Dirona has plenty of storage space—we’ve not yet come close to filling all the lockers despite living aboard. But it is a boat, and storage space is at a premium. So we’re always looking for ways to make the most efficient use of the space we have. When we visited the yard during construction, one of the items on our checklist was to add lockers in any inaccessible void spaces, or to modify standard lockers to make best use of the space available.  

As we organized the galley, one product we’ve found useful is Seville Classics iron expandable kitchen shelf. We’ve purchased five so far, and keep finding new uses for them. We initially got one for the locker above the washer/dryer that we use as a pantry:    

Then one for the dry-goods locker above the port counter:    

And another for the shelf below the port counter:    

And one for for our mugs and glasses cupboard above the main counter:    

Recently, we realized one would fit in the appliance garage behind the stove:

Seville Classics also has an iron two-tier shelf. By some fluke of luck, two fit exactly into our center overhead cupboard and really maximize our use of that space:

The shelves have little friction, so we’ve glued on non-skid material to keep things from shifting.

For dishes and coffee mugs, we are using Aspen from Crate and Barrel. We had Aspen coffee cups in storage from our house and brought them aboard the new boat. Before we put non-skid in the cupboards, the mugs had survived sliding and banging into each other so well that we decided to buy the plates and bowls too. So far they’re working out well. The bowls are a little on the large side, but are multi-purpose.

We purchased the shelves from our local Bed, Bath and Beyond store, but they also are available from Amazon.com.

We spent the July 4th Independence Day weekend anchored at the head of the Hood Canal (route map). We went mainly because we’d not anchored there before, and were planning to stay only for the 3rd. This, however, turned out to be a great place to watch fireworks. Private displays are illegal in most cities in the region, such as Seattle and Bellevue. But we’ve discovered that they are legal in unincorporated regions, and everyone seems to set them off. Last year we anchored off Penrose Point Marine Park, in unincorporated Pierce County, and enjoyed great local displays and distant public ones such as Tacoma's.

At the head of the Hood Canal, in unincorporated Mason County, the “pre-displays” on the 3rd were so good that we stayed for the next night. And wow, were we impressed—this was easily the best private display we’ve seen. The head appears almost land-locked at night, and houses ring the shore. It seemed that everyone was setting off some fairly high-end fireworks—the effect was a near 360-degree constant display. We’ll definitely be back.  

We’ve anchored in the Hood Canal a number of times, but mainly nearer to the mouth and always before the Great Bend. We’d travelled to the head at speed once on a day trip in the previous boat a almost a decade ago, but had never anchored there. The head is a just a long way—about 90 miles from Seattle. You have to travel 30 miles north to Port Ludlow and then 60 miles south all the way to the head. At this point, less than two miles of land separates the head of the Hood Canal from the head of Case Inlet in the south Puget Sound, but Case Inlet is only about 55 miles by boat from Seattle.

Surprisingly, we’re finding our short-term cruising range has increased with the 52 rather than decreased, even though it runs a good 5 knots slower. The difference between 14 knots and 8 knots is really not that huge anyway, in terms of distance possible in a day. The big factor is that the 52 is so much more comfortable to run for longer periods of time that we travel farther, and still arrive more relaxed and refreshed than before. Reaching the head of the Hood Canal felt like an easy run.

The week before last, our home was up in the air next to Emerald Harbor Marine's shop at Canal Boatyard in Ballard. Although we're happy to be back at Bell Harbor, we had a good week. Living aboard in the yard was an adventure, and we enjoyed exploring Ballard and visiting its many pubs. We'd lived on the 4087 while it was in the yard last fall, but the 52 is so much nicer. Grey water tanks make a major difference--we can shower on the boat and live almost normally so long as we minimize the waste water.

The boatyard is on freshwater behind the Ballard Locks. Our initial plan was to go through on Sunday night in preparation for a haul-out on Monday. But we decided to go early and spend the weekend on Lake Washington instead. Because locking through is a bit of a hassle and a time-burner, we don't go through very often.

