October 6, 2014

October 4th Sail, Marine Life Parade or A Whale of a Tale

October 6, 2014

Wow! What started out as a quiet sail for Mark, Joe, and I turned out to be one of our best sailing adventures ever. We saw more marine life on this sail than ever before. Three cheers for sailing in October and the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Hip, hip, hooray! We are so lucky to live here.

Sea lions, Crab Pots, Harbor Porpoises, Whales, Harbor Seals, and a Mermaid.

The day started out a bit gloomy with the weather. There were clouds but the temperature rose to 70 degrees. After a little while, the clouds parted and we had sunshine. Light winds kept our speed around 3 knots. Enough to sail by, but not enough to fly the pennants properly, to my chagrin. I tried all day to get a proper picture of them. It didn’t matter at all about the pennants and people pictures. Yesterday, the pictures were about marine life. Boy, we witnessed some memories.

Our friendly sea lion was on the buoy to greet us to Port Gardner. He was snoozing today and didn’t bother barking and barely opened his eyes. After getting the requisite pictures of the buoy seal lion I like to call “Harvey”, we noticed there were dozens of sea lions barking on the Navy gate buoys. I talked Mark into driving the boat close enough to get pictures. I didn’t discover until later, when I was viewing the pictures, the threat of violent use of force signs. Now I know why Mark and Joe were hesitant. Oh well, I’m sure they have pictures of us taking pictures of the cutest sea lions. One of the sea lions was posing. Adorable! He looked like he could be at Sea World. I think these are the sea lions that are passing the double top secret messages to Joe through the buoy barking…

There were crab pots everywhere. Some of the Puget Sound areas have reopened for crabbing and Port Gardner and Port Susan are two of the areas. Joe succinctly described navigating the sailboat through crab pots in some areas as going through a minefield. The crab taste good so perhaps someday we may be able to join them.

As with most of our sails, we don’t have a fixed agenda where we are going to go. Yesterday our sail headed towards Mukilteo like last week. Right before we got to the ferry we saw harbor porpoises! Mark and I have only seen these twice before. Once a few years ago and then last month on our way home from La Conner. We weren’t close enough to get fantastic pictures, but were able to see them swim. I did get pictures, just not anything remotely close-up. I think we saw them surface at least five times. We were too far away. I told Mark they reminded me of watching the Nutcracker Ballet with Alyssa and Sarah. There is a scene in the ballet where porpoises swim by the boat.

Right after we sailed past the Mukilteo ferry and lighthouse Mark said he saw a whale! We then got very excited. Joe had never seen a whale, only blowholes in all his travels. Sure enough, not only was there one whale, but two were in our sights! The telephoto lens was already on the camera from the sea lions,so we were able to sail on our present course south for a while. The whales were headed in a northwest direction. They then proceeded in a straight north direction, so we altered our course a bit. The whales were swimming faster than we were sailing and they outran us. The experience of seeing the amazing marine mammals breach every few minutes was AWESOME! We were thrilled with our adventure of whales. We last saw the whales going past the Clinton-Mukilteo Ferry on Whidbey Island. I’m sure the passengers on that ferry were as thrilled as we were to see whales swimming and breaching in front of them.

After looking at the time, we decided perhaps it was time to head towards home. On our way home I glanced to the side and saw a cute little harbor seal. I got a few backwards camera shots of him. I hope one day to get a really good picture of a harbor seal. They seem to be elusive. Joe said he saw a mermaid. Yea, we will give him that one.

We came into the Everett Marina with our running lights and steaming light on. First time for the new Jeanne Marie. We settled down for a quiet and relaxing dinner of barbecued shrimp, rice, and green beans. Mark and I have decided that after the Saturday sails we are going to spend the night on the boat.

On Sunday morning Mark used a knot called a whipping knot to repair the ends of some lines on the sailboat. His new Knot book is coming in handy. He also cleaned the BBQ and took the anchor chain and line out and straightened it. Next summer when we go to the San Juans we will probably need to anchor out somewhere so it’s good to know we have it stowed correctly.