South Puget Sound Trip

Today we begin a week long trip from Seattle headed into South Puget Sound. I’ve been planning for this trip for months, as it’s the longest I’ve taken in a long time, and the longest we’ve ever taken on Grace. The trip will have us visiting Tacoma, Oro Bay, Eagle Island, Olympia, Joemma Beach, and Hope Island, plus a bunch of other stops along the way.

There will be some great opportunities for posts along the way, as well as updates on some of the big projects that I have completed to help the trip be a success. We will be meeting Josh’s mom and dad on their sailboat Noel at our first stop in Tacoma, and spending a lot of late evenings playing cards – a much deserved vacation for all!

Our route for the next 7 days

Just for fun I tried to create a route for the next 7 days in Navionics on the iPad to see the overall trip length, fuel usage, and more. While not useful for navigation, it’s interesting to see the overall stats.

Part of my real planning exercise was to use Navionics for each leg of the journey, changing the speed and parameters around the boat, and recording that all in a spreadsheet. Grace can do 6 knots constantly (most of the time closer to 7 knots), but Noel’s top speed is about 5.5 knots. Having a way to tweak the numbers and routes and see where things could be optimized was very helpful.

Google Sheets spreadsheet of the journey plan

The last few weeks have been extremely busy for me – completing major and minor projects to make sure we were ready for a long trip. Some of those minor projects I hope to highlight here while on the trip.

One grocery cart…

Along with us on the trip is our friend Jake who has not done a ton of sailing, but is looking forward to learning a lot. Both he and Josh also have some crazy plans for crabbing and fishing that I have stayed out of, other than helping find a crab pot. We’ll see if they catch any huge salmon trolling behind us while underway.

Getting everything loaded out for the next 7 days is always a challenge, but I think we’ll be fine. We’re also going to Swantown Marina in Olympia for the middle of our trip, and should be able to re-provision if necessary.

While underway we’ll be trackable via our DeLorme InReach and on the usual AIS maps. Hope to see some of you on the water!