Stardate 15:30 hours. The boat is packed and Cliff my father in law are ready to go. Were heading north and the only structure to the plan is twofold.
1.) Were not going any futher than Princess Louisa Inlet. We want to stay closer to home and not end up running day in and day out. This is to be a relacing and enjoyable trip. Princess Louisa will be adventure enough.
2.) We are not coming back until the calendar says August.
Other than the above two guidelines, the sky is the limit. We have not affixed plan and we aim to keep it that way. But first we need fuel. Ghost will hold 600 gallons but we won’t need that much. More to the point, I don’t want that much. Leftover fuel has to sit in the tanks and old fuel is the chief cause of fuel related problems. Dipping the tanks shows we have about 160 gallons on board distributed in 4 tanks. to be safe I’m going to bring on an additional 250 gallons, leaving us with about 400 gallons of fuel. We will likely burn a little over half of that.
It should only be a short 30 minute trip over to Cap Sante, leaving plenty of time for an afternoon cruise to somewhere. When we get to Cap Sante though, they are out of fuel. The attendant says he thinks he can get me 150 gallons out of the bottom of the tank. Uh…no way. The last thing we need to do is find ourselves changing fuel filters every day for the next week from dredging the bottom of the barrell. I call Skyline marina and they have fuel. They are open until 5 and its 4 now. I throttle up to a fast cruise speed and flying down Guemes channel at 7 knots! Wait, that’s not fast. We have a head current and while I could push all 48 feet up on plane, we would literally be burning 4 times the rate of fuel and the whole point to this trip is to relax. There are two outcomes now, we make it to Skyline or we don’t. So we chuckle about our race for the next hour and make the Skyline fuel dock at 4:55. I admit to the attendant that I want to bring on 250 gallons and he is graceful enough to welcome us with open arms. The fuel is 24 cents a gallon more expensive for the privelege of taking on fuel today. It’s Thursday and waiting another day to depart on our trip would bring us to Friday. I’m not that superstitious but they say to never leave on a trip on a Friday. Given were going to be out for the month, I see no reason to take any risks. Besides, I’m ready to go and nothing is going to hold me back, cept maybe a broken barbeque or some other absolutely critical piece of sensitive equipment commonly afflicting boats. …but I digress
I pump my 250 gallons of precious diesel while Cliff mines the poor college student for information about his life experiences. It’s a pretty entertaining tale. This local gas pump hero was born and raised in Anaocrtes and is currently enrolled in a well known California school. I think Cliff and our new found fuel pump hero had a great time.
We got back underway and headed across Rosario straight and on through Thatcher pass. There were a few discussions on exactly where we were going, lightly colored by the need to go somewhere. Finally around 8pm we pulled into Parks Bay.
We spent the night in a familiar anchorage and slept soundly under a clear sky. Where to next? As Jimmy Buffett would say “I don’t know. I don’t care.”