Popeye In Paris! 2009 Paris Boat Show!

It's a tough job...but somebody has to do it! This year two of us travelled to the Paris Show so one of my salespeople could pick up their 2009 Beneteau Dedication Award (Congratulations, Tamas!) plus we get to see all the new models! Beneteau introduced three new models at the show including the new First 35, The Beneteau 50 and the gigantic new Beneteau 58! Each of these new models were spectacular and we're excited to get them all sailing in our hometown soon. The new First 35 is a Farr Design with a gorgeous teak/alpi interior that felt much larger than her size. Her carbon wheel was huge! The new Beneteau 50 featured a cockpit arch with it's newly styled deck but it was the new Beneteau 58 that stole the show. This boat had a swim/dinghy platform on the stern that was nicknamed "The Beach" complete with beach chairs! Spectacular!Hunter also had a surprising presence this year with their line up that included their new 2010 Hunter 39 as well. It was a great show! Overwhelming as usual but we made the best of it. A glass of Kir Royale (Champagne and Cassis) together with a terrific very french lunch allowed us to survive the long day at the show!

Sailing In Paris!

One of the companies I have the privilege of representing at work is an amazing French boat builder named Beneteau. During the first few days of December each year Beneteau USA takes it's award winners on a trip to the Paris Boat Show and then on down to the Atlantic coast to see all of the factories and learn about what's new. During my last Beneteau related trip to Paris (in the sunshine of June) I saw the sailboat dealership of my dreams in the park fountain very close to the Lourve Museum. This dealer moors all of his stock sailboat inventory on his cart each night and returns each morning to rent out his fleet to parents and kids from all over the world. I suppose he's technically more in the sailboat charter business than in sales. I can only wish i had his small inventory during this crazy economy! But...before I complain too much, I must tell you...I am once again sitting in my hotel room in St. Germain, very near the Notre Dame Cathedral and having just walked all around town in the light rain of December. It feels very much like Seattle weather but the lunch we just finished was out of this world. I LOVE Paris! We'll send you some photos from the boat show over the next few days. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy a little armchair sailing with these pictures from Paris. Click on them and they enlarge!

Taking the tiller back! Our new Thunderbird 26!

I grew up sailing small boats. Make that VERY small boats. I started sailing in an 8 foot pram called an El Toro out of the Kaneohe Bay Yacht Club in Hawaii...not long after the islands became a state. My family raced with friends aboard their Cal-20 and my folks soon purchased a new Cal-30 back in the mid-60's. These were all tiller boats and they were fun to sail. Simple and fun. My sailing has graduated to a big boat for cruising big water between here and Alaska but despite her beauty and her size...somewhere along my progression of sailboats I had lost that feeling one can only have with a tiller in one hand and a mainsheet (ok..or a beer...) in the other. Hence...The Thunderbird. I had a beer in one hand as i was talking with my good friend Michael Schattenkerk this past spring and we reminisced about the early days and of our small boat sailing. It started us down the road of a new partnership in a new (to us) boat. We looked at a lot of smaller boats and narrowed our criteria to include fiberglass, tillers, singlehandable, affordable boats with occasional overnighting capability and a class we just might do some racing in. Leschi marina is handy for both of us and so we looked into the San Juan 24 fleet as well as into Thunderbirds...the boat which finally came into our respective families. If you're not familiar with the Thunderbird 26, it's a Pacific Northwest icon. Originally designed by Ben Seaborn as part of a contest a plywood manufacturer sponsored in order to sell more plywood...I kid you not. Her hard chine hull and sharp edged transom is the giveaway to identifying a T-Bird from any distance. Michael and I ended up with a great boat with quite a history which I'll go into further in subsequent posts but most of all...we got a boat that's great to sail...with the tiller in one hand and a beer in the other. She's as of yet still nameless although we have recently been referring to her as "Poco Mas"...or 'Little More" and she's a kick. Now...why is it that of all these sails...there are no reefs in the mainsails???

AUTUMN WEEKEND TO MARROWSTONE

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!

Returning from Barkley Sound July 2009

Barkley Sound is about 300 square miles of water filled with rocks and islands located on the Pacific side of Vancouver Island.   We've tried to get out here before on a few occasions but been knocked back by the prevailing westerly winds in the wicked Straits of Juan de Fuca.   Having done it...it's sometimes just easier to go 'the long way'... six hundred miles up the 'inside passage', over the top of the island and then slide downwind on the northwesterly winds that blow most of the summer.

Once we arrived to the safety of "Joes Bay" in the Broken Group, we parked and slept.  We did a little bit of kayaking each day exploring the nearby islands.   I am admittedly more 'adventurous' of our boats traveling in company and like to poke into little nooks and indents in the rugged islands.   Tori and Dixie aboard Sea Fever are quick to follow into new and interesting albeit tight anchorages.  We often drop the hook and then tie the sterns of our boats to trees surrounding little lagoons.   The third boat in our triage this year was Nancy Early aboard Tethys, a veteran of not one but two complete circumnavigations and the first to do so with an all women's crew.   Nancy is careful in her travels and I think we may have stretched her a bit on this trip but she and Lynn were good sports and enjoyed some amazing little spots as a result.

We ventured into some amazing little spots such as Nettle Island, Cataract Bay and Franks Bay for a few days each.   We dinghied over to Lucky Creek and hiked up the waterfalls and kayaked up Pipestem inlet for miles in company with a golden eagle.  Useless Bay had a treacherous entrance (warning...do not enter when seas are breaking over the rocky entrance...) and it was not at all useless once we go in there...it was crab country.  

Nancy is this year's designated 'crab killing machine'.   Barkley is home to a tremendous number of Dungeness Crabs and Nancy was first in for the 'kill'.  "First you grab them from the backside, then you flip them over while holding their legs and claws apart...then you "relax them' against some sharp object and literally tear them in half...ALIVE.   Their shells will pop right off after that!"    She swears this is much preferred to 'boiling them alive'... It was amazing eating...despite the process!