We arrived at the locks late Friday evening (trip route). Depending on traffic, boats are directed into the small lock (30 x 150 ft, 8.5 x 45.7 meter) or the large (80 x 825 ft, 24.4 x 251.5 meter). We were travelling against the flow--boaters who keep their vessels on freshwater pour out on Friday night and return on Sunday. On busy weekends, passing through can take a while. The large lock had a full load of boats exiting, so we went directly into the small locks. The small lock is easier to manage for two reasons. Unlike the large lock, the guide walls in the small lock float, so lines don't have to be tended as the water level changes. The other, more important reason, is that fewer boats can fit inside the small lock. With our 16' beam, rafting is less likely with the roughly 12' left beside us. In the large lock, boats of all sizes are rafted 4 and 5 deep. It can get pretty hairy in there as everyone tries to navigate the confined and sometimes turbulent waters.

We're often asked how the 52's deeper draft has impacted our cruising, and in particular whether we'd still enter the many shallow-entry anchorages we describe in Cruising the Secret Coast. The deeper draft would only preclude entry from perhaps a half-dozen of them, and some we weren't keen to re-enter even in the 4087. So far, however, water draft hasn't been much of a concern, it's the roughly 30' air draft we've had to pay more attention to. This definitely was the case entering Lake Washington. Seven bridges cross the route from saltwater to Lake Washington, and another two cross the lake itself. We could safely pass under all but one, but most were close enough to warrant a careful look.

The first bridge we passed under was the Salmon Bay Bridge, just before the locks, with a 41' clearance. After the locks is the Ballard Bridge (44' clearance), the Fremont Bridge (30'), the Aurora Bridge (135'), the Ship Canal Bridge (127'), the University Bridge (42') and the Montlake Bridge (46'). The the Aurora and Ship Canal Bridges are fixed, and the rest are drawbridges. Running across Lake Washington are the SR-520 Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, with a clearance of 45' at the west end and 75' at the east end; and the I-90 floating bridge, with a vertical clearance of 35' at the west end and 33' feet at the east end. The Waggoner Cruising Guide has an excellent map of the route with the bridge clearances clearly indicated.

Pictured below are the Salmon Bay Bridge on the left and the Fremont Bridge on the right. Depending on the water level, we might have just squeeked under the Fremont Bridge, but a sailboat was already waiting for it to open so we went through with them. One long and one short horn blast is the signal to open the bridge--the bridge tender responds in kind if the bridge can be opened, or with 5 short blasts if not. The large bridge visible beyond the Fremont Bridge is the fixed-span Aurora Bridge, the last bridge before entering Lake Union. When the bridge was opened in 1932, it completed the final link of U.S. Highway 99 between Canada and Mexico. The bridge was built to allow large ships to pass through, but not the commercial sailing ships of the previous era. A locally famous picture shows one of the last tall ships to exit Lake Union, the Monongahela, before the final span was put in place. The Aurora Bridge also is home to the Fremont Troll.

The Lake Washington Ship Canal connects the Ballard Locks with Lake Washington. The first leg, the Fremont Cut, runs from the locks to Lake Union. The Fremont Cut has a long tradition of maritime industry. Fisherman's Terminal there is home to most of Seattle's commercial fishing fleet, including boats from The Deadliest Catch. Foss Maritime's headquarters are nearby. Just beyond our eventual destination, Canal Boatyard, is Kvichak Marine Industries. Docked outside their facility were three beautiful pilot boats bound for The Netherlands. The capable-looking craft are powered by twin Cat C32 ACERT 12-cylinder 1,300 HP engines and have top speeds of 28.5 knots fully-loaded.

East of the Aurora Bridge, the Fremont Cut ends at Lake Union. The lake is wringed with parks, float homes, marinas and restaurants and has wonderful city views. (The picture at the top of this blog entry is looking south across Lake Union to downtown Seattle.) The lake also is home to Kenmore Air, with floatplane service throughout Washington State and southern B.C.

