All Alone at the Docks

@ Penrose Point

@ Jarrell Cove
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@ Jarrell Cove (reflected)

Spectacular Gig Harbor Sunset

The "New" Narrows Bridge

We are getting a new bridge.

For many years there has been a big bottleneck getting over the old bridge as more and more people move to the Kitsap Peninsula.

The tidal current under the bridge is quite strong and that makes the construction more tricky for the workers and engineers.   But now the underpinnings are done and are solidly in the seabed.

With the towers are being built, the bridge is reported to 50% complete.

It's nice to see progress.   The bridge is due for completion in 2007 and the costs will be covered by tolls.

Oro Bay

Oro Bay is a narrow shallow bay (1 mile by a quarter mile) indenting into small Anderson Island (4 1/2 long by 3 miles wide) in south Puget Sound.   This has always been a favorite moorage for us.   When we first started coming here more than 25 years ago, log rafts were bundled on the north end of the bay, a marine fueling station in the center, and a small (about 40 folk) foot ferry was aground and breaking up on the south end.   There is lots of exploring to be done by dinghy.   We found the site of an old brick-making plant all grown over but broken bricks litter the beach.   We can watch deer on the shoreline or eating fallen apples from the wild apple trees.   We found out in the museum on the island that for many years there was no road to this end of the island.

Well a lot of that has changed!   The logs, fuel, and small ferry are gone.   And now there's a 50 boat marina here and two yacht club outstations.   One of the outstations being our own: Bremerton Yacht Club (BYC).   It took a lot of work to make the outstation happen with the complicated permit processes today.   BYC now has a sturdy dock with water and power to hold about 30 boats if need be.

This week we were alone at the dock.   Didn't we tell you everybody has gone home!
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On shore is a picnic shelter with tables, firepit, BBQ, and a couple of storage buildings.   The rest of the area is "parked out" - being kept "natural" with a bit of help from a mower, tackling the blackberries, and mulching around the trees.   We've got a great manager watching over the property who lives on Anderson Island.

Dean has helped with the park and done odd chores for a couple years.   And he was back doing that again.

Fall is a good time to pick huckleberries and Laurie got some to freeze for winter.

And oh yes, we need to explain about the ferry here, the Ocean City, that one of the locals has beached at his property.  

Rumors abound; but we think it was surplused from a San Francisco Bay ferry run.   Not sure if the owner hoped to be able to sell it to the ferry company that runs the ferry to Anderson Island or to maybe just charter it out.  

But we have seen it out cruising so know that it can be manuevered out of the bay.   It's just so big for this small area that it's a surprise to see.  

By the way, the fellow who owns the ferry also used to have an ultralight on floats that he'd fly around the bay.

Houseboating Friends

Some pictures of our boating friends with and without their boats

who we met along our cruise.

Sights from Olympia

The Kiss, the Capitol, and the killer whale.

Fall crops at the Farmer's Market.

                               Apples and plums.

  

                    Pumpkins and squash.  

                                

                     Colorful mums.

Oil Spill!

Beautiful cruising day in Commencement Bay.

Blue skies.

Calm seas.

But that was before the oil spill...









So far the vessel who spilled or pumped this bunker oil overboard has not been identified.

Imagine that there will be a big fine as the last estimate we heard was that $1.4 MILLION had been spent to clean up the estimated 1000 gallons.

After the Exxon Valdez mishap disaster, a fund was established for clean-ups of this kind and paid for by the oil companies (and all of us).

We can't imagine that this spill was done on purpose. Maybe a crew member flipped the wrong switch? Maybe the captain didn't even know about it?

At last report, one grebe was oil soaked and being treated. Clean-up took about a week. Glad there is in place the manpower and equipment to handle this type of incident.

For us, we are happy that we were not in the area when this happened and kept from getting globules of oil on our hull.

Scrap Metal

As long as we were in the commercial area of Tacoma, we did a little more exploring.

We came upon this champion recycling spot.

It looks like the cars (and etc) get chunked and the chunks get finely ground.

Then what?   Sent to Japan?   re-smeltered?

The mound looks like landscaping bark but is instead rusted metal.

Kalakala

In her first life, the boat now known as the Kalakala was the ferry Peralta which was in service in the San Franciso area. After the superstructure was destroyed in a fire, the Peralta was towed to the Seattle area. There she took on her second life as the ferry Kalakala with a new unique art-deco design and bare shiny metal streamlined sides. Known affectionately as the "Silver Slug", she went into service running the Seattle to Bremerton route.

A Seattle fellow found her and dreamed of restoring her.   He was able to raise the funds to buy and refloat the boat and to have her towed to Seattle.

Unfortunately, that's where funds ran out.   The Kalakala was moored at Lake Union in Seattle for a couple years while a search (to no avail) went on for funds to restore her to her former glory.

Last year she was sold on eBay and hauled up to Neah Bay and then, just recently, to an available spot in the commercial area of the Tacoma waterfront.

We took this chance to go down the waterway and snap a few pictures.  A fellow we talked to told us that the Kalakala hull is still strong but the metal superstructure all needs replaced.

We certainly don't see hope for her unless she finds a benefactor to take this on as a pet project.

What will be her fourth life?   A restaurant?   A casino?   A charter cruise ship?   Or a derelect sunk for a fish habitat?   Stay tuned.

Find out more information on the Kalakala at http://www.kalakala.org/ After more than 30 years in use as a ferry in Puget Sound, she was beached up in Alaska and used (and abused) as a seafood processor for almost 20 years.

Fall Boating in South Sound

We enjoy boating in south Puget Sound in the fall before the November monsoons hit.   South sound is quiet then, as most pleasure boaters have tied up their boats until next year.   The waters in south sound are protected with plenty of secure docks and anchorages.   We include in our definition of south sound the area from Blake Island to Olympia with all that area's various attached inlets, bays and harbors.


On this trip we enjoyed very pretty sunny weather but then some wet days toward the end of our trip.   But less rainy days than the weatherman had predicted.   We enjoyed the facilities at several state parks (Blake Island, Penrose Point, and Jarrell Cove).   We spent some time at the docks of a few cities: Des Moines, Gig Harbor, and Olympia.   Met with a lot of Houseboat Yacht Club people in Des Moines, Penrose Point, and Olympia.


This was a good trip with calm cruising, huckleberry picking, and nice walks.


At Oro Bay on Anderson Island is the Bremerton Yacht Club outstation.   Dean worked various projects there helping the outstation manager get things ready for the off-season.   He paced himself as he still wasn't up to par from his hernia repair in late September.   Laurie used her spare time learning HTML and how to create webpages.   (Here's one now.)  *** Since replaced with this blog! *** Something that there is never enough time to do with the interruptions at home.