We started living aboard early this year at Bell Harbor Marina as an experiment. We hadn't planned to live on our current boat--our initial plan was that we'd eventually live aboard on the new boat. We'd been on the waiting list for Bell Harbor for ages, and weren't expecting a slip to come available for a few more years. But we popped to the top of the list as James was taking a job in downtown Seattle. The opportunity was too good, so we had to try it.  

We made one big trip from the house with the car stuffed with everything we could think we might need. And in four months, the only thing we ended up needing from the house were international adapters for a trip James made to China. We had previously spent most weekends on the boat, and had been about as close to live-aboards as you could get without actually living aboard. So the boat was reasonably well setup already, and about the only modification we made was to add a couple of towel racks in the aft stateroom.

After a couple of weeks, we were hooked. We loved the downtown lifestyle, and didn't miss the house at all. And we'd almost completely stopped driving our car. We'd been planning to buy bicycles when we got the new boat, but decided to get them right away that first week at Bell Harbor. We wanted something that would work well around town, but also that we could take on logging roads along the coast. We spent ages talking with Aaron at the excellent Velo Bike Shop in Seattle and left with two Giant FCR 2s. James rides his bike to work downtown and Jennifer rides & buses to Redmond. Parking downtown is expensive, so we kept our car at Elliott Bay Marina, and just biked over there when we needed it. (Bell Harbor doesn't have permanent moorage through the summer, so we kept our slip at Elliott Bay Marina and have to move around a bit over the summer months. That's a minor hassle compared to the reward of living downtown.)

Within two months, we had spent a day interviewing real estate agents to start the process of selling the house. We chose Mary Lee and Jeff Shaffer, who did an astounding job in preparing the house for sale, creating marketing material, selling the house, and managing the offer and closing process. We recommend them without reservation. They are real professionals who made the experience efficient, successful, quick, and easy, especially given the current weak housing economy. Our house went on the market on April 16th, we accepted an offer on May 21st and the sale closed on June 23rd. Amazing.

We sold most of our furniture not required for staging on craigslist prior to going to market, and the remainder after. And last week, we sold our car, also through craigslist. So now we're down to just the current boat and a 5'-by-5' storage room that is stuffed solid. When the new boat arrives, we'll empty out the storage room, sell the current boat, and be down to just the boat and our bicycles.

We often get asked, why do you boat or what do you do out there?  Our answers revolve around experiencing nature and exploring new areas. We enjoy talking about what we have found in our book, Cruising the Secret Coast, and in the blog we maintain.

Recently John Marshall, who owns Nordhavn 55 Serendipity, posted one of best answers we’ve seen to “why we cruise?”  With John’s permission, it follows.

The remarkable thing about cruising on a boat like this is that we can go to truly isolated places and enjoy nature in its rawest and most primal (and beautiful) form, and still have every comfort of home.

Sometimes when I step outside the warm, bright confines of the boat at night and stand out there just listening to the wild, with the boat completely silent, the contrast gives me goose bumps. Inside is 5-star elegance. Outside is wild, cold, primal, uncompromising wilderness. It's a very bizarre but wonderful kind of transition that occurs in seconds, allowing me as much of either as suits my mood at the moment.

I've turned off the TV after watching a movie with the HD plasma screen and sound system delivering a performance that's as good as any theater, and then stepped outside the boat to find myself standing in the absolutely silent wilderness, without another human being around for tens of miles. A largely untouched wildness of wolves and bears and nature at its finest.

The closest equivalent would be a cabin in the deep woods or high on a mountain side in a wild area. Except you can't build cabins in places like national parks or many other wilderness areas, and you can't push a button and move them to someplace else.

Anyway, it’s a mix of perceptions and images and sensations that carry me away every day we're out. I've journeyed many places in the world, lived in far-away lands for many years, traveled in RV's, backpacked through the Rockies, climbed many peaks in my younger years, and the closest analogy to this feeling is when I was an avid backpacker and could carry my "house on my back". A snug tent and warm sleeping bag.

Inside my tent, reading a book with a flashlight, I was largely protected from the elements that might be raging outside. Yet one step outside my tent, and the wilderness I had to walk through to get back to civilization was uncompromising. There was no 9-11 to call if I got in trouble.

This boat in Alaska or northern BC is kind of a 5-star equivalent of that. What is common to my backpacking, however, is that despite all the comforts and the gadgets, you can't let yourself forget that you are on a little boat in a big sea and a deep wilderness far from anyone who could help you, and that piece of chain that leads to the bottom is never completely secure.

