Final night in Washington

We are parked at a gravel turnout on US-12, adjacent to the Tucannon River and at the junction of Tucannon Road (map), a dozen miles north of the small town of Dayton, Washington. The Snake River is another ten miles to the north, and is navigable through this section all the way to Lewiston, Idaho -- we hope to return someday in the boat.

While walking around the area, we saw a wild turkey hen and her dozen chicks, sauntering through the tall grass. There were plenty of other birds here, making this a great view spot for the cats. In fact, Angel managed to slip out while I was grilling our steak dinner and climb the 20' tall rock face next to the bus. Once up there, she tired of being "Cat of the Wild" and cried piteously to be rescued. So much for animal instincts. We never let the cats roam outside without close supervision, and it is always alarming when one of them escapes. We heard coyotes later in the evening, long after I climbed the hill and unceremoniously dragged Angel back into the bus.

Yesterday we left the Tri-Cities Elks shortly after I posted here, stopping at the Safeway in Kennewick to provision. I also walked over to the Chase bank to deposit the surprise check we received in the mail, and to the Goodwill store to drop off our old coffeemaker and a few other items. It was past three by the time we rolled back across the Columbia into Pasco.

Continuing east from there brought us across the Snake near Sacajawea State Park before turning off US-12 onto Washington 124, which cuts a few miles off the route, bypassing Walla Walla. After a few miles, 124 follows the Touchet River, crossing it in several places, whereas the more major US-12 follows the Walla Walla river, which the Touchet joins south of the small town of Touchet. While the railroad follows the Snake through this part of Washington, no auto road does, and we will not rejoin the snake until a dozen miles west of Clarkston, Washington, across the border from Lewiston, Idaho.

This is a beautiful and uncrowded part of the state, unseen even by most Washingtonians. The first hour east of the Tri-Cities is mostly flat and agricultural, giving way to rolling hills after 124 and 12 merge at Waitsburg. East of here the road will become twistier and hillier as we approach the western slope of the Idaho Rockies. Tonight we should be somewhere in Idaho.

Photo of the Touchet River by CorrieRosetti, used under a Creative Commons license.

Boats, boats, boats

I wrote here a couple of posts ago that I would try to share some of our boat search process on the blog. I'm guessing a lot of our readers are really in the RV community and won't care one whit, but I've received messages from a number of others that they may be following the same path some day, and would like to know more. Also, we get suggestions from time to time to consider some boat or other, many of which are really orthogonal to what we are looking for. Perhaps sharing a little more of our process will clarify things a bit.

Let me start by saying that I've always had the travel bug, and I had two great ambitions rattling around in the back of my head for "some day," presumably in retirement. One was to convert a tour bus and see the U.S. and perhaps beyond. And the other was to buy a sailboat and cruise the world. Even the most recent of our readers will know that I have more or less achieved the first ambition: in the eight years we have lived full-time aboard Odyssey, we've been to all of the lower 48 continental states, and six states in Mexico. We've racked up nearly 150,000 miles on the bus, and another 10,000 apiece on our motorcycles or scooters in that time.

For sure there are places we have not yet been and to which we would still like to go. Alaska, for example. And early on in our bus adventure I had harbored thoughts of going down the east coast of Mexico and perhaps into some of Central America. None of that is really "off the table," and in our "take life as it comes" philosophy, we might very well yet explore one or more places on our grand list while still in the bus and before we have a boat. In other words, we are not "done" by any means, and absent other forces at work we could easily continue the bus adventure another decade -- and we still will not have seen or done everything we'd like.


Old school GPS. You can't get to Alaska from here.

All of that said, we have, though, reached a point where we can honestly say to ourselves that we've had a good run at it, and we can be happy with what we've achieved without feeling the need to press on regardless, whether that's one more year or ten. And we are aware that boating is a much more physically demanding environment than RVing -- we want to turn our attention to the water now, while we are still young and fit enough to enjoy it to the fullest. In fact, we've been told on a number of occasions that we've done things out of sequence: the conventional progression for an adventurous couple, so we're told, is Sail Boat, Motor Boat, Motor Home, Nursing Home. We, apparently, put the Motor Home well out of sequence by starting with that first.


These people may also be too young for their bus.

As it turns out, we will also be skipping the Sail Boat portion of the program. As I said earlier, one of my ambitions had been to get a sailboat and cruise the world. That's because I started sailing long before I ever drove a motor boat, and also conventional wisdom has been that the only small recreational vessels which can cruise anywhere in the world operate by wind power.

