Resort Week Part 3: Gorge Harbour Lay Day

(August 28th, 2017)

It was our first lay day since we left Ketchikan almost two weeks prior, and boy, did we enjoy the heck out of it!

The day started off slow… and HOT!  None of us were accustomed to the heat after our Summer of Rain, so an early morning trip to the pool got the day off to a great start.  Again, the girls swam for hours.  Luckily, Ellie remembered how to swim (the previous day she’d forgotten, and I had to dive in and rescue her a few times), which was nice because it allowed me to get a little more south-passage planning done.  I also managed to download several cold soup recipes despite the slow internet.  I absolutely love cold soup on a hot day.  It’s one of the easiest and most satisfying warm-weather foods around.  So, the hour or so it took me to snag 12 recipes was worth it.

By lunch, we were all exhausted from the sun and swimming, and hungry, so we went back to the boat for lunch.  Plugged into shore power, Rich had the air conditioner up and running!  It was a nice treat on a hot day.  Needing to escape the sun we’d been searching for all summer, we spent a few hours relaxing on our beds.  I slept, and the girls read.  It was quite a luxury.

Affected by a motivation that escaped the girls and me, Rich toiled in the afternoon heat.  Apparently he reversed the dinghy direction on the davits (stern to port, bow to starboard) in an effort to balance the port to starboard weight distribution of the boat, and in the process he replaced a broken block on the davits as well.  One of the new blocks has ball bearings and of course now we wish they all did.  He also went on an epic scrubbing spree.

In the afternoon, we tried to go to the resort’s playground, but in the end the heat drove us back to the pool.

As dinnertime approached, we received a *huge* gift from Stan and Laurel on Breakaway: They were going to watch the girls while Rich and I went out to dinner at the resort restaurant!

A dinner out without the girls was quite the luxury, and Rich and I used it to do some planning for our trip down the coast.  We also had a wonderful conversation with the waitress, Ashea (sorry if I spelled that wrong!), who is two years out from her family’s own upcoming sailing adventure.

After dinner, Rich and I found the girls playing on the beach with Laurel, learning to skip rocks, and also playing with some of the kids staying at the campground that they’d met earlier in the day at the pool.  When the mosquitos got too aggressive, we headed back to the boat for bed.

The next morning, we took off around 8AM and made our way back out through the gorge.  The pleasure craft traffic, now that we were south of Seymour, was markedly more congested.  Keeping watch now meant some serious boat-dodging.  We also had to do our fair share of fishing boat dodging (again, not fishing ourselves! Oh the unfairness of it all!).  After a long motor in building wind and building seas, we dropped the anchor at Garden Bay.

Our “resort week” (which was only 3 nights) provided us some much needed R&R.  We were now refreshed and ready to continue making our way south to Anacortes.