From Lake Union, we passed under Ship Canal Bridge and the University Bridge into Portage Bay. The final bridge on our route that day, the Montlake Bridge, spans Montlake Cut, the last leg of the Lake Washington Ship Canal. On the first Saturday in May, the waterways and streets surrounding the cut are packed with attendees and participants in Seattle Yacht Club's Opening Day Parade and the Windemere Cup rowing regatta. Regatta crews traditionally paint their team's names along the cut walls.

Spitfire kept a careful watch as we ran through the cut. We passed by, but not under, the SR-520 Evergreen Point floating bridge. The city of Bellevue is visible in the distance behind the bridge.

We anchored for the night in Cozy Cove near Kirkland, off the east shore of the lake. Multi-million dollar houses wring the shore there, but are far enough away that we still had plenty of privacy. On Hunts's Point to our east, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, singer Kenny G and cellular phone pioneer Craig McGraw own adjacent estates. The bottom left shot is the view looking north from our anchorage in the evening and the bottom right was taken late the next morning. Evenings typically are quiet on Lake Washington, but during the day boats of all sizes ply the waters. Water skiing and jet skis are popular.

Saturday was warm and sunny, ideal for a lake cruise. We'd not navigated from the fly bridge much yet, so this also was a good chance to test the equipment. Although the pilot house definitely has the best setup, we've setup the fly bridge to have much the same functionality available. In addition to basic controls and equipment, we have a Maretron DSM-250 display, and a Furuno MFD8 display that hooks into the NavNet 3D system and is a backup server for the Furuno BlackBox down below. Everything worked well, and we had a great time cruising up top.

We'd did a slow tour to the north end of the lake, then turned south and passed under the SR-520 bridge and along the east side of Mercer Island. The I-90 fixed bridge there, pictured above, has a 200' clearance. Coming back along the west side of Mercer Island, we considered anchoring in Andrew's Bay off the west shore, but it was literally packed with boats. We instead continued north and passed under east part of the floating portion of I-90 bridge, where the clearance is 33'. We anchored for the night off Luther Burbank Park at the northeast tip of Mercer Island. It felt a little exposed, but is the same as Andrews Bay with respect to the prevailing northerly winds, and we had it all to ourselves.

OOn Sunday, we passed under the west side of the SR-520 floating bridge, with 35' of clearance, and reversed our path back through the Lake Washington Ship Canal to the boatyard. Traffic through Montlake Cut was a lot heavier than when we'd come through on Friday night, but was typical for a sunny summer day.

Lynwood Center, tucked into the corner at the west end of Rich Passage, has become one of our close-to-home favorites. It's nearness to the ferry routes and other traffic in Rich Passage make it an unusual anchorage. When we first stopped there, we expected that ferry wakes in particular would toss the boat a fair bit, but the anchorage is surprisingly calm (we surmise through a combination of the ferries slowing to take the corner and their east-west wake cancelling out the north-south wake.)

Diving birds provide constant entertainment, and on clear days the anchorage has a great view to Mount Rainier, but we especially enjoy watching the traffic through Rich Passage. Most memorable was a navy submarine that passed through from Bremerton with an impressive escort of two Coast Guard cutters, three high-speed Coast Guard RIBs and two large Navy tugs.

Public shore access is close by at the Schel-chelb Estuary, owned by the Bainbridge Island Parks and Recreation District. You can land there and walk a short distance to Lynwood Center. We stopped once at the bright and airy Treehouse Café for an excellent thin-crust pizza with a microbrew on tap. Lynwood Center also has a small grocery store, a movie theatre and a couple of other restaurants. Returning, we discovered that the tide comes in a long way. James had to wade out in his jeans, in cold winter weather, to rescue our stranded dinghy.

Last weekend we anchored there in the new boat for the first time. We had expected the 52 to roll significantly more than the hard-chined 4087 when a wake did come through, but so far we've been pleasantly surprised.

