This summer, we’re doing short excursions in order to take in a rendezvous of Nordic Tugs and a special graduation.

June Cruise to Anacortes and the San Juans – June 6-11, 2024

The Burrows Island Light

Sixty Nordic Tugs of various vintages and lengths returned to the town where they were built. It included a special memorial to the founder of the company, Jerry Husted, who passed away earlier in the year at the age of ninety-four. A cortège of Nordic Tugs circled the family as they spread his ashes on the waters off Cap Santé.

This, our first Rendezvous, was splendidly organized by volunteers and featured a full weekend of informative sessions, useful tip-laden dock talks, field trips, an account of a two-year trip on the inland waters of the United States, and good food.

The formal schedule is a testimony to the vibrancy of PaNNTOA, an all-volunteer organization.

The formal agenda was supplemented by informative sessions on individual boats.

We also took time to admire the real tugs that ply the waters around the bustling town of Anacortes, Washington, population 18,000.

A Road Trip to Portland – June 20-23, 2024

In June we went to Portland to celebrate the June graduation of a kid we’ve known since he was born. Saeed is now a Doctor of Chiropractic who is going on to an internship in Naturopathy with the intention of opening a clinic in British Columbia. The celebration with his family and fellow graduates in Portland is a bright spot that contrasts with the slow, sad recovery of the city’s downtown.

The trip south provides a rare and valuable practice driving our old Element. It’s been years since we drove along the western shores of Hood Canal that lay against the Olympic National Forest and Park. At the southern end of the Canal, members of the Skokomish Tribe are engaged in traditional activities, one unbroken for more than ten thousand years, the other recently revived after decades post-Contact. As elders and kids dig clams along the beack, young adults work to coordinate their paddle strokes as they prepare for upcoming canoe journeys.

Still, it astounds me that people find road trips fun. On return, I commit to exploring the Olympic Peninsula without a car and find it more doable than I’d imagined. My first set of day trips are delightful and all range in price from free to well under $10. Hurray for boat-bike-bus multi-modal mobility! Drafts of my Day Trips Without A Car (DTWAC) appear here.

Come spring, I’ll reformat them as printable PDFs after updating details and providing QR codes to the relevant transit schedules. Unless you’re tethered to civilization, getting directions from your phone doesn’t work. I like old-fashioned paper maps with a scale of miles and hold onto any I find. saving my phone for emergencies and quick confirmation of bus or ferry times to get home.

July Cruise to South Puget Sound – July 7 – 17, 2024

By late spring, life in Port Townsend is feeling frenetic. Streets filled with cara; sidewalks and beaches overly peopled. Still, compared to the national scene, it’s pretty harmonious. June at home is unfamiliar to us. We’re usually cruising far to the north. So Monday morning, we get out of Dodge.

Blake Island State Park is the first stop. Weekenders are gone, and the buoys are unoccupied. We return to the usual place with a view of the Seattle waterfront rather than of the big ugly car carriers anchored on either side of this small island.

Next, we transit the narrows, continue down East Passage, and sweep west around Point Robinson with its driftwood-strewn beach and lighthouse. for our first-ever visit to Quartermaster Harbor on Vashon-Maury Island.

It’s hot as hell and necessarily relaxing. We open up doors, windows and hatches and lay about. Houses and a small local park – the only option for going ashore – surround the huge bay. We stay put.

Filuchy Bay on the Key Peninsula is the next stop and a longtime favorite. We drop anchor in front of the big, quiet (mostly second) homes. We do little else than spend another day working through our books.

On Thursday we round the tip of Key Peninsula and cruise up Case Inlet to Jarrell Cove on Harstine Island and catch one of the state park mooring buoys. This year, buoys have phone numbers, so I call and charge a credit card. It’s still hot.

We’re visited by a pump-out boat driven by Paul Wyen, a remarkable entrepreneur who has a contract to cruise the State Parks pumping out boats. There are pump-out facilities at both the marina and the state park, but both of those are on small septic systems. As long as we continue to produce the pee poo slurry on our boats, this is clearly the best option. I miss Aurora’s friendly urine-diverting, aerating, and composting AirHead toilet.

When I finally get on my SUP and paddle to the small Jarell Cove Marina, I find Harry Powell at work restoring his old Santa Cruz 50. A fellow Wednesday volunteer at the Maritime Center Boatshop in Point Hudson, Harry is my personal guru. He’s a lifelong racer with a law degree who has built high-tech racing yachts on both coasts, including in his San Diego shop.

We’ve never been to Anderson Island, so we head down Nisqually Reach and turn into Oro Bay, where we drop anchor behind a small spit with a glorious view of Mt. Ranier.

Yes, looking right into the crater of a live volcano gives one pause, but the view in the opposite direction is not pretty. Shoved up against shore is an old rusting ferry, the object of the dream of whoever brought it all the way from Chesapeake Bay.

Anderson is a quiet, rural island of a thousand inhabitants and an unincorporated piece of Pierce County. A small Pierce County Ferry, which is operated by public works rather than to Pierce Transit, connects residents with Steilacoom. Northbound from Oro Bay we pass on starboard tiny Ketron Island. It’s less than a square kilometer in area and boasts 24 inhabitants. We leave it for another time after learning that it is also home to an abandoned ferry!

Time to head for the city. We transit the Narrows again, enjoying the shadows cast on the shore topography and the freight train by the morning light.

The guest dock at Shilshole is all but empty, so we pull in and set off to see how Ballard has changed since our last visit. Condos everywhere; old places disappeared.

We catch up with Seattle friends Philip and Kinza over an array of small at Ray’s.

The next day we go off in search of haircuts and RAD Bikes to see if their new trike looks promising. It doesn’t. We watch the action at the Chittenden Locks and I check out several fine contemporary Viking boats at the Nordic Museum.

On return home the next morning, we spot a weird ship with a mast entering Port Townsend Bay from the north. It turns out to be a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. Yes, the south shore of our bay is an outstation of the Bremerton Navy base. Long the home of indigenous Salish coast people who left Indian Island is ringed with white shell middens of their summer kitchens. That is until – according to a historical marker Jack successfully fought to have torn down – the Indians simply “moved on.”

Whatever goes on on Indian Island today does not sit well with the people of Port Townsend. Certainly not with the Women in Black who stand in silent protest at Adams Street Garden every week. Nor with those of us who gather every Friday in Tyler Street Plaza wearing kaffiya, holding Palestinian flags, and educating one another and passers-by about the Gaza massacres. Nor with Doug Milholland, who every Father’s Day protests at the monstrous gate of the Indian Island gate until he wears down the guards who gently arrest and oust him.