August 2014 Cruise – First cruise in Mobert

Well we did it..  We successfully completed our first cruise on Mobert — cruising the San Juan Islands for 9 days.  Everything worked out great overall.  After leaving Kirkland early in the morning on Saturday the 23rd, we made our way through the Lake Washington Ship Canal, raising 4 bridges and making it through the Ballard Locks in record time.  Unfortunately there was no wind so we settled in for a long motor on our way to Port Townsend.  It was a beautiful day with smooth water.  We took the easy time to organize the boat.  The tides were with us, or at least not against us, and we experimented with different engine RPM’s to see how they affected boat speed.

After the better part of a day we sighted Port Townsend and as a sort of tease the wind picked up just as we got close to Point Hudson Marina.

Port Townsend is fun..  We went out to beach for a while and played, then walked in to town to look for some sunglasses for the girls.  After checking out a few stores, walking up and down the main street and taking in the sights we headed back to the boat to make some dinner.  Since our dock neighbor was by himself while his daughter and her friends were in town, we invited him to join us for our BBQ salmon meal and all in all we had a great evening.

The next morning we woke up early and after some coffee runs into town we backed out of the slip and made our way out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  Again we had no wind but this time there were swells, and two of the four adult crew members became pretty much inoperable.

Halfway across the strait we noticed the fuel filter vacuum gauge had been rising and was well into warning territory..  (hmm, maybe we need an alarm on that).  We watched it for a while and it kept climbing.  Well this wasn’t good.  I completed a full parts inventory of the boat the night before we left so I knew we had spare filter elements for the Racor but honestly I’ve never changed one and I was really afraid of getting diesel all over the cabin.  Racor’s documentation indicates you need a little extra diesel to pour in after you put the new filter in, and of course we didn’t have a suitable container or any extra fuel.  Well, the next best thing was to drain the particulates from the filter bowl. So we set sails (even though there was only about 2kts of wind) and shut down the engine for a bit.  Our theory is that because we were currently using the aft fuel tank and that tank was down under 1/8th full, the swells were stirring up stuff from the bottom of the tank.  So we switched to the other tank, drained the filter bowl, and fired the engine back up.  Over the next few hours the vacuum gauge slowly fell back down toward normal.  Crisis averted.

After clearing the strait the swells passed and our active crew count slowly increased back to the same level as our departure.  Then it was time to zoom way in on the chartplotter, head north into Mosquito Pass and then into Garrison Bay, San Juan Island for our next anchorage.  Garrison Bay is the home of English Camp, where the Brits literally held down the fort during a standoff with the Americans over territory in the San Juan Islands.  Known as the Pig War because the only thing that died during the war was a single pig, the historic camps have several buildings remaining and various signs and paths to tell the story.

Anchored fairly deep in the bay, we took the girls ashore to explore the camp and then dinghy around the bay.  After that we had dinner and slept peacefully in the well protected anchorage.