This is also 'bear country'...with bears often on the beaches foraging for food.   There are lots of bears and this year we got very close to two of them in our big boats and our kayaks...fortunately not while ashore this year.    

The Pacific Rim National Park includes a 30 mile hike along the rugged west coast from Port Renfrew out to Bamfield, a little town filled with boardwalks where one's transportation around 'town' is entirely by boat.  It's a great little town where we ended this years cruise at the "Bamfield Music Festival.  This is the fourth year of the festival and the evening we attended featured UBC's resident string quartet and a pianist from Boston.  Classical music (and a bit of Gershwin) in the middle of nowhere.   Spoiled Rotten.  It was our first port in two weeks and quite a treat!

The best part of most trips 'up the outside' of the island is coming home.   We go back out into the Pacific and then south into the Straits on a summer westerly wind which usually makes for a great sail and this year was no exception.   We left Bamfield at first light with full visibility....and then slipped into the cover of dense fog.   We had almost zero visibility for 30 miles and later in the day we were sailing downwind at full speed (8-10 knots) with about one boat length's visibility (only 50 feet!).   We hoped there were no sleeping whales or other boats without radar!   When we popped out into the clear and breezy afternoon we could see both sides of the straits (Canada to the left and the USA to the right) and played tag with "Sea Fever" for a few hours up to Race Rocks.   

One more day from Canada into Port Angeles and we were home free...like kids playing on the freeway we crossed some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world once again in ....dense fog but the day lightened up, the predicted gales fortunately came late and we were safely on the hook in Port Ludlow having a bbq by sunset.   It was another amazing trip with memories galore...and we learned a few things along the way...but don't forget..."We Were Working!"

Hope you're having a great summer!

Barkley Sound July 2009

I told Rumor to watch out for birds!

I was talking about watching out for Eagles though!  Out here on the 'Wild Coast' there are eagles everywhere you turn.  They have the funniest bird call that is high pitched and very un-eagle-like if you ask me...but they're all over the place.  The eagles are also notorious for swooping down on fisherman to snatch away their fresh caught salmon.  We have even had customers who lost their little 'toto-like' dog to an eagle who swooped down

and took him right off of the foredeck and flew away for a nice lunch.

When I told Rumor to watch out for birds she took note and as soon as we anchored in Joe's Bay...in the middle of the Broken Islands Group in Barkley Sound, we were surrounded by hummingbirds.  They are all around us.  

It didn't take long before one flew into 'Sea Fever' and was flying into the glass trying frantically to get out.  Just a few minutes later one flew into Insignia's bright pilothouse causing Rumor to jump for joy!  She was

bouncing off of the settee with fresh hummingbird flying just out of reach. It was all I could do to catch the hummingbird with one hand and the cat with the other in hopes of saving a bloody memory of Joe's Bay.   If Rumor

ever got the taste of fresh bird...her canned duck pate cat food would never again suffice!  

Thankfully Tori and Dixie returned to help free the poor hummingbird who had no idea he'd flown into the wrong boat this afternoon!   "That boat has a cat in it!!"   ...and I told her to watch out for the birds!  (I didn't want

Rumor to be an Eagle's snack!!)  little did I know Rumor would have fresh bird right over where she nestles in the pilothouse!

We had a fun July fourth weekend coming up from Seattle to Victoria.  Mike Buckley and Anne Cipolla joined us for the trip across the straits which were uneventful save for the wild gyrations of Insignia under the control of her

disoriented autopilot.  Turns out our big 'pots and pans' locker is adjacent to the fluxgate compass that the autopilot uses to know where to go.  Once we removed the pots and pans to a new location and recalibrated the magnetic compass our autopilot began to behave normally again once again.

Vicoria was fun!   Jim & Gail Innes, customers and friends from White Rock joined us in their beautiful new Beneteau 49 'Red Sheila'  (with her Tuscan 'Safety' Orange canvas she's quite a sight!)    We had a party  of 12 for a great birth-month celebration dinner at Il Terrazzo!

The weather forecast pinned us in Victoria for an extra night as we waited for the outer coast weather to settle down a bit but we survived!   We were surrounded by a large Orca Whale pod as we punched through 35 knots of

breeze while clearing Race Rocks just west of Victoria.  We took shelter in Becher Bay for our brief night before our 5am departure to head out the Straits of Juan de Fuca towards Barkley.  This is the part of the trip that

is the toughest.   It's one very long day up the long line of shipwrecks that parallel the Pacific Coast hiking trail that runs from Port Renfrew out to Barkley Sound.  We had light winds, a little sloppy wave action and some

nice sailing at the end of the trip past Bamfield and into Robbers Passage.

Our crab trap came up empty this morning so we headed across the sound into the Pacific Rim National Park and the Broken Islands.  This is literally a 'Sea of Rocks' and it's our first time with the aid of electronic

navigation.  I'm not sure if it's helping lower the stress level...or increasing it!  Too much information!   We've been here several times before but this trip we have a deeper draft (keel depth of 7 feet this trip) so we

have less clearance and no room for error.  The girls on Sea Fever draw 8.5' with their boat...even more!

We've seen one other sailboat and one powerboat all day as we slowly cruised through the archipelago...there are very few pleasure boats, so far more fishing boats and way, way more kayaks.   We're each carrying two kayaks and

we're hoping to spend this coming week working on our upper arm strength as we paddle around the islands.   The mist and clouds hover right over the tree tops and it makes for a mystical experience.  One tends to be quiet in

the stillness...until the hummingbirds arrive!

From Joe's Bay....Barkley Sound, BC

-Robbie