Cruise to Blake Island

Native American carvings adorn the doors of the longhouse at Blake Island

Cruising from an urban lake to an island getaway

My wife, Nola, and I are so lucky to live in the Puget Sound area. Where else can you start a sailboat cruise on an urban, fresh water lake surrounded by commercial shipyards and multi-million dollar floating homes, pass through an industrial ship canal, drop down a set of locks, and cruise out into the saltchuck where dozens of pristine islands and harbors await within a half-day sail?

We started out from Seattle's Lake Union, home of the Duck Dodge sailboat races, and headed out the Lake Washington Ship Canal. As many times as I have gone through the canal, I see something new every time. This time, we saw the classic, 100-foot, fantail motor yacht Thea Foss hauled out in drydock for a refit. Thea Foss was designed by Seattle naval architecht Ted Geary and built in the 1920s for Hollywood star John Barrymore. Thea is now the corporate yacht of Foss Tugs and its parent company, Saltchuck. Nola and I had the pleasure of a dinner cruise aboard her at the invitation of my good friend and former boat partner Jack Martin, a retired officer of a Saltchuck company, Totem Ocean Freight. Elegant is an understatement for this yacht.


M.V. Thea Foss in drydock on the Lake Washington Ship Canal

This Lake is too high. Let's lower it about twenty feet.

Seattle's founders had great vision for their growing city. If they didn't like a major natural landmark, they just changed it. They sluiced Denny Hill into Elliott Bay to form Harbor Island. Then, they decided they wanted to connect the fresh water lakes with Puget Sound, so they dug a ship canal and built a set of locks in 1917. To reduce how much water needs to be pumped out of the locks to lower boats down to the water level of the Sound, they decided to drain Lake Washington about 20 feet. Problem solved!

Modern day boaters sometimes refer to the locks as "divorce alley" because it can be somewhat stressful to maneuver through them. Couples are often heard to be giving unwanted advice to each other at very high decibel levels.

Nola and I have passed through the locks so many times we have it down. We rafted up to a big power boat as the lock doors closed, waited as the water level dropped about 15 feet, then the lockmaster gave us the nod to cast off after the doors opened with a big rush of water.

As soon as we cleared the shallow channel outside the locks in Shilshole Bay, we hoisted our sails and set a course for Blake Island, about ten miles to the south. The wind died, so we motor sailed for a while, making frequent changes of clothing as light rains fell then subsided. The wind picked back up, so we sailed the last half of the trip and were lucky to get one of the last slips at the marina on Blake Island.


Our sailboat Sublime at the Blake Island Marina, dwarfed by the other yachts as usual

So near, yet it feels so far away

Blake Island is a Washington State Park. It is blanketed with lush forests that are criss-crossed by hiking trails. Otters and raccoons play on the sandy beaches. The deer that roam the island have grown indifferent to their two-legged visitors.

Walking on the beach, it seems like the island could be far, far away, until you look to the east and see the skyscrapers in downtown Seattle.


The city seems so far away from the beaches of Blake Island

Tillicum Village

One of the attractions of Blake Island is Tillilcum Village, where visitors from all over the world cross the Sound on tour boats to enjoy a feast of salmon in an Indian longhouse and take in a Native American dance performance.

The dance performance was produced by Greg Thompson, who is better know for his extravagant topless reviews in Las Vegas. In this production, the women remain fully clothed while some of the men bare their chests.


The longhouse and totem poles at Tillicum Village

Nola and I enjoyed a dinner of barbecued bratwurst on our boat, then settle into our comfy cushions in the sunny cockpit to read books with absolutely no socially redeeming qualities. Bliss. It was the solstice, so we had plenty of light to read outside until well after nine o'clock.

We slept like babies that night, lulled to sleep by the gentle rocking motion of the boat. After after a breakfast of French toast, we took our cairn terrier Ella for one last walk ashore, and headed back home.

We were able to sail all the way back to the locks, with a gentle tailwind pushing us at a leisurely pace. The sun was peaking out from behind puffy with clouds, and we saw the Olympic Mountains to the west and the Cascade Mountains to the east. Mount Rainier was too shy to come out that day.

When we got to the small locks, the boat that entered just ahead of us was a whopping big power catamaran that was just barely able to squeeze in. Had we been in the large locks, the cat would have fit with room to spare. The large locks are the second largest in the world, next to the locks in the Panama canal. Battleships can sail through the locks into Lake Washington.


This power catamaran was so wide it just barely fit into the small locks

Going through the Locks on the way home


Open sesame!

