With sunshine in the forecast and some favourable wind and tide my long time sailing buddy and good friend Michael Schattenkerk and I headed north for the first weekend of Autumn. After waiting three hours for the locks we finally dropped from the fresh water down into Puget Sound and headed north. It's been years since we went into Mats Mats Bay with it's narrow and shallow entrance but the tides were in our favor so we took the chance to go inside. It was a place we used to anchor in years ago with my old Baba 30. I remember it had just a few farm houses with fields that sloped down to the landlocked bay. Well..it's been a very long time and the development around the bay has not done it any favors. There's a mish mash of vacation cottages mixed in with trailers and fish farm equipment and a host of old boats on what look like permanent moorings. We made a quick exit and retreated to the more open and beautiful anchorage at Port Ludlow. Although it's more developed, the view of the Olympic Mountains, the sunset and then the sunrise were all worth it.
The breeze filled in early and we tacked our way Admiralty Inlet towards the north end of Marrowstone and headed for yet another shallow and tricky entrance, that into Kilisut harbor between Indian and Marrowstone Islands. This is just south of Port Townsend. The entrance is well marked with a series of markers on pilings that go from the entry buoy (#1) all the way in to marker #17! With 11' of tide showing on our Chartplotter we noted that there were several places that would only have a few feet of water over them at low tide. We've been sailing in company with Tori and Dixie aboard Sea Fever (51' with an 8.5' draft) so there are several places we've not ventured into for fear of running aground. This weekend we were on our own and with a bit less draft aboard Insignia (only 7') we took our chances and poked into a few shallow places.
One nice feature of the new Raymarine E-Series chartplotter is the tidal graph and tide data that shows where the height of the tide is at the current time along with the highs and lows. This tool allowed us to be more accurate than our old formula. (Our old formula was as follows for a six hour tide cycle: 1/12 tide in the first and last hour 2/12 in the second and fifth and 3/12 in the third and fourth hours of the tide.... or 1-2-3-3-2-1) The GPS tide data is much more accurate! If you find a diamond shape with a "T" in the middle of it...take your curser over to it and click and you'll be viewing tide data for that location on your chart plotter. Simple as pie!
So with that data we ventured all the way south to Mystery Bay, Marrowstone and once again found a harbor full of many neglected and unique boats that appear to have been moored and not moved for a very long time. Having seen this, we once again abandoned our intended anchorage (and walk for ice cream at the old Nordland store...) in favor of returning to the entrance of the harbor channel at Fort Flagler State Park. We snagged a buoy (one of seven, all empty and only $10 per night!) and kayaked ashore for ice. (the ice is necessary for diluting the gin, tonic and lime juice at happy hour!) We kayaked around the spit which caused about 35 seals to leave their warm and sandy beach, flee into the water and pop up all around us in our kayaks. That was fun!
After a gorgeous sunset we settled into a great dinner and a movie and on Sunday morning waited till the tide graph gave us the 'go ahead' and we carefully retraced our path out the shallow entrance, raised our sails and had a glorious downwind run almost all the way back to the locks! It was swift and smooth sailing such that I baked a big batch of brownies and Rumor (the cat) was happy all the way home. She loves sailing downwind!
