Ranier from Puget Sound
That night we pulled into Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island to stay for a couple of days (turned out to be more like a week).
Bainbridge Island is across Puget sound from Seattle and has a ferry that connects with downtown that runs about once every hour. It is a cute little town and has a nice small town feel to it. As an added bonus, it is pretty easy to take the ferry across to Seattle, have dinner, and ferry back. The last ferry leaves at 1am (or something like that). We stayed at Winslow marnia. It has a littl marine store, a groovy coffe house and a couple of resteraunts.
We also met a fine group of people while we were there. BJ & Trish on another Tayana 37; David and his wife living on a WWII dentist boat; and Bob, a retired minister, on his Hans Christian, getting ready to start sailing a bit.
On Friday morning I hoped on the ferry to Seattle from there I took Amtrak back down to Olympia to pick up our car. All went well, except that the Amtrak train terminal is out in the middle of nowhere with a bus that shows up once an hour. Of course, the bus schedule and the train schedule are not synchronized, so I had just missed the bus by about 10 minutes. While I was digging in the phone book trying to catch a cab, a guy came up to try to buy some tickets at the station. Of course the station attendents had bugged out early before closing time and he was out of luck. I, however, was in luck and managed to score a ride downtown to pick up our car. The next stop was West Marine to pick up a new Battery and a bunch of electronics. Because this is a boat, nothing can ever go smoothly, so of course, the charger I ordered was the wrong type. Seems the catalog had the incorrect numbers in it ... hmmph. Okay, I'll just order this thing and pick it up at some other West Marine .... Everything else seemed to be there and I was off to pick up an outboard motor for our dingy. You guessed it, they were sold out. This was after the sales guy told me two days ago that they had plenty in stock and I didn't need to reserve on. Well they did call around for me and found another motor up in Auburn. Turns out it was on sale and about 100 bucks cheaper than I was going to pay anyway. So a bonus. I didn't have time to hit Auburn today, but could do it on Saturday. So I head back up to Bainbridge Island for a much needed nap.
Saturday - Road Trip
So we have a bunch on our plate ... and it mostly involves spending money .... ye hah. First stop, Auburn to pick up our dingy motor. Cha-ching - 1 unit. Next stop, Union lake to pick up an inflatable. Cha-ching - 2 units. Next stop, Fisheries Supply to pick up a bunch of random crap. Cha-ching - 1 unit. Ye hah. Got to stop.
Afterwords, we went up north to Kenwood to visit one of Kathy's friend's sister and husband for dinner (Beth & Eric). They have a nice house in the woods just north of lake Washington and a nice little wooden boat on the lake. We all seemed to hit it off and they offered to let us keep our car up there for the summer (we were going to keep it at the airport). We will think about it. Anyway, we had a great fun at there house and hope to get up with them soon.
That evening we took the Edmonds-Kingstion ferry at about 11:30pm and hit the pillow pretty hard when we got back at 12:30am!
Sunday
Beth, Eric and the Kids came over to see our boat. We had a nice time hanging out in Bainbridge and had lunch at a suprisingly good Mexican resteraunt. We couldn't go out for a sail, since I still had to fix the batteries - tomorrow.
Monday - Thursday
Boat work day! Replaced battery bank 2 with new gel. Replaced alternator with high output Balmer. Added new external charger. Rewired battery banks. Fixed a bunch of other crap. Whew. I am beat. Is this the fun part? Somewhere in here we go to Seattle pick up our newly regalvonized anchors and our newly inspected life raft (another unit! anyone keeping track?)
Somewhere in there we had a really nice dinner in Bainbridge.
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