Best sleep in a long time, though the mooring ball kept tapping against the hull. It’s almost I am and I’m just waking up.
So it was a late start with typical Pacific Northwest weather. So far today we’ve had calm and blustery, sunny, rainy, hail, and sun with temperatures from about 10 to about 15 and back again. Your basic, “if you don’t like the weather now, just wait an hour and it will change,” day.
Our first task was to inflate the dinghy with a foot pump. We had been carrying it in a bag on the foredeck. So it was huff and puff and blow the dinghy up, then lift it over the safety rails, bring it to the stern, and lower the outboard to it to be affixed to the transom. I remained aboard whilst the rest of the ship’s complement went ashore to wander the beach.
We ended up motoring about 15 nm to tonight’s anchorage. I was on helm following the 20 foot depth line at the destination when the depth gauge did an instant blip from 20 feet to 4 feet. There were no charted obstructions, but I thought we had possibly found an uncharted one and were about to hit something. This pattern repeated itself often, giving me a fright each time.
We practiced putting out both a bow anchor and a stern one, which holds the boat in a fixed position even if the currents or wind shifts. We did find a few hitches in our procedures, so good we practiced before we needed it. We also practiced bringing a victim aboard. Using a combination of a halyard and the block-and-tackle from the engine hoist, we figured out a way that even the weakest crew members can retrieve the heaviest crew member.
Tomorrow we’ll practice deploying the life sling, then drop Tina off at one marina before proceeding through the locks and under the draw bridges. We have to get through the bridges before 4pm because they stop working during rush hour.
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