port madison and christy's folks

Christy's folks are in town to celebrate Turkey day with my family in what will no doubt be a familial supernova of fun to take place somewhere in the woods south of Yakima, WA. Since this is their first gander at Hello World, we took them sailing on Sunday.

Nothing too exciting - just a nice beam reach from Shilshole over to Port Madison. Joining us on the sail was our neighbors on J-dock, Bill and Jo. Bill, Christy's dad, Carl, and I worked on our mainsail furling issue a bit at the dock prior to taking off and while hauling out the main for the sail. The weather was beautiful for a Seattle November weekend and the wind was cooperative for about half the sail anyways.


Our anchorage at the back of Port Madison.


Sitting at anchor enjoying lunch.


Christy hanging in the cockpit with her folks.


Bill and Jo from s/v Bountiful. Jo makes some wicked cookies, holy cow.


Shithead, the cat, cowering in the back of the quarterberth telepathically communicating with me how much he dislikes it when his house heels, pitches, or has any motion whatsoever. And turn off that damned engine, willya??





We did not definitively solve the sticky mainsail furler but we did improve the situation some. We pulled off the access panels and looked inside to find years of lubricating gunk, mix with grit inside. We cleaned that out best we could with solvent and then sprayed a liberal amount of T9 to lubricate the bearings. It's still pretty tight coming out and the furler sleeve has too much lateral movement for us to be comfortable with it. So we have more work to do on the main before we're happy.

UPDATE: This was the first test of our anchor rode marking and it worked great. It was very easy to decipher the rode length marks as they exited the chain locker, especially since the marks were on seperate chain links.

UPDATE part 2:Christy and I use radio headsets when we anchor so we don't have to yell at each other while I'm up on the bow (previous owner called 'em marital aids). I found it was useful to call out the lengths of chain as it exited so I didn't lose count and in case I did lose count, Christy could remind me.

47°41'34.44"N 122°32'40.66"W