tip!)

We returned to camp, worked a bit more, then took the Hobie out for an evening sail. Well guess what? We ended up directly under the pattern for another round of F18 touch-n-goes. Sailing. In nature.

Remember, this was taken with my iPhone. Which makes things looks way further away than they really were.

We saw about 6 harbor seals and one porpoise. Here's where we went:

Now, I'm going to cook up some mussels in the classic French, steamed with garlic, butter, white wine method, probably with some garlic bread and salad.

Today’s Mish Mash of Events

Laura Domela — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 22:07:47 +0000

Here's what we did today.

We had breakfast (fresh farm eggs from the farm market yesterday on top of steamed spinach, bacon, and a sprinkle of pecorino). And here's another ship, of course:

We drove into Cathlamet to have lunch and stop by the market. Here's an osprey and nest on top of a bridge on the way:

Passion flower outside the cafe where we ate:

A cool little free library kiosk in Cathlamet:

Then we put on the wetsuits and dry jackets and went for a sail. We started out so calmly…meandering back through Steamboat Slough with just a little bit of wind in the sails, kickin' back quietly watching osprey, heron, eagle. And then, soon as we rounded the tip of that island all hell broke loose as we headed back to camp. HUGE swells, TONS of wind (around 18mph). The Hobie handled (and Kevin handled the Hobie) very well in all that craziness. See here where it looks like just a straight line back to the Airstream? Heh, yeah. It's a bit misleading.

Sure was fun though!

This afternoon’s sail track

Laura Domela — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 21:44:23 +0000

Distance:		16.6 miles
Elapsed Time:		3:34:31
Avg Speed:		4.6 mph
Max Speed:		8.7 mph

We made ourselves a little figure eight around Welsh Island and Tenasillahe Island this afternoon. Fun! We saw plenty of ospreys, several herons, and one very large bald eagle. This is the southern tip of Tenasillahe Island:

This little cabin is in Red Slough (the slough that divides the two islands, where there is basically nothing else…) Kevin and I always just call it the Deliverance Cabin:

Afternoon Sail in the Columbia River

Laura Domela — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 22:30:57 +0000

We headed out with the Hobie this afternoon to do a little sailing. The wind had picked up but it wasn't looking quite as rough as it was yesterday (um, whitecaps and 3 foot swells, wind 18mph? Yeah, we were soaked).

It was beautiful out this afternoon and we headed down river for a bit before we decided to take a little detour through a slough that cuts through Welsh Island (see our track below). The Hobie Tandem Island is so good for everything around here. You can sail as much as you want (top speed today was 7.7mph), and then if you want to go explore somewhere like these little back sloughs and there's little or no wind, just furl the sail and pop in the mirage drives and pedal a bit. We never needed the mirage drives today because the wind remained our friend even through the "swampy back roads".

Dry camping status report, Day 3:
Solar/battery state of charge: 90%
Fresh water: 3/4
Gray water: 1/8
Black water: 3/8 (because I've been pouring dishwater in there occasionally)
AT&T cell service is good
Verizon data card working fine
No Sprint service whatsoever, as usual
The park has showers so we're taking advantage of those.