As we motored through the ship canal on our way back to Lake Union, our mast fit under all the bridges except one. We blew one prolonged blast and one short blast on our air horn and the bridge tender raised the Fremont bridge for us. It gives a skipper a feeling of temporary omnipotence to have the power to raise a bridge and stop traffic for several blocks in either direction. Once, I waved politely to the waiting motorists and they responded with a one-fingered salute telling us we were number one.


Sublime passing under the Fremont bridge

Pirate Night at Duck Dodge

Yours truly gets in the spirit of Pirate Night

ARRRRGH! Thar Be Pirates on Lake Union!

Pirate Night is one of the more popular theme nights at the Duck Dodge sailboat race on Seattle’s Lake Union. Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley wannabees escape their office cubicles, shed their street clothes and don pirate swag ranging from elaborate to lame, like mine. We decorated our Coronado 27, Sublime, with two big skull and crossbones flags and a four-foot tall, inflatable parrot that we flew from the backstay until it was blown off and lost at sea.

We cast off our lines and headed out on the bounding main to buckle some swash and test our mettle against the other funky, old boats in the “cruising and slower boat division”, since we couldn’t keep up with the “half-fast” fleet, let alone the “fast” boats.

Our hardy crew included, from left to right, my wife Nola, our cairn terrier Ella, me, Mark Brower, L.B. Day, and Bill Hagstotz behind the lens.

The Seadog Suffers

Our cairn terrier Ella is usually a great boat dog. She has logged many sea miles cruising in the San Juan and Gulf Islands, and has me trained to take her ashore early every morning in the dinghy. We thought she would enjoy being with us for the Duck Dodge race. Boy, were we wrong. We have an invisible fence for Ella at our house that makes her shock collar beep when she gets too close. If she gets even closer to the edge of the yard, she gets a good jolt, so she knows to stay close to the house. I was using a digital stopwatch to time the start of the race, and it beeped every 30 seconds at the same frequency as Ella’s shock collar. Nola had to keep her down below in the cabin to calm her down. Just when her heart would stop pounding, my watch would beep again and she would freak out. So much for bringing Ella along on Duck Dodge races.

Pirate vessels ply the bounding main of Lake Union against a backdrop of the Seattle skyline

Off to the races!

About a hundred boats jockeyed for the start, and then it was off for a lap or two around the lake. We faired reasonably well in the race, but other boats in our class had spinnakers that gave them a speed advantage going downwind. Excuses, excuses. Anyway, it’s not about how well you place in the Duck Dodge, it’s about how much fun you can have without getting into too much trouble. So I tell myself. I do admit to secretly lusting after a gold, silver or bronze duck decal to paste on my boom to prove I got a podium position.

The committee boat for the night was the Mallory Todd, a 65-foot charter schooner. It seems that some of the pirate crews were using compasses that keep spinning around like Captain Jack Sparrow’s, so they had a bit of trouble navigating the race course. Three or four of them crashed into the Mallory Todd with loud crunching sounds that carried across the water. I’m afraid it might be a while before that schooner volunteers to be the committee boat again.


Romance was in the air at the raft party

Floating Pirate Party

After the race, dozens of boats rafted up to the committee boat for the party, where a few hundred scallywags engaged in small talk with a pirate accent. As the sun set, it reflected off the skyscrapers in the Seattle skyline and the clouds turned shades of orange and pink.

Sailing off into the sunset in search of lost gold

About Duck Dodge

The Duck Dodge sailboat races have been held on Seattle’s Lake Union every Tuesday night from Memorial Day to Labor Day since 1974. The races are just for fun, so there are no handicaps used to corrected elapsed time as in serious races. To add to the fun, there are theme nights such as Tropical Night, Pirate Night and Prom Night. To visit the Duck Dodge website, go to http://www.duckdodge.org

Thanks for the photos, Bill!
Many thanks to friend, neighbor, crew member and professional photographer Bill Hagstotz for the great photos in this blog story. To see more of Bill’s work, visit his site at http://www.bhpimages.com/

Downtown Sailing Series 2007 Season Opener

Left to right: Carol Brower, Jim Herman, L.B. Day and Mark Brower racing on Mark's boat Calculated Risque in the season opener of the Downtown Sailing Series

They Threw a Party and a Race Broke Out!

There has been a lot of discussion lately in the sailing press about how to get more people involved in sailing in general and racing in particular. The Downtown Sailing Series held on Seattle's Elliott Bay is succeeding in doing just that. By placing the emphasis on fun, the event attracts new boats to racing and new people to sailing.

