Always Onward Adventures

Sara has gotten really into biking after she got a new bike from her Grandma for her birthday - so we took advantage of some great early May weather to go on some “adventure” bike trips. I don’t usually write about day trips, but Sara was so excited about these trips and we are working up to an overnight bike trip - so I thought they would be worth writing about. The first ride was just a little under 17 miles on a mostly gravel trail and the second was a little under 18 miles on mostly paved trail. Sara proclaimed after the first one - “This was the most Awesome Bike Trip Ever!!”.

Sara had her Spring break last week and we decided to take a very low key sailing trip for the week. Our original plan was to sail up to the San Juan’s for the week, but the combination of inclement weather, small craft advisories during 2 of the 5 days, and other commitments had us put that plan on hold for the actual summer. Instead, we just bumped around the Puget Sound for the week. On the plus side, we had lots of wind and we able to sail for all of the trip (except for the few minutes for docking and undocking). It felt really good to be sailing given how little we did on the Alaska trip last summer.

Summary For Sara’s mid-winter break, we flew back to Taos to go skiing. For the last 4-5 years, we have only been back in Christmas or Thanksgiving so just having a solid base of snow was pretty awesome. We got 3 days of skiing in and one rest day. Sara again is progressing leaps and bounds - she is skiing double blacks like they are no big deal and she was starting to ski parallel on the greens/blues. I’m going to apologize in advance for being a bit of a show-off in this post - I’m very proud of Sara’s skiing and I know it comes through…

We have been skiing every weekend since the begining of the year, but unseasonable warm spell this last week make the prospect of skiing more like ice skating. Instead, we picked a new campground that we had been meaning to go to and headed out for a weekend of hiking and camping. Sara, who constantly talks about camping when it’s been more than a month since we have gone, was thrilled.

Sara and I go on our first camping trip since returning from our boat trip to Alaska. We go on several hikes - one of them over 6 miles - and find a new way into the Olympic National Park. 10/13/2023 Sara has been very excited to go van camping again - we haven’t been in over a year with the prep for and then going on our boat trip. This weekend was our weekend - Sara was off on Friday so decided to leave on Friday morning and come back Saturday evening. Our location of choice was Dosewallips State park and the Dosewallips river valley near Brinnon, Wa.

We make our way through the San Juans, pass through Deception Pass into the Puget Sound, and then home! 9/18/2023 We had only a short move today - 11 nm from Henry island to Friday Harbor. We ended up getting in pretty early and found the place much less crowded than last time - only 3 boats vs 12 boats when we were heading north. Friday Harbor Amazingly, one of the first people we ran into was at Friday Harbor when we came through on the way North - a boat called Nisku. Apparently there was quite the stir when we mentioned our plans here 4 months ago and Nisku had been following this blog ever sense - with a particular interest in all of our mechanical challenges (and successes!). I had always assumed that the only people reading this blog were my family and maybe a few close friends - I’m going to have to watch what I write now… :)

We pick our way through the Gulf Islands and back down into the USA! 9/14/2023 We departed right on time at 8:20a this morning and made quick work of the 7 nm trip to Dodds Narrows - faster than expected with a 2 knt current - and we ended up having to wait for about 20 min before we felt comfortable running through the narrows with the current (~30 min before slack). As we were waiting, we saw some sea lions playing in the middle of the rapids. Seeing sea lions right on either side of the rapids has become a common occurance for us, they must be using the current to catch fish. It was only a few more hours from there to Ovens island and we had a bright beautiful day to do it in - and for a short while some wind to sail!

We head through the rapids, across the Straight of Georgia, and into the Gulf islands. From here on out, we are back in civilization - we have cell service & wifi most days and we will be staying in marinas/outstations most evenings. 9/8/2023 We had a very late start today - our window for crossing the rapids is at 1:10p so we are aiming to leave Shoal Bay at 11a. We spent most of the morning chatting with another boat who is from the area and they were heading to Dent island lodge. They gave us some good intel about being able to head through the rapids early on a high water slack - so ended up following them through the first set of rapids at about 12:15p. We waved goodbye as we headed through the next two sets of rapids and we saw some sea lions playing at slack water in the rapids - they were very fun to watch and very active.