First Sailing Trip – Day 8 – The Homecoming

Up early again and the crew had us off the dock at 9am sharp heading south to Port Ludlow. It’s Colm’s 29th Birthday today and we are meeting his uncle for lunch there. The tide was way out starting to coming in during the run south. There was thick fog and visibility was pretty poor, so we hoisted the radar reflector so bigger boats could see us and kept watch. The fog lifted shortly before we got to Ludlow.

Lunch at Port Ludlow was good and Colm’s family was cool. They have a sailboat moored there that looks really nice. I wish ours was as clean. We shoved off from Ludlow and headed across Admiralty Inlet towards Possession Sound on our way home. The Tide was helping for a while and we were making 8+ knots over ground heading south. Then we cut across the sound end of Whidbey and headed north towards Everett. We thought that the tides would be heading north into Possession and giving us a little push but instead it seemed like the tides were pulling water out so we fought about 1 knot of current all that way up.
The winds kicked up around Mukilteo so we hoisted the sails to see what we could get out of the last few miles before home. Turned out to be a good choice. It was the best sailing of the entire trip, making 8.5 knots through the water heeled over about 30 degrees for over an hour. It was really fun. That’s the beauty of this boat, it LOVES going to windward (into the wind in landlubber terms). We dropped the sails outside the Port Gardner channel and motored into port at extremely high tide with very high winds and big chop. We tied up to the guest dock in front of Anthony’s Home Port, had a great dinner and a bunch of drinks at Anthony’s WoodFire Grill and crashed in our bunks back on the boat.