Well, a little more than 12 hours until we launch tomorrow morning. We spent the entire week tracking down the details that needed to be done before unplugging for almost 4 months. It was hectic, but we think we got enough done. At this point, anything that isn’t done won’t matter.
We spent one day this week with the folks from Easy Rider, the manufacturer of our kayaks. We bought our boats used, but it turns out that the owner of Easy Rider, Peter Kaupat, built the boats we are using for him and his wife to do a similar trip up the Inside Passage that they were never able to make. Peter took a personal interest in our trip, and was extremely generous. They went over the boats, repairing and replacing everything that was worn out (our boats are over 15 years old). And he spent a bunch of time going over the boats and equipment with us on the water. It was great. We had a bunch of fun sailing the empty boats around on Lake Washington in the sunshine. We don’t expect to sail a lot on our trip, but the boats sail very well both up and down wind, and what we learned will come in handy.
While staying in Seattle, my friend Mike and Katey’s brother Danny let us take over they places to store gear, sleep, eat, etc. I don’t know what we would have done without them. Because we moved out of our place at the same time we were leaving for this trip, we had lots of different piles of stuff to move, store, or ship, and not all of it ended up in the right place. We had to do a bunch of running around in Seattle, and we have needed pretty much every hour we had this week. It would have been difficult to get everything sorted and packed if we had been staying at a hotel or camping.
So now all we have to do is move the boats one more time to launch tomorrow morning. We were planning to launch at Golden Gardens Park, but there is a large sailing regatta going on this weekend out at Shilshole, so we decided to launch out of Edmonds. We’re looking forward to sitting in the boats with nothing to do but paddle!
Man! It must be so exciting, getting ready- you guys are going to have so much fun 🙂