Louise, by contrast, will not sail. I had more or less written off the possibility of cruising the world, until one eventful day at the Seattle boat show while finishing up construction on Odyssey. Rather than repeat that whole story here, I will refer you instead to the latter half of this post, wherein I described what brought us to the boat show and the epiphany that we had there.

You might discern from that post, six full years ago, that we still had much to learn about long distance power boats, and were even on the fence as to whether or not we wanted ocean-crossing capability. In the ensuing six years, we've done a great deal more research, to include taking in eight or so Trawler Fest shows, going on two separate week-long training cruises, reading hundreds of articles, books, and blogs, and generally immersing ourselves in "trawler" culture as much as possible. All of this culminated in our retaining a broker back in October to help us find a boat, an individual whom we had met at a number of shows and with whom we had a good rapport and friendship.

After going aboard hundreds of vessels (each Trawler Fest hosts anywhere from 50-100 boats), and reading voraciously for six years, we've managed to somewhat prioritize our wants and needs when it comes to the boat. The reality of boating is that every boat represents one or more compromises, and the point we have come to has more to do with knowing what compromises we are willing to make, rather than having a bullet-point list of must-haves and must-nots. And, of course, there is the small matter of budget -- the "ideal" boat does not exist, but you can get a lot closer to it with an infinite supply of cash, something we do not have.


His face is his fortune. Probably not enough to buy a boat.

That's a really long lead-up to where we are at today in the search process, and why we have mostly crossed quite a number of boats off the list, including most recently the Hatteras 58 LRC. Let me start off by saying we are looking for a "trawler," which pains me to say, because that word is poorly defined even in the industry, has been co-opted for marketing purposes by many boats that don't really belong in the class. It is even more confusing to our friends, family, and non-boating readers, for whom it likely conjures up images of shrimpers on the bayou, or worse, those crab boats on "The Deadliest Catch." Or possibly the Andrea Gail.


Frugal boaters agree that old tires make the best fenders.

In recreational boating, a trawler is generally a roomy power boat that moves at displacement speeds, with relatively small engines, relatively good fuel economy, and usually all the comforts of home. They are a marked contrast from, for example, speedboats, which plane over the water, and are usually distinguished from motor yachts which, while similarly outfitted in the living spaces, are also designed to plane over the water and have enormous engines to allow them to do so.


Hull shape is the key.

Since no one can really agree on the definition, there are now all manner of boats with semi-planing hulls and larger engines which are also marketed as trawlers, and there are likely boats that more closely align with the definition above which, for whatever reason, are marketed as something else. We're immune to marketing hype, however, and we are only looking at boats which move at hull speed, and prefer boats with engines to match that goal, and fuel tanks to provide great range.

Having settled that, next up on the list is size. There is a joke in the recreational boating community that if you have a "Whatchamacallit 50," then your boat is 60' long when bragging about it at the yacht club, and 40' long when paying the dock master for a slip. At some level, this joke is a fitting metaphor for the size we are looking for.

There is a mantra in the cruising community that one should buy the smallest possible boat that fits everything needed. There are good reasons for this: the smaller the boat, the more anchorages into which it will fit, the easier it is to handle in close quarters, and the less expensive it will be to dock (marinas usually charge by the foot of overall length for dockage), operate, and maintain.


Too big.

That said, there are downsides to smaller boats as well. For one thing, the longer the boat, the safer it will be in heavy seas, all else being equal. For another, there is the matter of hull speed: displacement boats are limited in speed by a formula related to waterline length. While counter-intuitive for many people, what this means is the longer the boat, the faster it goes. It is simple physics, and is immutable; the only way to make a boat go faster than hull speed is to make the bottom hydrodynamic, and push it so hard that the hull comes up out of the water and skips along on top -- planing.


Too small.

What this means for us is that we have decided our boat should be at least 40' at the waterline, which usually translates to 43'-47' overall. That's good for a top speed of close to nine knots, and should handle fairly rough seas reasonably well. And, until recently, we had also decided our boat should be at most 52' overall. That's to keep dockage costs down, reduce insurance premiums, make for fairly easy handling with just two of us aboard, and, not least of all, keep us from rattling around a ton of extra space that we don't really need.