The Downtown Sailing Series is organized by Elliott Bay Marina, and takes place Thursday evenings during the summer. For the season opener, I raced on my friend Mark Brower's Tartan Ten, a flush-deck, 34 foot racing boat designed by Sparkman & Stephens. Also in the crew was Mark's significant other, L.B. Day, his brother Carol, and long-time friend Jim Herman.

There are only two classes in this race: racing and cruising. Handicaps are not used to correct elapsed times as they are in serious races, so everybody knows it's just for fun. We did the first start for racing boats at 7:00 p.m. The wind was about 10 knots from the northwest, not quite far enough aft to fly a spinnaker, so we sailed on a reach with the genoa toward the first mark. The view was spectacular. We were racing toward the skyline of downtown Seattle, with Mount Rainier showing off to the south. Behind us were the Olympic Mountains, and we were surrounded by beautiful sailboats.


The fleet racing in the Downtown Sailing Series with the Seattle skyline as a backdrop

As the fleet approached the first mark, we had to hang a left and do a detour around an anchored grain ship, but that just made the race more interesting. As we rounded the fist mark, we hoisted the spinnaker to go faster downwind, and I had managed to connect the sheets to the spinnaker through the lifelines so it would not hoist properly. Carol scrambled onto the deck to help me get things sorted out, and we were on our way.

After the next mark, we did a nicely executed spinnaker douse and headed back upwind, with gusts of 12 to 15 knots heeling the boat over too far, so Jim was busy on the mainsheet traveller keeping the boat on its feet.

After the final mark, we had a short downwind leg to the finish and thought briefly about hoisting the spinnaker again, but it sounded like a lot of work so we passed since this race is just for fun. Other boats did fly their kites, so we were treated to some nice views as they crossed the line.

Kyrnos Crosses the Finish Line Under Spinnaker


Thursday! Thursday! 64 Sailboats!
Is this a drag race or a sailboat race? It can be hard to tell at times because of the unique rules of the Downtown Sailing Series. Boats need to finish by 8:30 or they are listed in the results as DNF - Did Not Finish. If a boat needs to motor in order to finish by the deadline, that's just fine. Really. The object of this rule is to get everybody to the party on time! There are hilarious drag races with boats motoring as fast as they can toward the finish line in order to get to the party before the line for hot dogs, beer and wine gets too long.

We placed 14th out of 25 boats in the racing class. If they had been using PHRF handicaps, we would have placed much higher because the boats that finished ahead of us were for the most part bigger, faster, and way more expensive. We definitely won on a SPD and FPD basis - Speed Per Dollar and Fun Per Dollar. Prizes in the Downtown sailing series are not awarded for your finishing position. They are randomly drawn out of a hat. If you don't win one week, your name is left in the hat for following weeks, so the more times you race the greater your chance of winning a nice sailing gear bag full of goodies.


Hanging Out at the Party After the Race



The party after the race is held at the Seattle Yacht Club outstation at Elliott Bay Marina. Thanks to some generous sponsors - Bank of America and Trinchero Vineyard - the party includes free wine, beer, hot dogs and snacks. A crowd of a couple of hundred people hangs out at the party as the sun goes down over the Olympics. For the season opener and the final race of the season, there is a live band.

Dancing the Night Away




For more information about the Downtown Sailing Series, visit http://www.elliottbaymarina.net/

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Duck Dodge Sailboat Race Mardi Gras Night

The Duck Dodge sailboat race has been happening on Seattle's Lake Union every Tuesday evening from Memorial Day to Labor Day for more than 30 years now. Unlike most sailboat races, which can be serious affairs, Duck Dodge is just for fun. No handicaps, no protests, and a very simple set of rules including: don't make any ducks alter course. Hence the name - Duck Dodge.

To make the race even more fun, there are theme nights, such as Pirate Night, Prom Night, and Tropical Night.

On this particular Tuesday, the theme was Mardi Gras Night. People came decked out in beads, and the committee boat marking the start/finish line was right in line with the theme. It was a stern wheeler named Banjo, which, after enough beers, made one almost believe they were in the big easy. My friend Kim DuBois, A.K.A. Queen of Duck Dodge, heads up the all-volunteer race committee, and her husband Matthew Wood, a buddy of mine from serious yacht racing, sets the buoys that mark the course from his trusty inflatable dinghy with its little outboard.

I headed out on my boat Sublime for the race with my friends Mark Brower and John Barr. My old boat fit right in with the fleet, which is comprised of a bunch of funky, slow boats with a few hot, fast boats mixed in.



We maneuvered for the start with about a hundred boats all jockeying for position. The race is separated into four classes that start at five minute intervals, but to the untrained eye, it looks pretty much like pandemonium. Lots of boats bumping into each other and some raised voices, but eventually all the boats make it off the starting line in the general direction of the race course.

