DriveFar then sail

[Christopher]

Hi all,  been ages since I've been on here, but I thought I'd share.  I moved from Milwaukee on Lake Michigan over to Boise, ID.   I sold my old Bristol 29, sadly and she made her way down to Florida via the Mississippi with her new owner.  After a couple years boatless, last year I decided to jump back in with a trailer sailer.  I bought a 1993 Hunter 23.5 (water camper) and I hop between various mountain lakes.  In a few weeks I'm making the 580 mile drive up to Anacortes, maybe Bellingham to drop in and spend a week in the San Juans.  BTW - if anyone has any tips on where it's better to put in for the San Juans please share.

Anyway - just wanted to say hi.

[Frank]

There is an awful lot to be said for the mobility of trailersailing!
Lots for shoal draft too!!
Great boat for how you are using it!
Throw a dart at the map.....you can probably go there 😄
Post a few pics of your travels.
Have fun!!

[Christopher]

Absolutely!  Trailering has been a learning experience.  Lots of hard lessons learned, but after 5 or 6 trips I got the kinks worked out and I've got my procedures down.  There are not a lot of systems on a trailer, but there is a lot that can go wrong between loading/unloading, mast stepping/unstepping and re-rigging the boat every time I go out.  Fabulous learning experience though and teaching me a lot of patience.  I'll definitely have some pics to post.  Hoping to see some Orcas up in the San Juans.  I've had people tell me they've seen 20 in a pack swimming along with their boat. 

[Christopher]

Thought I'd share a little video I made of my San Juan Islands cruise.  Got back last week.  Amazing place!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn5NGEYpgpM&t=6s

[jotruk]

great video looks like a fun time.

[Norman]

Very much enjoyed the voyage.  I noticed some special weather phenomena, such as the tongue of cloud downwind from a pass in the ridge near the end of the video.  Warm moist air  is raised and cooled on the windward side, to saturation, and the slight pressure drop on the Lee side produces the feather of cloud.  Earlier. As you showed a panorama, there was low fog, just off the water on the far side of a channel between two points, but all other directions were very clear.

Small temperature or pressure changes can result in dramatic changes in visibility, without warning in such regions.

There were more boats in most of your video than I expected, but I have been thinking of the area as it was a half century ago.  It is still not crowded with people, and obviously a dramatic change from most of the coastal regions in the East.

Thanks for posting.

Norman

[Christopher]

Thanks for the weather observations.  That's probably great stuff to know during such an occupation as this.  By the time we had cleared the small channel to get to where that low fog was, it had disappeared.  We had heard chatter on the radio only hours earlier of people navigating pretty low visibility areas (a few boat lengths) without radar and it had me pretty nervous.

One thing that really had me uneasy was the number of unmarked, uncharted obstructions sticking up out of the water at low tide.  We were out in the middle of busy channels and there were what looked like posts or pilings sticking up just a few inches to a foot out of the water.  They were definitely not buoys or anything floating on the surface nor were they rocks.  We kept a very sharp eye out though the whole time and were able to spot them and avoid.