Little Harbor 68 at Shilshole Bay Marina
This was a week of coincidences, connections and crossed paths that reminded me that we really do live in a small world.
My wife Nola and I had already planned to spend a weekend in Victoria, B.C. by flying on a Kenmore Air floatplane and spending a night at the Empress Hotel. When I learned that my friends at Brower Boat were going to deliver a yacht there on the Thursday before the weekend we had scheduled, I jumped on the opportunity. Nola opted out because she had work to do, but I decided to go early and get a chance to spend some time on a fine yacht with my buddies, brothers Carroll and Mark Brower and another Brower Boat employee, Vern, who hails from the island of Bequia in the St. Vincents and Grenadines in the Caribbean.
If you could see the boat we made the trip on, you would understand why I was so eager to go on the delivery. This was a Yacht with a capital Y; a Little Harbor 68 sloop in bristol condition. It had four staterooms, three heads featuring towels with the yacht name embroidered on them, a huge main salon with a flat panel TV, and a galley the size of the kitchen in our house except with more refrigerator and freezer space. The owner needed to boat to go to Victoria to be put on a yacht delivery ship and go through the Panama Canal to Florida. The trip on the ship would cost as much as 35 foot used sailboat in good condition.
On Wednesday evening, I helped Carroll bring the yacht from Lake Union through the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the locks to Shilshole Bay Marina so we could get an early start the next morning for Victoria. Also along for that leg of the trip was Tom Andrews, who works with Carroll at Brower Boat. Tom is a New Zealander who used to run the Lidgard sail loft in Honolulu. The locks opened as soon as we approached, but we did have to wait a while for the railroad bridge on the outside of the locks to open due to the approach of an Amtrak train.
Making 10 knots enroute to Victoria
We left Shilshole Bay Marina in Seattle at about 8:30 on a gray, chilly January morning . As we cleared the marina breakwater, Carroll turned the wheel over to me and I immediately delegated the driving duties to our friend Otto (A.K.A. autopilot).
Down below, the main salon glowed with the color of teak and the heating system made it warm and cozy inside. Mark and Vern provisioned the boat with hot coffee, pastries, cookies and sandwiches. Mark found the local NPR jazz station on the stereo so we had a sound track for our adventure that matched the elegant style of the yacht.
Main salon of the Little Harbor 68
The waters of Puget Sound were calm, and the snow on the Olympic Mountains showed through breaks in the cloud cover. We cranked up the big diesel to cruising RPMs and cut smoothly through the water at about 9.5 knots. As the current began to ebb in our direction, our speed over the ground increased to as high as 14 knots, so the scenery was moving by at a good clip.
Carroll at the wheel
As we approached Port Townsend, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier and two escort vessels passed us. Huge! It made a blip on the radar screen that looked like small island.
North of Port Townsend, the Straits of Juan de Fuca awaited us. This body of water connects Puget Sound to the Pacific Ocean and lies in a funnel between the Olympic Mountains to the south and the landmass of Vancouver Island to the North, so the wind can be accelerated through this narrow slot. If the current is opposing the wind, the Straits can produce killer waves. Not this day. The water was glassy calm, with only a few freighter and tugboat wakes that were handled easily by the 105,000-pound displacement of the Little Harbor 68.
Mark and Vern bundled up against the cold
We set a course of 280 degrees magnetic across the straits and made for Victoria. We pulled into the harbor only 7 hours after departing Seattle! We found the customs dock and only took a few minutes for Carrolll to clear us and get on the radio with the harbormaster to get a slip for the night. We tied up in the same slip that the yacht Atalanta did after I raced on her for the 2007 Swiftsure International Yacht Regatta. See my blog story about that race.
After the solitude of being the only boat in our proximity for hours, the Victoria inner harbor seemed busy by comparison. The ferry Coho that runs between Port Angeles and Victoria blew three short blasts on her horn and backed out of her slip causing us to change course. We slalomed our way through several floatplanes, and a police boat decided it would be a good idea to cross our bow as we were making our way to our slip. We got the boat tied up near the Empress Hotel and got everything put away.
Little Harbor 68 at her slip near the Empress Hotel in Victoria’s Inner Harbor
Carroll, Mark, Vern and I got settled into our respective hotel rooms and met later at the Bengal Lounge in the Empress Hotel, which gets its style from the days when India was a British colony. There is an impressive Bengal tiger pelt hanging on the wall above a roaring fireplace and the signature entree is the curry bar.
The Bengal Tiger that is the namesake of the lounge at the Empress Hotel
The next day, I bowed out while the other guys brought the boat to Esquimalt Harbor to put on the yacht transport ship. They had to wait longer than expected because a 93 foot sailing yacht from Seattle, Altair, was being loaded onto the ship. It turns out our friend Joe Grieser was aboard Altair. Small world.
Our luxurious room at the Empress Hotel
The view from our room of the Inner Harbor
I got a chance to spend the next couple of days visiting my favorite haunts in Victoria, and I met Nola on Saturday morning when her floatplane arrived. We checked into our harbor side room at the Empress Hotel to start our weekend together. We enjoyed the hot tub and pool at the hotel, strolled the town and did some shopping. Nola had cobb salad for lunch and I had bangers & mash at the Irish Times. For dinner, we feasted on the curry bar at the Bengal Lounge.
Our ride home taxis to the dock
Sunday afternoon, the wind in the Victoria Inner Harbor was blowing about 25 knots and there was some doubt that the floatplane we were booked on would be able to fly in those conditions. The pilot had to attempt landing at the dock twice because he was blown away the first time. We boarded the floatplane for the beautiful, one-hour flight at about 1000 feet above the San Juan Islands and Puget Sound. We landed on Lake Union, completing a full circle. The floatplane harbor was just a few docks away from where I had started the trip on the yacht. We drove about 10 minutes back to our house in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle, feeling as if we had been to a far away land.
Full circle: approaching Lake Union as we pass the Space Needle.