The traffic gets tight when the boats round the buoys that mark the corners of the course, and we managed to pass several boats at each rounding. The wind was light, and it took nearly until sunset to complete the course. Boats in each class are awarded a gold, silver or bronze duck decal to paste onto their boom for winning first, second or third place. The boat with the best interpretation of that night's theme gets a green duck. The most coveted duck of all is the black duck, which is awarded for inappropriate behavior. I'm not kidding.

After the race, dozens of boats raft up to the committee boat, crank up their stereos, and party. Imagine a floating Mardi Gras festival with several hundred revelers, watching the glow of the sunset reflecting off the skyscrapers in downtown Seattle.

Boats raft up for the party at Duck Dodge Mardi Gras Night



Duck Dodge has many wonderful traditions. Since I am the captain of my boat, one of my favorite traditions is the one that calls for Duck Dodge Virgins - women at their first Duck Dodge - to walk the entire width of the raft of boats and kiss either the boat's mast or master. Not many masts get kissed.

At around ten o'clock, the party either breaks up voluntarily or the police boat lets us know we have worn out our welcome. The boats separate from the raft and sail home in the dark. A couple of weeks ago, there were a bunch of people from another boat on my boat when the raft broke up and they had to hitchhike home with us.

For more information on the Duck Dodge, check out www.duckdodge.org

Swiftsure 2007 on Atalanta

The Swiftsure International Yacht Race celebrates its sixty-fourth year with record breaking conditions.
By Dennis Palmer

The race was held on May 26 & 27, 2007, starting at Clover Point near Victoria B.C. The event features races of several lengths, the longest being the Swiftsure Lightship Classic at 138.7 nautical miles. In total, 206 boats participated, with 22 going the distance on the long course. The long course ventures out the notorious Straits of Juan de Fuca, which acts as a venturi to accelerate the wind from the Pacific between the Olympic mountains in Washington State and the mountains on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. When strong wind and current are from opposite directions, the Straits are infamous for huge, square waves. The race course continues beyond the Straits into the Pacific Ocean, where the swells take their toll on boats and crew. The rounding mark is a Canadian Navy vessel anchored at Swiftsure Bank.

I raced the long course aboard the yacht Atalanta, a 74-foot ocean racing ketch, designed by Bill Tripp and built in 1968 in the Abeking & Rasmussen yard in Bremen, Germany. Atalanta was originally named Ondine II, and was commissioned by Huey Long. She is now owned by real estate developer Richard Hedreen and her home port is Seattle.

Atalanta has a long history of ocean racing successes, including line honors in the Sydney Hobart race with Ted Turner aboard. She also claimed line honors twice in the Newport to Bermuda race. In a century of Newport to Bermuda races, only two boats have exceeded Atalanta's average speed of 9.4 knots: Nirvana and Pyewacket. Atalanta twice won Swiftsure on corrected time, and held the corrected time record for ten years until it was broken this year.

Atalanta is an massive, powerful vessel. The numbers below give you some idea of her magnitude.

• Displacement: 118,000 lbs. (That equals 3.5 Santa Cruz 70s)


• Spinnaker sail area: 5000 Square Feet (That equals two 2500 sq. ft. single story rambler houses)


• Main mast 100 feet tall, with a diameter so large you can't wrap your arms around it.


• Mizzen mast taller than the main mast on most 40' boats


• LOA 79 feet


• 18 foot beam


• Wire rope shrouds: 1" in diameter


• Weight of #1 genoa: 320 lbs. It takes 4 to 6 people just to get the sail on deck.


• Two coffee grinders with stations for 4 people, linked to primary winches about 30" in diameter.
  

The race started under cloudy skies on Saturday at 10:10 with winds of 10 to 15 knots from the west. The wind quickly built to 20 to 25 knots, tapered off a bit near Neah Bay, and cranked back up to 30+ knots when we got outside the Straits into the ocean.

Atalanta sails upwind in a strong breeze like a locomotive. We reached peak speeds of about 11.5 knots on the way out the straits, and rarely dropped below nine knots. Imagine a heel angle of 40 to 45 degrees on a boat this big. With an 18 foot beam, the windward rail is about nine feet higher than the leeward rail. That's as high as sitting on the roof of your house looking down at the yard. Not a place for somebody with a fear of heights. Climbing from the leeward rail to the windward rail is like rock climbing on a slippery, wet surface. When the crew sits on the high side, you have to contstantly brace your self from fallling down to the low side into frigid 48 degree water. The leeward rail is often submerged during high wind, with a river about a foot deep running across the deck at 10 knots, fast enough to sweep people off the deck in the blink of an eye.