Anchoring notes: Anchor in 3-4 fathoms in the bight along the north shore at the west end of Rich Passage. North and southeast wind protection is good, but southwest winds blowing across Port Orchard can force substantial waves into Rich Passage. The Schel-chelb Estuary (see http://www.ci.bainbridge-isl.wa.us/shoreline_access_guidebook.aspx) is at the north corner where the road passes over a culvert.

We spent the final two nights of our mid-March shakedown cruise in Hammersley Inlet. Shelton and the Oakland Bay Marina are at the elbow of Hammersley Inlet, where it bends into Oakland Bay. We've anchored in the area many nights, and spent hours exploring the area by dinghy and on foot. We enjoy the industry: the timber mill off Shelton, Taylor Shellfish Farms, and a complex gravel mine conveyer and barge-loading system that moves the barge back and forth rather than the conveyor. We even enjoy seeing the trucks full of logs pass on nearby State Route 3 on their way to the mill. And at night, the sky glows in the distance from the mill lights. There's also plenty of nature to enjoy, particularly at high tide when a dinghy can reach into deep into the drying heads.

We rarely see other boats at anchor in the area. A major reason is navigating Hammersley Inlet. The waterway looks difficult on Chart 18547 (and even harder on a smaller-scale chart), but is generally wide and reasonably deep. Only a few tight spots require careful course selection. The main navigation challenge is oncoming traffic, particularly tugboats with barges. In that case, the tugboat operator selects their course, and you take what is left. We didn't encounter any tug traffic this trip, and visibility was much better than on some of our previous visits, when the fog was so thick we could hardly see the shore on either side.

We travelled to Hammersley Inlet from Stretch Island Marine Park at the north end of Case Inlet  (route details). The most direct route there is through Pickering Passage along the west side of Harstene Island. Halfway along is the Harstene Island bridge, with a clearance of 31 feet at mean high water. The tide level was 13 feet and mean high water there is 24 feet. With our estimated air draft of 30 feet (we'd not yet measured it) there should be ten feet between the bridge and the top of our the stack. We approached slowly, judged we had sufficient room, then carefully worked our way through. We had plenty of room, although the clearance seemed more like five feet than ten.

Given the clearance appeared closer than documented, we wanted a way to precisely check the close ones. So we measured our air draft with a Fluke 411D laser distance meter and got 30.5' feet from the waterline to the top of the stack. We then measured the distance from a fixed point on the bow to the waterline and got 7.1'. That means we would need 23.4' (30.5'-7.1') above the bow in order to clear a bridge.

Now when we approached a bridge, we can put just poke the bow under, and measure the distance to the bridge with the laser meter. If we have at least 23.4 feet, then we can clear.

A major spring storm was forecast to hit the Puget Sound on Friday. A 972-mb low over southern Vancouver Island would generate storm-force winds along the  Washington state coast. A gale warning was in effect for the more-protected Puget Sound, and winds there were forecast to reach 30-40 knots, with wind waves of 5-7 feet. Perfect. We'd get a chance to test the new boat in rough waters.

The storm was at its worst when we left Bell Harbor Marina Friday afternoon. Winds at nearby West Point were southerly 37 knots, gusting to 41. The main fairway out of the Bell Harbor Marina runs alongside a sloping rock wall--the lower the tide, the smaller the fairway. We left on a zero-foot low tide, with the wall to port and a boat on the end of the dock to starboard. This gave us about 30 feet of usable fairway, or only about 8 feet on either side of our 16' beam. This sounds like plenty, but with a new boat and a strong wind, it actually was tighter than it sounds . The east-west channel from the marina into Elliott Bay also is narrow, and waves were breaking across the entrance. But we had no trouble navigating the fairway or exiting the marina. The boat felt solid and stable.

Outside, large waves swept across Elliott Bay and broke high up on the bow of the 650-foot freighter Westwood Columbia as it approached Seattle from the northwest.