Trawlers in this size range generally have two staterooms (bedrooms) and one or two heads (bathrooms). Below that and they start to get cramped, and above this length they often will have three or more staterooms and heads -- more spaces and equipment than we want to clean and maintain. For the last six months, we have therefore concentrated our search on trawlers from 43' to 52' overall.

As I have discussed here over the last few posts, we talked ourselves into a particular 60' boat in Washington, which is clearly well past our self-imposed limit. The boat had three staterooms and three heads, fully one more of each than we need, and that extra ten feet or so of boat to maneuver and pay for at the dock. But all boats are compromises, and this one seemed to meet every other criterion, in a way that no other boat we'd seen to date had. In the end, it fell through because of some technical issues with the boat that lurked beneath the surface. (As a side note, we'd still buy this boat if the seller would drop the price by the amount we'd need to spend at a boat yard fixing those issues.)

Having broken the magic 52' barrier with this boat, we decided to expand our search to include boats up to 60' in overall length. That's what led us, for instance, to look at the Hatteras 58 LRC last week. But, and this is a key concept, the size of a boat is not only measured by overall length, and, in fact, this number can be very deceiving.

The 60' boat we liked, a Dutch-built aluminum model, had a very low "house" (the part of the boat that is built above the main deck and protrudes above the hull). Wide walk-around decks, a very long foredeck, and generous afterdeck (the areas in front of and behind the house, between the house and the bow and stern of the boat) combined with the low house to make for a very sleek vessel with interior space, above deck, commensurate with many boats more in the 50' range. Even below decks, the space was constrained by a very fine and highly raked bow, and sleek sides.

In marked contrast, the Hatteras 58 was a much larger boat, even though it had two feet less overall length. The waterline length of the Hatteras was actually greater, and the boat was both wider and taller, both below decks as well as above. This boat, for example, had four staterooms and four heads, one more of each than the 60' boat. In short, it was really too much boat for us on almost all counts. To top it off, it was already at the top of our budget, leaving little for any changes, and lacked a bow thruster, an essential feature (for us) that we would have to add before we could even leave the dock.

Along with type and size, among our top search criteria is seaworthiness. We are not looking at any boats that can not handle "green water" across the deck -- meaning ocean waves breaking across the decks of the boat. This rules out boats with poorly sealed doors and windows, low freeboard (the distance from the waterline to the lowest opening through the hull), insufficient ballast (heavy material at the bottom of the hull to right the boat when it tries to roll over, like those old punching bags or Weebles toys), or attachments to the decks that can't handle rough weather.


Not a displacement-hull trawler. Also not very big waves. But plenty of testosterone.

While seaworthiness may seem like a no-brainer, there are plenty of so-called trawlers that are not meant to be taken to sea in heavy weather. Even many salt-water boats spend their whole lives in protected waters such as estuaries like San Francisco Bay, or the Intracoastal Waterways. Many of these boats are fine choices even for the Bahamas, just a day's passage from protected waters in Florida which can be made in favorable weather, but can not weather an open ocean crossing.

Whether or not we ever take our boat across the Atlantic, for example, to cruise the Mediterranean, or across the Pacific to Hawaii and the South Pacific, it is a sure bet that we'll at least be out in the ocean a fair bit. Even getting from San Francisco to LA requires a stint in open ocean, and we won't buy a boat that is not capable of making such a passage in relative safety.

From here, the list starts to get more fuzzy, and we enter the territory of compromises. Probably next on our wish list is range. Even the most seaworthy boat can't cross the Atlantic without a range of at least 2,000 nautical miles, so if we ended up with a boat with less range than that, we'd be limited to
"coastal cruising." Range is a function of the fuel mileage of the boat and size of the tankage, and the fuel mileage is somewhat controllable by speed. Most of the boats we are looking at would have to slow down to about six knots to make a crossing on the available tankage.

After range would come stabilization. Stabilization counteracts the tendency of the boat to roll from side to side, and is a matter of comfort and safety in heavy seas. Some hull shapes are inherently more stable than others, but many boats can benefit from the addition of a stabilization system. There are lots of ways to do it, including passive fins protruding from the hull known as "bilge keels," active fins which are electronically controlled by a gyroscope and are steered, much like airplane ailerons, to counteract the roll, towed "paravane" stabilizers suspended from poles on either side of the boat (and imparting more of a fishing-trawler appearance to it), massive gyroscopes, and anti-roll tanks full of liquid ballast, to name a few. Adding stabilizers to a boat that does not already have them can be an expensive proposition, so we are trying to look only at boats that have them, or have plenty of headroom in the price to add them.