Check out this video of Atalanta running her rail during the Swiftsure race:

View the Atalanta Photo Library: www.flickr.com/groups/atalanta

We had a few mechanical problems during the race. Our hydraulic pump would not function. Even though we were using a suit of racing headsails, the boat is set up with a furling headstay for cruising. The furler was stuck with the grooves for the headsails 90 degrees to the centerline of the boat, so there was lots of friction for doing headsail changes. It took four guys grinding hard to hoist a new headsail inside the old one. With all that friction, dousing the headsail was a lot more work than usual, so we were pretty burned out after several sail changes on the way out to the windward mark.

The wind usually lightens up as you pass from the narrow Straits into the ocean, so we shifted up to the light #1 genoa as the wind abated. Unfortunately, the wind picked right back up to about 32 knots. The ocean swell was coming from a slightly different direction than the wind waves, and the combined peaks were taller than the boom on Atalanta, which is about 12 feet off the water. With 118,000 pounds of displacement, we blasted through the waves, causing spray to fire hose the crew. The light #1 was not up to the task of handling both a 32 knot breeze and the shock loading caused by bashing through the swells, and it exploded with the sound of thunder. We quickly doused the remains of the #1 and hoisted the #2 genoa as we were approaching the mark, with a gorgeous sunset of red, gold and yellow showing between the cloud cover and the ocean.

We rounded the mark at about 21:30, and hoisted the 5000 square foot spinnaker. Finally, the boat stood back up on her feet, and the crew could walk around the deck without using rock climbing techniques. The knotmeter climbed to 14.5 knots as we surfed down the big swells in the 30 knot wind, and I was trimming the kite with a kink in my neck from looking up a hundred feet to see if the luff was curling. We had a bright moon to guide our way back home, so I could see the spinnaker trim well.

The wind reduced to about 20 to 25 knots as we entered the Straits, and the ocean swells diminished so just rythmic wind waves remained, making for a very comfortable motion of the boat through the water. The stars were out, the moon was at our back, and we could see the running lights of our competition and big freighters and cruise ships we needed to steer clear of.

I went below at about midnight for some much needed rest, and got to relax for about 40 minutes before there was a call for all hands on deck to execute a gybe. Oh well, I would be able to sleep when I finished the race the next morning.

As we approached Victoria, we rounded Race Rocks, where the wind and current always accelerate. It was still dark, and we were threading the needle between rocks using the GPS, since we could not see them. We had a 3 knot current on the nose, and the wind built back up to about 30 knots as we approached the place where we needed to gybe. As we gybed, the mast end of the spinnaker pole travelled way too high on the mast, and the mast crew could not get it back down quickly with such great loads on it. Because of that, the grinders were not able to tension the new guy. I was in the cockpit, handling both the old spinnaker sheet and the new spinnaker sheet, and I could not let the old sheet go until the guy was tensioned. When that finally happened, I turned my attention to trimming in the new sheet with the help of two grinders, but the spinnaker was flogging violently by this time and it exploded with a boom. It took a while to haul down the shreds, and we were still making 11 knots without a spinnaker. We hoisted the #2 genoa, turned about 30 degrees to port and the lights of Victoria came into view about ten miles away. The rest of the race was a beam reach at 12 knots of boatspeed with no more tacking required, so the crew was able to relax and enjoy a sleigh ride to the finish line as the sun rose behind Victoria.

We crossed the line at 5:16 Sunday morning, and our corrected time earned us second place in division B, about a minute and half out of first place. Overall, we corrected out to seventh place for all divisions, and five of the six boats ahead of us shattered our old course record for corrected time.

Swiftsure Lightship Classic 2007 Top Ten Overall On Corrected Time

1. Coruba: Nelson Marek 68 (17:21:48)


2. Braveheart: TP52 (17:34:41)


3. Neptune's Car: Santa Cruz 70 (18:09:38)


4. Mayhem: TP52 (18:09:43)


5. Icon :Perry 65 (18:22:40)


6. Finale: Swan 46 (18:41:41 )


7. Atalanta: Tripp 74 (18:43:15)


8. Marda Gras: Santa Cruz 52 (19:12:22)


9. Night Runner: Perry 42 (21:28:05)


10. Jam: J160 (22:03:04)

For complete results, visit http://www.swiftsure.org/ for the Swiftsure website.

After we passed through the safety inspection and got the boat moored and put away, I checked into the Empress Hotel where I soaked my sore muscles in the hot tub and enjoyed a hot breakfast.

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