Aboard Astraea

After our night in Deer Harbor we made a breakfast of Fried Potatoes and eggs, hauled up the anchor and headed out to the West Sound of Orcas Island. Milltown has a reciprocal agreement with the Orcas Island Yacht Club. When they visit Everett they can

Can I get a lift?

use the docks for free and when we visit Orcas Island we can use theirs for free. We pulled up to their dock that sits in about 20 feet of water. I expected the reciprocal dock to be busier, but there was only one boat there, New LAttitudes from Anacortes.

After securing the boat, we decided to start walking towards Eastsound. There was a Saturday farmers market we wanted to check out. The dock attendant in Deer Harbor told us the Island Shuttle didn’t start running until the end of June, so our only options for transportation around the island were rental car, taxi, or hitch hiking. Never ones to turn down an opportunity for anew experience, Nate started sticking his thumb out. We walked about a mile and a half before a car finally pulled over; a Prius driven by a nice older woman who was on her way to work at the bookshop in town. We were lucky

Walking through Eastsound

to get the ride because it was a lot farther than we thought! She told us the hitchhiking is the norm on the island and that if her dogs aren’t in the backseat she’ll always pick people up. The sheriff will even pick you up if you don’t mind getting locked in the backseat!

We made it into Eastsound and headed straight to the farmers market. It was pretty small with not much that interested us, so we kept walking up the main road. We came across a Lopez Winery tasting room, and since we had skipped out on that on Lopez,decided to have a taste. All the wines were pretty good. Some were even made better by using and aerator. She had us try a wine straight out of the bottle, and then poured another glass through the aerator. It was amazing how much better it tasted! But since we were trying to get rid of a lot of beer before entering

Natalie hitched a ride in the back of a rusty pickup truck.

Canada, we decided not to buy any wine. Feeling a little buzzed from the wine, we kept walking through town and checked out a few shops and finally settled in to the cozy island pub.

After a hitch back to the boat we met our neighbor, John, from New LAttitudes. His boat was a nice big cabin cruiser. We could definitely live on that thing, but wouldn’t be able to afford it unless we lived there for 20 years. It was cool to go aboard his boat and just hang out and talk because boating easily spans generations and styles, sail or power.

Good weather again today in Fisherman Bay on Lopez Island. Rowed ashore to take showers at the resort. They charged us $6 each to use the services ashore. Sounded OK to me until we made it in and there was a $2 per 6 minute shower. We could have just ditched their showers and headed downtown to use the free ones that the Chamber of Commerce offers, but I was already $12 in the hole – why not go all the way? At the end of it we spent $18 on showers that day. That’s a lot of cruising kitty (cash) just to wash up. Natalie was ready to put a shower on the boat after that experience.

Bye Bye Lopez Island and $18 showers.

We dropped our shower stuff in the dinghy and rolled downtown to Lopez Village to see what was open. Pretty much it’s a cute little island town. There’s a fudge shop, coffee shop, winery and organic grocery store. We grabbed some ice and a few other necessities (s’mores anyone?) from the regular grocery store and headed back to the boat. We motored out against the current headed for Deer Bay.

The trip to Deer Bay wasn’t anything to brag about. Wind on the nose so we just motored through, recharging the batteries. Keeping the batteries full is our biggest worry out here after weather. All the nice things on airborne need electricity. If we want the kerosene heater to work, we need power for the kerosene pump. If we want to see at night, we can use the kerosene lantern. Unfortunately it doesn’t throw much light for reading, so we burn electric lights. The anchor light uses electricity too, so if we want to stay legal at night when we’re anchored, that needs to be lit. Our propane stove has an electric solenoid and safety sniffers to keep us from blowing up if there’s a leak.  Yup.  That uses electricity too.  Other nice stuff we have on board that uses electricity are the GPS, laptops and the radio. Keeping the batteries topped up makes life easier.

We have one smaller battery that’s used for starting the engine and another larger “house battery” that’s used for the rest of our electrical needs. We run off the house battery all night, and if it dies there’s no problem. In the morning we can switch over to the other battery, start the engine and then run it for a while to charge up the house battery for another night.

We arrived at Deer Harbor, dropped the anchor in about 30 feet of water and I fired up the grill for burgers. After the dishes were done I turned on the kerosene heater, lit the lantern and Natalie and I practiced songs on our guitars. We sang the Eagles, CCR and country songs until my fingers hurt too much from playing and we turned in for the night.