Scandinavian Villages and Native American Longhouses by Sailboat (Day 1)

Over the weekend of October 18th, we embarked on our first ever fall season cruise.  Originally we planned to head out on Friday but due to work career

related delays on Friday, we got to the boat late. Due to the late start we ended up spending the night aboard in the marina. We had a nice dinner aboard and settled in. We got up early Saturday morning and headed out across the lake toward the channel.

We managed to get out of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and through the Ballard Locks fairly early in the day after which we set sail for Agate Passage on the north end of Bainbridge Island.  There was a consistent 12-13kt southerly that made our passage across the channel quick and easy.  As we rounded Agate Point the island sheltered the wind and we attempted to head upwind through the small channel, but there was very little wind and a fairly significant current so we ended up motor sailing for most of the length of the passage.   Once through the passage and into the bay near Port Orchard we caught a little wind again and headed up into Liberty Bay.

The water of Liberty Bay was very brown, from what appears to be zooplankton, or possibly phytoplankton.  I’m not really sure what that means but from what I did read about algae blooms it is an intermittent phenomena and there’s not a lot you can do about it in a bay like this one that doesn’t get tons of tidal flow.  We pulled into our reserved slip at Port of Poulsbo and headed ashore.

Downtown Poulsbo is a Scandinavian village situated on the shores of Liberty Bay, just a few miles from Seattle.  It’s very quaint and between the ice cream shops, the restaurants, pubs, and breweries, I could easily spend a week just eating my way around the place.  Unfortunately for Poulsbo’s chef’s, we only had one night there.  So we walked up to the U.S. Post Office and mailed some letters from the girls, then went back to the boat for a little beef stew and a nap, then later we set out to find a brewery to commandeer for the evening.

Each weekend in October, the local breweries and pubs in Poulsbo put together Rocktoberfest, which is a family (and dog) friendly pub-crawl of sorts with various places having live music and food.  We decided to try out Valhöll Brewery so we walked about a block up the hill from the marina to find it.  Several good things awaited us…

• First, it’s a brewery so of course there are several micro-brews on tap
• Second, they allow kids
• Third, they allow dogs
• Fourth, they had live music
• Fifth, they had a BBQ caterer there serving ribs and briskets
• Sixth, We spent less than $30 for all 4 of us having BBQ, beer, chips, and their own locally made root beer

To top it off, the weather was amazing for late October.  I was in a t-shirt and we were sitting outside on the patio eating ribs and drinking beer of the micro and root variety.

The catering and brewery staff were very friendly and enamored with Olivia’s rib eating style.  It was her first rib and she was digging it.  Eventually we had to make our way back to the boat to get ready for bedtime.  The girls watched part of Tangled and then fought bedtime as per-the-usual.