Many thanks to everyone here for the encouragement.
Just got home from a couple GREAT days on the boat with
family.
On Friday, the trip from Port Townsend to Pleasant Harbor was a 6 hour
motor passage. Here, we have just passed under the East span of the
Hood Canal Floating Bridge.
My Daughter had a blast.
The Fore
deck hatch/seat proved to be a VERY popular place to hang out.
My wife is going to be a fine yachtswoman. She took to the boat naturally. She did all of our shrimp pot pulling by hand. 4 pots about 250 feet deep. Got our 3 limits for the day in a
single 1.5 hour set. Great shrimping.
About half way through our shrimp-feast-lunch for 7 (the
saloon table worked great), I got a cellphone call from an old grade
school friend who was out on the
water with a dead boat
engine (failed
electronic engine control unit (Andrew, there is some more ammunition for you)). He was lying to his
anchor on a lee shore about 4 miles away. We cleaned up the
galley and made our way over to lend a hand. I built that post to look like a tug boat towing bollard. Did not think it would get used as such on the first trip.
The "rescue" of my friend took about 5 hours to get him (and is shrimp pots that had to be pulled) back to HIS harbor. By the time we were free to start the 2 hour trip back to Panope's harbor, the
weather picked up quite a bit. We had solid hour of 25-30 knots on the nose with spray frequently passing over top of the pilot house. We were able to make 5 knots at about 60%
power. The boats
interior stayed completely dry.
In summary, it was an action packed and very busy couple of days. The boat got a pretty good workout and performed flawlessly. The crew had a great time and nobody got scared or sick.
My only regret was that in all the busyness and commotion, I did not have time to finish rigging/lacing the
mainsail. I'll have to wait till later this week to get time under sail.
Steve