This morning we woke up to fog in Puget Sound, with some of the ships blowing their fog horns at regular intervals. Our plan was to enter the San Juan Channel via Cattle Pass and it would be early afternoon before the current would be at ebb and then in our favor.
I logged into Sailmail and received three messages. While framing my responses I realized that I had not lowered either the Monitor paddle or the trailing wire into the water but I was still getting good reception. I was receiving data at the rate of over 5000 bytes per minute using only the new connection to my keel bolts as the ground. This is hardly definitive proof that the connections to the keel bolts provide adequate grounding for the HF radio because Friday Harbor is literally around the corner and the HF radio is working with a ground wave; but the result was certainly not discouraging.
We decided to survey part of the bay on the Zodiac. I inflated it on the foredeck, we threw it in the water, lowered the outboard motor with the davits, and Brenda had her first experience of climbing down the Monitor wind vane supports and onto the Zodiac. We motored to the western shore of the bay then cut the engine and let the gentle wind push us along the shoreline so that we could look at the wild life in silence. We drifted past a small group of otters who were very interested in our presence. The fact that they stood their ground suggested to us that they were protecting their homestead that may have had young. Anyway, we got good close views of the otters as we drifted by.
I decided to try to carry the Zodiac on the foredeck fully inflated and found that it rides beautifully inverted, on top of the life raft, transom between the life raft and mast, stern tubes on either side of the mast, and the bow of the Zodiac just clear of both bollards that I use for anchoring. The Zodiac traveled beautifully this way with minimal effect on our visibility from the cockpit.
The fog had rolled in from Puget Sound and by 12.30 PM we could still not see the entrance to the bay from our anchorage. However, our overnight neighbors ("Spark" from Vancouver, WA) had left an hour earlier and we figured that we would be able to see the rocks on each side of the bay as we got closer.
The visibility turned out to be no problem and we motored in very calm water to Cattle Pass between San Juan and Lopez islands. Along the way I did did some investigation and was surprised to see that I had run the engine 34 hours since filling the diesel tanks in Hawaii. I put in 10 liters of diesel en route to make sure that the engine would not conk out at a delicate time. We encountered some turbulence in two sections of the pass but the fact that we were traveling at just over 6 kt told me that the current was with us. When we had cleared the pass we hooked left and motored in to the southern end of Griffin Bay where we dropped anchor in 11.2 meters with 35 meters of chain. Hanging of an ESE 7 kt offshore wind put us at 48N27.9, 122W59.0. Afterwards I beat myself up as usual for being too timid to get in closer into shallower water but the holding ground was good and the anchor alarm was on.
The anchorage was very safe and scenic, with the sky clear and the sun shining. We were totally surrounded by land: San Juan Island enveloping us on the west side, and Lopez Island along the east side. San Juan Island looked very developed. We could see quite a few houses on the shore, and there seemed to be a tiny boat harbor at Fish Creek, at the extreme south of Griffin Bay.
Our plan is to visit Friday Harbor the tomorrow to fuel up the boat, do some laundry, have showers, and have a look around. Friday Harbor is embarrassingly close to our anchorage: one hour of motoring around the peninsula of land at the north end of Griffin Bay.
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