Conditions were rough but tolerable. We ran at 8 knots about halfway across Elliott Bay, on a southwesterly course for Yukon Harbor. This put the waves pretty much on our nose. After burying the bow a few times, we pulled off some speed to reduce the motion. We ran most of the way without the stabilizers, to see how the boat felt, and found it pretty comfortable.

According to Cliff Mass' Storm Review, the maximum gusts at West Point reached 53 knots that afternoon. Conditions probably were in the top ten for worse that we've experienced on the previous boat. We normally would have been worn-out after arriving, but the 52 handled the conditions with ease. Everything stayed put and we arrived at Yukon Harbor fairly relaxed and comfortable. One thing we've done to prepare for rough water in both boats is to have a way to secure everything, inside and out. Even with no safety risk, having things moving is distracting and disconcerting. Offshore sailors reported that loose items shifting and falling reduces a crew’s confidence in their vessel’s safety. On the 52, we've installed D-rings in the cockpit and boat deck and use ratchet straps to secure everything on deck.

Yukon Harbor is another one of our unusual anchorages. The bay is exposed to the north, but has good holding and excellent southwest protection. We overnight there a lot, particularly in the winter when prevailing winds are from the south. Safely at anchor, we fired up the barbecue and had a relaxing steak dinner.

From Eagle Island, we made a short trip to another favorite anchorage at Nisqually Flats. The anchorage is a bit unusual, but we love the mountain views in both directions. Conditions generally are calm unless the winds pick up from the north, so even on overcast days, its a good anchorage. Mount Rainier wasn't quite as visible as at Eagle Island yesterday, although still was dramatic, but the Olympics were very clear. And we were happy to hear the piper as she walked along the shore.

We spent a couple of days at Nisqually, unpacking our endless pile of boxes and testing out the various systems. The warm weather continued, and the temperature was warm enough that we could have a morning coffee break outside on the boat deck.

The boat deck on the 52 is 2 feet longer than the 47, giving us plenty of space for a table. But that extended deck, plus a deeper swim platform, made launching the dinghy from stern a challenge. The capability to launch to all three locations--port starboard and stern--was important to us though. To accommodate a stern launch, we upgraded the davit from a Steelhead SM1500R with a 12' reach to a custom Steelhead ES1100 with a 16' reach, and moved the standpipe aft 1'3". This has worked out well--we can launch the dinghy single-handed to all three positions.

We also tested out deploying the flopper stopper, which was relatively straightforward. Conditions were so calm that we couldn't gauge how well it would work though. Since the stack on the 52 has been moved aft compared to the 47, we moved the whisker pole mount aft a similar amount, so that the topping lift would connect directly above the pole on the exhaust stack.

Friday afternoon we cruised south from Bell Harbor Marina for a week-long shakedown cruise in the South (Puget) Sound. We visit there frequently--it's easily accessible from Seattle and has excellent anchorages, many with views to Mount Rainier and the Olympic Mountains. Relatively few boaters visit however, compared to the cruising grounds to the north, such as the San Juan Islands.  We know many people who have cruised the Pacific Northwest for years, but have never visited the South Sound.

Definitions of the South Sound vary, but we never feel officially there until we've passed under the Tacoma Narrows Bridges.

The weather was clear and at 59°F, unseasonably warm for March in the Pacific Northwest, with great mountain views. Below are the snow-covered Olympic Mountains viewed over the Fox Island bridge.

That night we stopped at Eagle Island Marine State Park, a long-time favorite of ours.  Mount Rainer was out in fully glory, with a colorul sunrise the next morning.

While underway yesterday, we received an email from Paul & Linda Dugger, saying "What a beautiful craft. Your new boat is glistening in the morning sun." They had noticed Dirona at anchor and sent some pictures taken from the deck of their house on Anderson Island. What an amazing view they must have from their deck, and we sure appreciate them sending us the pictures.