Twenty five days

As I type this on Sunday, we are at anchor in Port Blakely, on our 25^th day off the dock so far this year.

That's an amazing statistic.  On most any other year, a review of our log would show a little more than 40 days off the dock for the entire year.  Yet here we are, only 8 days into June, with almost the entire summer and fall ahead of us.

How has this happened?

• Spectacular weather.  Instead of our normal season of Woebegone, we have actually had summer start this year with the beginning of May, instead of July 5^th. 
• My three-day work schedule.  I am, and have been for some time, working 3 ten-hour days (yes, that's a 75% schedule).  This makes for a wonderful 4-day weekend every week - more time for sailing!
• Jane has essentially retired.  This means that she can take care of things at the cabin during the week (laundry, gardening, etc), freeing the weekends for boating.
• A focused determination to use the boat.  This is a big factor.  Without this, we would have taken each rainy forecast as a reason to leave the boat at the dock.  It also means that I have put boating above car maintenance.  At the moment we have but one running vehicle - a situation that, given the nature of our car fleet, is very risky.  

But I said above that we were in Port Blakely.  I checked back thru the log and found that the last time we were here was 5/14/2010, and in years going back before 2010, Blakely Harbor was featured quite frequently.  And as I recall, this harbor was often so crowded that it was not easy to find a spot for the anchor.  Not so this weekend.

I have to wonder.  One thing that has changed between then and now is that Eagle Harbor has cleaned up their moorage field, getting rid of all the permanently moored floating collections of "boats".  This has made Eagle Harbor available as a destination again, perhaps taking some of the load off of Port Blakely, just around the corner.

Not much has changed here in our three-year absence.  The ferry wakes still roll thru here with regularity.  There are no new houses on the shoreline (although the last remaining double-wide on the south shore is now a giant hole in the ground).  The old sawmill log impoundment pond at the very end of the bay is still a park, and the old boiler house is still covered with graffiti.  It is still much quieter here, compared to the hustle and bustle of Eagle Harbor.  And the view of Seattle at nite is still spectacular, undimmed by shoreline lites.