SV Quijote 2025 - A Wee Blog for a Brief Trip

I'm at home, lying on my bed, yawning and yawning, and coming up with nothing to talk about. It was a normal voyage ending day. Transiting locks was typical. Thankfully I've got a card up my sleeve. I saved a pithy anecdote from yesterday. There was an undisclosed fourth pithy anecdote. Even better, this anecdote has a backstory. Back in time we go. 2017. I'm still El Capitan. Kevin is still capable crew. We're cruising around Vancouver Island. Thomas was with us. Vi had had enough of us. Adiosed the pair of us. One morning, against all precedent, Kevin decides he's going to start the engine. He does so and smoke comes pouring out of the engine room. I looked at him, accusation written all over my face. What had he done? It turned out to be a bad starter solenoid, but Kevin felt guilty as hell, and it was written all over his face. Skip forward to 2025.   Eight years is a long time; it's finally time to put eight years of shame and humiliation away. Kevin decide...

Our last night.    The last night of the epic, the unbelievable, the journey of a lifetime!!! Or not.    No really, it's been a great few weeks.    It was a little abbreviated, shoehorned between other trips, but it was good to get out, and really good to have Kevin along for the duration, and Tina along for the first few days. We crossed the Strait of Juan de Fuca today and headed down the throat of the Admiralty Inlet. We ended up where we started out: Port Ludlow. I have several ideas for today's anecdotal tidbit. Should I tell about getting stung by a wasp yesterday at the exact moment I was steering the boat into Dodd Narrows? Should I describe the sensation of eating Kevin's "key lime" pie? Should I tell about precisely timing turning on the deck wash hose pressure to shoot Kevin in the face with a jet of water?    Or should I tell about two crazed commercial vessel operators, on successive days, start honking their horns at me repeatedly to...

  One of our loyal followers wrote to ask me why I hadn't written a blog post in a couple days.    It's a fair question.    I write posts in my head during the day so I have some idea of what I'm going to say when I sit down.    I often forget whether I've actually written something, or just thought about writing it.  So… sometimes I have to go back and reread prior posts to figure out what I've said and what I haven't. The whole process is a little more time-consuming than it might be if I just sat down and wrote something, which is to say if I was more efficient. It's also the case that I'm usually trying to do the writing while I'm either making dinner or helping with dinner, or doing dishes or helping with cleaning up. Or    downloading weather or navigating for the next day. There are a lot of distractions. During last night's engine check, I discovered I needed to retention the fan belt. That involves digging out the tools, removing t...

Boho Bay. Another out of the way anchorage that nobody seems to know about. I don't know, maybe they don't want to know. It's a scenic anchorage with a couple of homesteads built on the shoreline. It's a little tricky to get your anchor set because it's so deep right up until it's too shallow. Kevin asked: why don't we drop the anchor farther into the bay where it's more shallow? My answer: the bay doesn't appear to be big enough for my comfort farther in. It doesn't have good swinging room, which means if the wind direction changes we might find ourselves on the bottom. A couple more boats have come in since we came. I can see them wrestling with the same decision that we came to, trolling around the shallow end, then coming out to anchor deeper. Some Cabin cruiser will come in and throw their anchor in the shallow end, but they won't have much chain out. They'll get away with it because it's not going to blow very hard tonight. U...

Here's something new... I was just observing that one nice thing about being in town is being able to open the windows without worrying about mosquitoes. One disadvantage is that the docks are noisy and can wake me in the middle of the night. Is that true? No. I have never been awakened by the dock noise in the middle of the night. But darn it, it seems like I ought to have. They're very loud. Boy, this blog has gone downhill. I should have some snippet of reflection from the day. Some pithy anecdote. Okay, here's what I've got. There was no wind yesterday. We motored four hours from Bird Cove to Campbell River. We slid sideways up to the fuel dock, shoe horning our way between two yachts. Kevin sprung for ice cream sandwiches while I rung up the fuel. We were making our way toward our assigned slip, but I lined up on the wrong one. I started to make the correction, but knew it had a cockup in the making. Sometimes there is nothing for it but to go aroun...

It's been just Kevin and me onboard for most of this trip. Neither of us are big talkers. He calls it companionable silence. It's pretty quiet. I like conversation, but, long periods of silence are nice too. Kevin is a good fit for Quijote. Our common appreciation for quiet aside, he's also incredibly conscientious about everything he does on the boat. If something needs doing, Kevin takes care of it. He's good crew. I asked him to take a look at the knot meter sensor on the bottom of the hull, his response wasn't: "are you crazy?" It was: "I would, but I don't have a mask, so I won' be able to see much." Fair enough. If I buy a mask in Campbell River, I have no doubt Kevin will dive under the hull for me. He won't want to do it in the marina (the water isn't clean), but the first anchorage out he will. I guess that's a good reason not to buy a mask. I don't want to be asking him to do what I don't feel l...

Quijote started the trip with 110 gallons of fresh water. With two days to go, we're down to about half of that. Same goes for fuel. We started with 90 gallons and have about half remaining. That's usage frugal enough that we could have stayed out another couple of weeks. We'll be in Campbell River in a couple days. We'll fill the tanks, the cupboards, take hot showers, do a little laundry, and get our land legs back. I made reservations for two nights at the Discovery Harbour Marina. I like the marina because it has everything you'd want within easy walking distance. MegaGrocery? ☑️ Propane? ☑️ Great restaurants? ☑️ Yummy apple pies? ☑️ Fast WiFi? 👎🏻 (can't have it all) As for the here and now... we're in a lovely, spacious cove stern tied to a cliff. When we arrived there was a lot of room, but slowly it has started to fill. There are about a dozen boats in here now. Three times that many probably wedge their way in here at peak season, before the kid...