We're looking for the trash fence...

Crappy Pacific Northwest weather and constant work on the boat have kept us from taking the boat out, but this passed weekend Dawn and I took the boat out for out first trip since December. We organized a veritable flotilla of boats for a Poulsbo raft-up and viewing of the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Here are few pics of Viking Fest things. My main camera wasn’t charged up so these are just from my iPhone.

Cappy Bone and Tawn from s/v Palarran have another great video!

I’m writing you from the comfort of the nav station while securely anchored in LIberty Bay just off the shore of Poulsbo, WA. What a great night of sailing and seeing all of our hard work actually working! We took a little detour into Port Madison (hey where’s the Bridge??) and so we ended up arriving after dark, but not to fear. We were able to set the hook with the new windlass and chain locker configuration. We flipped on the foredeck light so Dawn could see me while I worked the windlass and she drove the boat. That was awesome because we could still use our hand signals for anchoring instead of having to shout.

But on the way over it was pure bliss to raise the sails and shut off the engine! We were doing well over 6 Kts in 18Kts of breeze as we crossed the sound, absolute JOY.

Right now I’m mooching someone's wifi ashore and the wifi antenna and Ubiquiti bullet are working pretty well for free internet! We still have a lot of thing we want to do, but man is it nice to get out and enjoy some of the fruits of our labor.

Tomorrow we’ll be joined by Danika, Palarran, Andante, and Defiant. We’re all going ashore to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie at 10pm, but all day tomorrow it’s Viking Fest in Poulsbo and we’re definitely going to go ashore and plunder some savages!

Goodnight and pleasant dreams !

We’re back from our trip and this is the first in a series of posts about our trip. Step one drunken pirate debauchery AKA the Latitudes and Attitudes NW party.

Lats ‘N Atts (whose domain is seafaring.com due I’m sure to some from J. Buffet, esq.) is a sailing magazine Bob Bitchin’. The magazine definitely has a flair for all things pirate and girl-in-bikini . So aesthetically it’s awesome, but editorially it’s a little watered down. For editorial write-ups and product reviews I refer to Practical Sailor and Consumer Reports. Hard core readers however fanatically identify with the biker outlawpirate image and the carefree “Don’t tread on me!” image portrayed by Bob Bitchin’. And this is why it's worth showing up at the party. The Lats ‘N Atts party is in a different spot every year, this year it was in Poulsbo, WA which we love to visit. You might recall we recently sailed there for the 3rd of July raft up with the D Dockers. (see Flickr).

Dawn and I had scheduled to leave the dock for Poulsbo Thursday but we were hoping to get off the dock on Wednesday night but as things are prone to do they took longer than planned especially since I managed to fry the computer fan in our composting head. It was a quick trip to Radio Shack to buy another and a side trip to Cupcake Royale for a much-needed bon voyage mini cupcake for Dawn. We also made a quick call to Nature’s Head for a spare and they sent a new one right away.  The fan from Radio Shack was a quick soldering project and installed easily. Along with that we just had more errands, more packing, tanks to fill, the list goes on so we opted to sleep on the dock an head out to Poulsbo on Thursday morning.

After finally throwing off the dock lines, we motored across the Sound on a beam reach at 4.5 kts in pretty light winds.  We have been learning about the optimal points of sail for Deep Playa and she keeps impressing us with her fleetness especially on a beam down through a reach. It was a beautiful sail over and nice warm weather to boot. We arrived in Poulsbo expecting to see the anchorage crowded by many boats for the party but was pleasantly surprised by the lack of boats and got a sweet spot. We dropped anchor and not too long afterwards, s/v Danika and s/v Epic showed up and rafted up with us. The weekend was loaded with lots of interesting trips on shore to the local hangouts, like the local dive bar. Always fun to watch the locals and non-locals mix and mingle. The actual party held on Saturday night was a bit too cheesy for my liking however; the D Dockers know how to make the best out of a situation and proceeded to don the appropriate pirate costumes. There was lots of debauchery to be had and by night’s end there were some drunken pirates returning to the floatilla. All and all the party was a lot of fun, I think attributed more to our fellow D, J and K dock mates that attended with us.