Boat with paravane stabilizers out.

While it would seem at this point that next on the list should be lots of technical items like engine systems, generators, water makers, and the like, or maybe bridge electronics like radar sets and chart plotters (what a GPS navigation system is called on a boat), or even safety equipment like life rafts and radio beacons, I am not really concerned about those. The more we pay for the boat, the more of these things need to be good-to-go, but I am confident in our own abilities to update, upgrade, repair, or replace these kinds of things as needed to make the boat safe, comfortable, and efficient. Instead, our next category is accommodations.

At some level, this can really be moved to the top of the list, because, in reality, if the layout and accommodations don't feel right to us the moment we step aboard, we seldom get as far as looking at the engines, fuel tanks, stabilizers, and the like. We've stepped aboard more than one salty and seaworthy boat that could easily go around the world without even breathing hard, only to make an about-face after sitting down in the salon (living room) or stepping into the head.

Some of our non-negotiables here include a panoramic view from the main living area, which is where we would expect to spend most of our waking hours aboard. A master stateroom with at least a "queen" berth (bed), which I put in quotes because many berths are not rectangular and the mattress might only measure up to queen standards in a specific spot. A master head with enough counter space to put in and take out contact lenses, and a shower large enough to stand in and wash comfortably. Room somewhere for a washer and dryer. And a guest stateroom with comfortable berths for two adults.


You can really get the feel of a boat from a good model.

I have to confess that it is really this accommodation category that makes me appreciate Odyssey -- so many of the boats we have visited represent a step down in overall comfort and convenience from what we have today. And while I am willing to do (or invest in) some minor remodeling to make some of the spaces more closely align with our needs, we don't want to repeat the Odyssey experience, wherein we ended up gutting the bus and starting from scratch, a costly lesson.

So there you have it, a run-down of the top considerations for our boat search. To summarize, we are looking for a robust, open-ocean boat in the 43'-60' range that moves efficiently at hull speed, has 2,000-mile range, stabilizers, and a comfortable layout. Ideally we'd like walk-around side decks, a "fly bridge" (outside controls) in addition to the pilot house, draft less than 6', air draft (height with all masts lowered) less than 19', a double or queen berth in the guest stateroom, and good access for scuba diving. There must be a way to get the boat to port even if an engine fails, which can be a second engine or a "get-home" system such as hydraulic drive from the generator. We'd like to stick to two staterooms, but will settle for three if the price is right and all else meets our needs. The rest, as they say, is negotiable.

Finally, a number of people have written to express their concerns about the future of this blog. Rest assured that I will continue blogging even after we have moved to a boat. Most likely that will be right here at OurOdyssey.BlogSpot.com, because our life will still be an odyssey even if that is not the name of the boat. And the 1,700 or so posts already here thus far will remain as an archive of our time on the road. I hope you will continue to follow us, but we do understand that quite a few of our readers are here specifically for the RV or bus content. I am sure we will also pick up some new readers who are more interested in cruising than RVing.

All photos used under a Creative Commons license. To see title and creator, hover over or click on each picture.

Farewell, Tri-Cities

We are parked at the Tri-Cities Elks Lodge, in Kennewick, Washington (map). This is our "home" lodge, even though we've only been here twice. I checked in this morning at the office, and they were surprised to learn we were members, but grateful to be able to put a face with the name on the roster. This is likely our last visit to this lodge and the Tri-Cities area.

Yesterday, after a pleasant drive over the Snoqualmie pass, we continued south along the eastern bank of the Columbia, under the old Beverly Railroad Bridge of the Milwaukee Road, and into the community of Desert Aire, where we have property. We yanked our forlorn yet imposing over-sized mailbox off the shared pedestal, and tried to find anyone in either of the two real estate offices on site, to list our lot.

Not only was no one around, but our phone calls went unreturned as well, and so we continued here to Kennewick, stopping off at our mail receiving service, a UPS store, for the first time ever. We've already filed changes of address with most of our correspondents, so there was but a small handful of mail awaiting us.

Oddly, this was the quietest place we've stayed for weeks, even though we are in a fairly developed business and residential area. When I walked around the block last night, I discovered a real estate office just a half block away, and we walked over there this morning to get our property listed. If the folks up in Desert Aire ever call back, we'll have to tell them they missed the boat.