That's where the comparison to a 5-star hotel or cabin in the woods breaks down. On a boat, we are always voyaging, even when we're anchored in a snug cove. We might turn off the DVD and shut down the cappuccino maker and go to the comfort of our warm bed, crawling under the down blankets, but toss in 40 knots of unexpected wind, fog and driving rain in the middle of the night, and combine that with a dragging anchor, and that DVD and the plasma TV and the surround sound are suddenly completely meaningless toys.

Now its engines and rudders and windlasses and working on deck in the violent conditions and you are suddenly a seaman fighting the cruel sea for your very survival, just as sailors have had to do for millennium.

You have awoken from being cradled in 21st century luxury to find yourself in the midst of an adventure, and only your own skills and those of your mate or crew will take you to safety.

I truly believe that its adventures and unexpected challenges like this that keep us alive and young at heart.

We’ve anchored overnight about a thousand times over the past decade. We love the privacy and independence of anchoring out, and enjoy the ever-changing view as the boat drifts around the anchor and the tide rises and falls. Key ingredients for a restful night are not worrying about our anchor dragging, or another boat swinging or dragging onto us. So we seek anchorages with good holding that are less-frequented. Typically, this means the anchorages are not mentioned in the cruising guides, so we have to discover them for ourselves.

We set the anchor aggressively—equivalent to a sustained 30-knot wind—and are pretty much willing to overnight anywhere if the anchor holds well and the water is reasonably calm. While we are prepared to move the boat should conditions deteriorate, this has happened surprisingly infrequently. Some of the anchorages we’ve tried would be popular, but are overshadowed by a more appealing stop nearby. Others are exposed to wind or swell and are acceptable only during certain conditions. And some are just plain unusual.

Although we do take a few longer trips each year, a large part of our time at anchor is spent a few miles from our slip in Seattle. While we do have favorite stops, we’re always on the lookout for new ones and have found a remarkable number of little-visited anchorages close to home. In Cruising the Secret Coast, we describe our anchoring techniques and less-known anchorages on British Columbia’s Inside Passage. In this series of blogs, we’ll share some of our discoveries closer to home, starting with Priest Point in the South Sound.

We initially anchored at Priest Point in Budd Inlet during what has become our annual Thanksgiving South Sound cruise. We wanted to visit Priest Point Park, where extensive mudflats make landing difficult in most tides. High daytime tides always seem to occur around Thanksgiving, and on that day’s 15-foot high tide we could easily reach the head of wooded Ellis Cove and land the dinghy to walk the well-maintained trails through old-growth forests.

While exposed to winds in Budd Inlet, Priest Point is a fine stop in settled weather, with nighttime views to the lights of Olympia. And it feels more private than the more popular Butler Cove nearby, where the marked channel increases traffic and crowds the anchorage against the houses ashore.

Anchoring notes: The anchorage is north of Priest Point, roughly opposite Butler Cove. Anchor in 2-3 fathoms north of the charged submerged dolphins on Chart 18456 or the 1:20,000 inset on Chart 18445.

The house and hull for new Dirona came out of the mold a few weeks back and have now been joined together. In the top left picture below, our three engines await installation. From right to left: main engine, John Deer 6068AFM75; wing engine, Lugger 40HP Lugger L844D; and generator, 12 kW Northern Lights.

The boat has a lot of height to gain—the flybridge, stack, and boat deck are still in the mold. The stack will be installed with a tabernacle hinge so that it can be lowered or removed completely, using a Travel Lift. We’re hoping to be able to reduce the air draft enough to clear the lowest fixed bridge along the Great Loop: the 19’1” AT&S Railroad Bridge on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

Eagle Island Marine State Park has long been one of our South Sound favorites. The park has everything we look for in a destination—solitude, wildlife, interesting dinghy territory, and dramatic views. The island—tucked between McNeil and Anderson islands in Balch Passage off the southeast tip of Key Peninsula—is accessible only by boat and is day-use ashore. Except for a handful of boats moored overnight, few people are about by dusk.

Evenings, however, are not always quiet. Seals frequent the area in large numbers, and snort, splash, and cavort well after sunset. During the day when the tide is low, they often congregate ashore to warm themselves in the sun.

Eagle Island itself is tiny, barely 300 yards long and 150 yards wide. The island practically doubles and halves in size on large exchanges as the wide sandy beach that surrounds it appears and disappears. The beach is ideal for lazy walking, and overgrown trails also cross the island. Along one trail is an old shelter, perhaps from some long past caretaker or squatter.

