Captain’s Log: Ready to go North to Alaska

April 8 – 25

Hi All,

Yep, we are finally ready. Seems like since we landed in Port Angeles to have Mystic painted by Platypus Marine on 9/23/2019 it’s been all work with very little play, let alone contend with the darn virus.

We just finished the informal Selene rendezvous here in Roche Harbor since last Wednesday. 26 boats attended….pretty good for an informal gathering with no formal activities planned (Covid protocol rules). Just shows how starved people are for social activity. We are the owners who have owned their boat continuously the longest….whoa!!! We knew only a handful of boats so we spent time going up and down the dock meeting all the new owners. ~5 boats are heading north to Alaska this week and maybe ~3 more coming in a few weeks. Many of these boats are quite experienced having done 10-20 trips to Alaska. We did get some good information on crossing the border and changed our plans to check in at Van Isle in Sydney versus going to Nanaimo. If you get an agent that knows the marine transit rules it’s easy, but if you get an agent back in Ontario it can be difficult!! Everyone seemed to be on different schedules so it looks like we will be on our own for the 10-day transit but hope to share some anchorages at some point to get more acquainted with people.

So what have we been doing the past few weeks since the last update?? Kathy came back from a 4-day visit with her parents in Dallas. I stayed in Gig Harbor doing various projects. I went after the engine room bilge leak. I had determined we had water coming up from the keel through 4 drilled screw holes in the bilge (which I did not know had been done). I do not think we have a salt water leak but water from the ER bilge draining down into the keel area over time thanks to these screw holes. The keel has lead ballast and then fiberglass on top of the lead. There is about a 3-5″ gap between the bilge and keel fiberglass where the water collected. I drilled a hole and immediately saw water. I vacuumed out close to 3-gals and over the next few weeks got 1-2 ounces per day. I’ve since plugged the hole and will look at it again in Ketchikan!!

I also replaced some of the burnt-out backlights on the electrical panel which is helpful to see the breaker labels especially at night. We did have some issues with the new Kabola burner going out on low voltage when powered by just the batteries. Too much line loss. So, Costica came to Gig Harbor and we spent a day moving the 12-volt-to-230-volt inverter to the engine room close to the batteries as well as doing various adjustments to the burner (the factory settings were too rich so by analyzing the exhaust Costica could make various fuel and mechanical adjustments to fine tune the burner!!)

We left Gig Harbor on 4/13 and met Dave and Helen on sv Jammin in Port Townsend for 2-days of jocularity. We met D&H in Mexico and stayed friends/buddy boating throughout Central America and Caribbean. They were in Portland visiting their daughter and drove up to see us!! Wow….did they have fun or what acting like 30-somethings again:))))

We then spent another 5 days anchoring in the San Juan’s. One night we visited with Jeff and Melody on sv Double Diamond. We first met them in Fakarava in the Tuamotus in 2013 and again met them many times along the way to New Zealand. They have since sold their boat and have almost finished building a gorgeous house on Decatur Island here in the San Juan’s with a lovely view of Rosario Strait.

It was really fun reconnecting with our cruising buddies and just shows how close we all got in some of those very remote places.

The Plan: We will leave tomorrow, 4/26 for our 10-day British Columbia transit to Ketchikan. We will not touch land other than to anhcor at night for safety reasons as there are just too many logs in the water due to all the logging. We have to stay extra vigilant during the day to avoid them as well!!

If you are interested you can follow us on our SPOT tracking: https://maps.findmespot.com/Track#history/assets

Or follow our AIS track on marine traffic:
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-123.154/centery:48.612/zoom:12

I will be blogging on our trip so of course you can follow us on the blog:
http://mysticmoonvoyages.com/

Hope all is well!!

John
Mystic Moon
Roche Harbor San Juan Island

PS: On the blog posted on 4/7 we had over 45 emails returned “undeliverable” from our website out of 172 subscribers. The service tech who manages our website believed it was caused by issues with various servers on AOL, Yahoo, and Apple. I hope that is the case but somewhat concerned those sites have changed some bulk mail protocols. We shall see what happens this go around.