Coupeville With Friends
Updated: Mar 5, 2019
09/28/2018 🍒 Today we asked Jason and his family to go on a little day trip cruise with us. Jason has rebuilt an industrial sewing machine and has completed a few canvas projects for Cerise as he learns more about sewing. They turned out great and caught some Ranger Tug owners' attention and comments as well. Thank you Jason!
This trip was supposed to happen last Saturday, but the forecast last week was small craft advisories all over the area and 4 ft waves. Not a good forecast for a day trip with friends that is supposed to be fun. We made a good choice to postpone this a week. We will stay inside (east of) of Whidbey Island. The weather was forecast for 15-20 mph wind on the outside of Whidbey Island later in the day. So, again the San Juan’s were out for this trip. We will point the bow toward Coupeville, Washington today.
Coupeville is a cute little town on the south shore of Penn Cove on Whidbey Island. (https://townofcoupeville.org/town-in/ ). It is widely famous for their ice cream store as well as a waterfront street with shops. It is about 17nm from the slip, so it makes for an easy day trip.
Tracy and I spent the night before on the boat in the slip, so we could have everything ready before our guests got there at 9:30 on Saturday. Jason and his wife Lynn, one son (of 3), David, and, Hao Ren, their exchange student from China showed up and shortly after that we cast off and headed for that reality of boat ownership, the fuel dock. As luck would have it, there was strong Swinomish Channel current running north. This let me show off my boating skills of docking in a current. It only took two tries, one turn around and one long throw of a line to the fuel dock attendant to get the boat to the dock in front of the fuel pump. I’ll call that a win.
Pulling away form the dock was uneventful, and we headed toward the south end of the channel and toward Whidbey Island. The fuel dock attendant had warned us that there were a lot of commercial crab pots outside the channel headed south. He was correct. There were hundreds of them, in all colors of the rainbow. The first half of the trip was spent dodging crab pot buoys in a light chop. My GPS track resembled a snake.
Thankfully we missed them all and continued on our way. After we rounded Strawberry point and headed toward the west, the water turned flat and we enjoyed the rest of the cruise into Penn Cove laughing and talking.
Our guests have been to Coupeville many times, but this was their first time seeing it from the water. To take advantage of this event, I pulled the boat in front of the pier, and town front while everyone took pictures.
The dockhand at the Coupeville pier was a very nice young man. He helped us get tied up and took our $5 for 3-hour moorage fee. As the time went on, we saw him cleaning the dock of seagull…deposits… and generally doing anything that needed to be done.
Once settled, we had a nice lunch of Roast Beef or Turkey sandwiches, fruit, and chips and chatting. There was an abundance of talk about Ice Cream for desert.
We walked up the pier toward town and noticed a large number of seagulls on the roof of the pier. Coupeville has a great waterfront street with many shops and restaurants.
We walked around the nice shops and contributed to the local economy for about an hour or so. Yes, we did get ice cream. We ate it as we slowly walked out the pier, back to the boat and it was delicious, as always. Our dockhand reminded us that our 3 hours were up as were getting ready to leave. We pulled away and meandered our way out of Penn Cove and back to La Conner.
The water was still flat. There were still a lot of crab pots. There were not as many. My estimate is that about 40% of them had been pulled since we went by earlier.
The sound of the engine allowed the boys to get a nap on the way home. I guess these old folks wore them out.
We arrived back at our slip and put Cerise to bed after we thanked her for another great day on the waters of the Pacific Northwest.
More pictures from this trip