Lakebay to Gig Harbor, WA

Laura Domela — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 23:41:37 +0000

Another gorgeous sunrise in Lakebay!

We left our mooring buoy at Penrose Point State Park this morning around 10:30am and headed toward Gig Harbor. In this shot below, you can just barely make out Mt. Rainier through the clouds, to the left of the trees on the point:

It was a beautiful, quiet cruise over to Gig Harbor. Here we are just outside the harbor:

We stopped first at the Tides Tavern, tied up at the guest dock, and then headed up to have lunch. We both had halibut and chips and it was very good…we rank it right up there with the best we've had (and the tartar sauce was crazy good…they wouldn't tell us what made it so good/different though).

Airship at the guest dock:

Tides Tavern:

We took advantage of the 4 hour guest tie up and walked up to West Marine after lunch to pick up a few things (another fender in case we end up going through the Ballard Locks, so we now have a set of three for port and three for starboard). Then, we motored down to Arabella's Landing and got a nice spot on their guest dock for the night. We put a load of laundry in, walked back up to town to exchange a thing at West Marine, stopped in a couple shops on the way back, including the distillery Heritage Distilling.

We tasted a barrel-finished vodka and a couple of bourbons and brought a bottle of the barrel-finished vodka back to the boat (it'll make a great martini!).

Mini-still:

There's a great marine supply/gift shop here at Arabella's Landing called Ship to Shore. We stopped in to check it out before going back to the boat, and I picked up a few more pieces of glass(plastic)ware so we could finish stocking the cupboard with Strahl–everything. This stuff is SO GREAT! If you prefer plastic over glass in your boat or RV, we highly recommend this brand. Almost every single guest who has held one of these wine glasses in their hand thought it was glass. It's such nice quality and feels great to hold (and has this killer little ridge on the bottom of the glass for your finger to sit in…hard to describe, but trust me, they're fabulous).

We have four 8oz (chardonnay) wine glasses, four 13oz (bordeaux) wine glasses, four of each of the small and medium old-fashioned style tumblers, and four tall "water" glasses. Love 'em! (They have several sizes of martini glasses too, but we've opted to use the small old-fashioned style tumblers for cocktails, rather than take up the room in our cupboard that martini glasses take up.)

Uh oh, while gathering links I just found these. They stack, and are martini-like. Done.

It turned into a sunny (warm!) day today:

We spent the rest of the afternoon working here on the boat, in the sun, in Gig Harbor, WA, in February, with the doors and windows open. Pretty sweet day!

Here's our route from Lakebay to Gig Harbor (light green line, kind of hard to see):

Lakebay, WA

Laura Domela — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 14:23:50 +0000

This is one of our new favorite spots in the South Sound: Lakebay and Penrose Point State Park. This is where we moored last night, on a marine state park buoy, and it looked JUST LIKE THAT. Amazing isn't it? It is so very still here.

We took the dinghy into shore (past the marina and cafe, closed during the week in the winter) and tied up to the state park dock so we could go take a look around.

That's our dinghy out there at the end of the dock:

Before we went to the dock, we headed for a shallow cove, but it proved too shallow (and too COVERED with oysters and shells) to nicely beach the dinghy.

We walked out on the beach a ways and I've never seen so many sand dollars (alive!) in my life. I think I only recently learned what they looked like when they're alive (at an aquarium on the Oregon Coast)…they're dark purple and covered in fuzz. Here's one:

(Though I can't be certain of its aliveness since it was on the beach, and not underwater.)

Many sizes of sand dollars (those little ones are about the size of a quarter):

The rocks on this beach reminded me of the show we saw at the Glass Museum in Tacoma last week. The colors and textures were endlessly cool:

We returned to Airship and took the chairs to the upper deck, popped open a beer, and just sat mostly in silence as we took in the beauty and stillness of this place.

Here's what it looked like early this morning:

It's starting to burn off now, and we're off to hike some trails.

Here's our track from yesterday – 36 nautical miles total. (Our friend Cari drove out to Jarrell Cove and we took her on a short cruise down to McMicken Island and back. The mooring buoys at McMicken looked great, but I'm glad we decided to go further on to Lakebay.)

South Sound – Riveted

Lakebay to Gig Harbor, WA

Lakebay, WA