Face Shot

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 try get me out of their way?

Since it's never happened before and then suddenly happens on two consecutive days, we'll go with the last one. Besides, there's not much to tell about the first two except that the Keylime pie is tasteless and the jet of water never actually happened . But what fun to imagine!

So yesterday we were crossing the border into the San Juan Islands group when a container ship came roaring around the corner and started honking furiously at me. At first, I thought I was looking at the boat side on, sailing away, and it looked pretty small, but it kept honking furiously and I couldn't figure out why and then I realized I wasn't looking at the boat side on, I was looking at it end on and it was bearing down on us. It was massive. Kevin recited the horn pattern from the internet: "Seven blasts of the horn: you are in danger. Take immediate evasive action." I hardly even needed to tell Quijote to turn around. She was already on her way when I spun the wheel.

A similar thing happened to me today. This time it was a tug and barge that looked well out of our way, but he was persistent in telling us to turn around by laying on his horn over and over again. Once again, we did a 360 and let him go by. We can see where these ships came from on the chart plotter, but it's harder to know what direction they're headed to.

It's curious that they choose to lean on the horn rather than hail me on the radio. It suggests they'd rather run a boat down than lower themselves to speaking with a pleasure craft operator. Or that they don't speak. English.