Our journey wouldn't have felt complete without touching home base in Anacortes, our hailing port since 1992. It was a festive and emotional return: we flew flags from all the countries we'd visited, and Katelinn and Camden greeted us on the dock with a large world flag, tooting signal horns and spraying champagne!
Damp and breezy fall weather got in the way of outdoor activities and we were reluctant to be indoors due to COVID, so we spent most of our time together spread apart in the cockpit with the enclosure panels open and a space heater at our feet to keep us tolerably warm. As homecomings go, it was still delightful; we came home to be with family and friends, and nothing got in the way of sharing stories and laughter.
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| A tour of South Pacific beers |
We did manage a short trip to nearby Saddlebag Island, and en route to Anacortes we stopped overnight at our two favorite anchorages in the San Juans. These places are most dear to our hearts and we want to memorialize them here.
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| Watmough Bay, Lopez Island Keen eyes (or a zoom feature) will spot the moon and a flock of birds playing with the wind |
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| A typical Pacific NW beach |
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| Forest and ocean meet in these islands |
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| Grove of madrone trees on Saddlebag Island, |
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| a marine park just 30 minutes from Anacortes |
We have now returned to Port Townsend, where we will be hauled out for the winter. (We chose PT because--unlike Anacortes--the boatyard allows liveaboards, plus we're quite close to Katelinn's home.) We'll live on the hard until the end of the year, the earliest our renters could be vacated so we could return to our house in Ashland. We have a daunting number of large projects that will keep us busy, if not warm: painting inside and out, refinishing the cabin sole, reseating windows, etc.
Once Second Wind has had the facelift she deserves, we will put her on the market. We will be heartbroken to see her go, but she deserves to be out on the ocean, and we are no longer the ones to take her there. We're sad about that fact, too. But as the two year journey stretched into six, we had more magnificent experiences than we could ever have imagined--and now it's time to move on to different kinds of adventures.
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| Second Wind on land |
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| Our current home; Art is stabilizing some rickety stairs (better than climbing a ladder for 3 months) |
To bring closure to this tale, one final blog entry will be posted by the time we leave Port Townsend.
I have a nephew who might be interested in Second Wind. He teaches physics at OSU. He and his wife (also a PhD, hers in Urban water management) teach and research remotely. They sail, and have often spoken about sailing the world. So keep me in the loop as plans develop.
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