Nearby Anderson Island is easy to circumnavigate in a motorized dinghy. Or take a kayak along the west shore. Several lagoons are accessible at high tide in shallow-draft craft. The two lagoons directly southwest of Otso Pt. are Higgins Cove and Miller Cove. A collapsed 1940s-era boathouse is on the spit at secluded Higgins Cove, where on very high tides the waterway extends a fair distance inshore. Miller Cove is larger, with a house or two, and a narrow foot bridge that joins the island to the spit. Amsterdam Bay is interesting to tour by small craft, and might be deep enough for anchoring with care, but is heavily populated and not very private. The charted lagoon south of Treble Pt. is freshwater Carlson Bay, part of Andrew Anderson Marine Park (also known as Andy’s Marine Park.) The beautiful sand beach that borders the lagoon provides the only public saltwater shore access on the island.

Despite its other attractions, what first drew us to Eagle Island, and what brings us back, are its amazing mountain views. The west side faces the Olympic Mountains for fabulous sunsets, and Mt. Rainier dominates the skyline to the east. If we’re in luck, we’ll snag the single eastern buoy and have that side all to ourselves. Well, to ourselves and the seals.

Thanks to Elizabeth Galentine, author of Images of America Anderson Island (Arcadia Publishing, 2006), Sarah Garmire and Donna Golden for help with Anderson Island names and lore.

Our next boat came out of the mold a few weeks back at the South Coast Marine shipyard in Xiamen, China. The yard is efficient in moving the big molds and hulls around. The time between the first picture and the last in the first set below is less than an hour.

The interior has begun to take shape as bulkheads are installed. The bottom photos show the port-side fuel tank. The forward section of the fuel tank, with a gap below, is an extension that gives the Nordhavn 52 an extra 100 gallons per side over the 47.

Laredo Inlet extends deep into Princess Royal Island through two and three thousand-foot mountain ranges. The scenery, particularly on a clear day, is spectacular. After anchoring overnight in Weld Cove one summer, we cruised to the head the next morning to see what we could find. The morning started foggy, but lifted to a deep blue sky. The head was especially dramatic, with snow-dabbled mountains all around.

We wanted to anchor for breakfast at least, and perhaps a dinghy tour. But this was a typical inlet head, where the depths fell from 100 to 10 feet almost in a boat’s length. We eventually found temporary anchorage with reasonable holding. We couldn’t get very far up Buie Creek in the dinghy, but far enough to see a waterfall in the distance, so we landed to check it out. Princess Royal Island is famous for its bear population, particularly the rare white Kermode bear, and this felt like prime bear territory. While we would have loved to see a Kermode, we didn’t want to see one while walking ashore, so we put our bear avoidance techniques into full gear.

It turned out that there wasn’t just one waterfall—there were three. The one we could see from the boat was just the lower falls. As we neared, we could see another falls higher up behind, and a third one beside it. The higher two spilled perhaps 40 feet into a deep pool that emptied through the lower falls. What a find. While we never did see a bear while we were in Laredo Inlet, the falls almost made up for it.

Anchoring notes: We anchored northeast of Brew Island at 52°58.128’N/ 128°39.763’W in 100 feet, moderate holding.

The Pacific Northwest Trawler Fest will be held at Anacortes this year on May 7^th through 9^th. We’ll be presenting on Saturday the 9^th at 10:30am on Queen Charlotte Sound. This is our favorite cruising destination—if we could only visit one place year after year, this would be the place. The terrain is complex, the scenery is varied and impressive, and the anchorage choices are many. Most of the region is protected, with little signs of civilization, past or present. And the area is huge—600 square miles. This is 13 times the size of Broughton Archipelago Marine Park, and almost 20 times larger than Desolation Sound Marine Park. Even if every boater on the coast visited in one day, there’d still be plenty of empty anchorages.

One of the areas we’ll highlight is Kildidt Inlet. Kildidt Inlet runs northward from Kildidt Sound deep into Hunter Island. After about 3 miles, the inlet branches into two secluded lagoons connected by a narrow, islet-studded channel. The waterways are fun to explore, with good anchoring, but entry is blocked by the perilous Kildidt Narrows. A 12-knot tidal stream and several hazards require careful planning. An astonishing variety of colorful sea life grows among the reefs at the rapids. Visiting at low-water slack is like scuba diving, but without the tanks.