Years ago I thought I knew the Central to South Sound pretty well. I’ve made many many dives in that area during the time that Captain Paul was running the Genie Aye as a dive charter. There are so many great great spots Sound, Zee’s Reef, Sunrise, KVI, Blake Island (pixie sticks my favorite), Tacoma Narrows bridge, Maplewood and ton of others I’m forgetting. I’ve spent a lot of time in that area. So when the tollyclub mini in Gig Harbor rolled around this year, I admit to being pretty excited about it. The fact is that all my experience in central and south sound were on other peoples boats. In all the time I’ve owned my own boat, I’ve never ventured further south than Seattle in my own boat! Lets face it, trips that far south can be a bit of a haul and until going on sabatical this year I just have not had the time.
So with no small degree of excitement I got underway out of Everett by 10:35. I can’t believe how nice the weather is. I had planned on making a stop about half way down to Gig, maybe at Blake or take a tour of the water rats down at Eagle Harbor (check out http://www.donberry.com/harbor2/harbor2.html). I’ve been intrigued to check out Eagle Harbor first hand since first reading Don Berry’s accounts many years ago when he was alive and living in Eagle Harbor as one of the water rats. I credit Don Berry for getting me through some late nights on some tough projects. Thanks Dave.
But I digress. It may be March but the weather was amazing. I ran on the flybridge the whole way down. As soon as I made Vashon island, the junk in the water went from occasional to thick as peanut butter. It’s been a long while since I’ve seen tide rips so chock full of logs that the only way through is to charge at them, then throw everything into neutral and let your momentum carry you through, hopefully pushing everything out of the way as you go.
I hit a pretty big log, well lets call it a tree, about 40 foot or so back in December so I’m a little gunshy about picking up new dings on the prop, but I made it down to Gig just fine. I plan to pull the boat out sometime before spring ends and the rush of boats getting into yards gets too out of hand.
I’m a day early for the Gig Tollyclub mini. I can see Bob’s 26 sitting at the dock, but she’s all closed up. I decided to put the hook down in the middle of Gig Harbor for some peace and quiet. It was fantastic. I used my high power wifi bridge to pull in a signal from somewhere on shore. It was not a fast connection, but it was fast enough to watch some movies on Netflix.