While driving around our "neighborhood" yesterday we noticed quite a few empty lots for sale. Since we bought in 2004, however, the development has "sold out," in the sense that the successors to the original 1969 developers finally sold off all the lots one way or another, back in 2006. Prices have been climbing ever since, and the least expensive lot we found on the listings was $25k. We thus listed ours just under $20k for a quick sale, at least as quick as anything happens in this area.

We also noted at least two lots with nothing but RVs on them, clearly occupied. This is in contravention of the law of the land, about which there had been a very big flap back when we were buying in. We got a steal on our lot, because that very year all the RVers were forced to vacate the development, thus dumping a huge number of under-developed lots on the market. Either the law has changed, or the finicky folks who filed the original complaints leading to the evictions have since left the area.

Now that our business here in the Tri-City area is concluded, we will head east out of town, bound for the Snake River route into Idaho. I suspect tonight will be our final night in Washington for the foreseeable future.

Eastward bound

We are at the Snoqualmie Casino near North Bend, Washington (map). We've stayed here before, and we remembered it as a pleasant and convenient stop. Since then, however, the regular menu in the "nice" restaurant has instituted stratospheric prices not commensurate, according to reviews, with the quality of the food. Fortunately, on Monday nights they serve only a tapas menu in the bar, along with happy hour wine pricing, and that made for an inexpensive and pleasant meal.

This morning Sure Marine called to tell me they found nothing wrong with my pump. Of course, now that we're on our way out of town, going back for it is prohibitive, so we're having them send it to South Dakota. I'm now very puzzled about what went wrong back when we replaced it; perhaps my feeble efforts to disassemble it actually tightened up the seals, or else maybe the power wiring was marginal. In any case, it would appear I bought a very expensive replacement pump back then needlessly. At least we'll have a good working spare now, and we can probably port it over to the boat when we move, as we will want to have a similar hydronic system aboard.

I also received this morning an email from a friend urging us to reconsider the Hatteras 58 LRC. It occurs to me that we have not really shared much of our decision tree for the boat here on the blog, and I probably need to write up a post describing what we are looking for and how we have come to this point in the process. That's probably a fair bit of time to compose, and we need to be getting on the road shortly, so it will have to wait for another time. Suffice it to say that there is a method to our madness, even though I think we might be driving our broker to drink.

In a few minutes we will head over the Snoqualmie pass and into eastern Washington, also known as "the dry side." We'll make a stop at our current legal residence of Desert Aire, probably for the last time, and get our property there listed for sale, before continuing on to the Tri Cities to pick up the last of our mail from our old mail forwarding service.

Wrapping up in the Pacific Northwest

We are once again parked in our "usual spot" at Infinity Coach, in Sumner, Washington (map). We arrived back here mid-day on Thursday, after I spent the morning with Patrick in Kirkland looking at the small air leak in our Yachtub. We just couldn't get it dry enough to repair it but we devised a plan for whenever we get someplace less humid for a few days.

Friday morning we got the freshly reupholstered love seat back into position; it looks nice, and, as a bonus, we had them re-shape the foam on the left side of the backrest so that it no longer conflicts with the window blind there. We also got the brush guard re-installed; it looks even more butch with the Line-X coating. We did have to coax it into position, sanding the bedliner material around the mounts a bit as it was much thicker than the original powder coat.



With these last two items taken care of, all that remains to get Odyssey into Bristol condition for sale is some light touch-up to the woodwork, which I will try to do myself once we get to South Dakota and take care of business there. As of the end of the day Friday, we had otherwise finished our to-do list with Infinity and were ready to head out.

One of the reasons we came all the way back here, though, for what amounted to some minor work and to pick up the aforementioned two items, was to see our good friends and Infinity proprietors Bob and Shirley, who were still en route back from their annual sojourn to Mexico when we left here for Trawler Fest. We had dinner with them Friday evening and enjoyed catching up on each others' travels.

That meant we were here for the start of Memorial Day weekend, and as anyone who travels by RV will know, you don't want to be on the road this weekend without reservations for a place to stay. So we opted to just spend the weekend right here. That gave us a chance to relax a bit after a relatively full week, and also get a few errands done.

After our let-down last week with the boat we really liked, I had gone back to the drawing board, expanding our search to encompass some larger boats than we had previously considered. That was how we ended up looking at one more boat last week while we had the rental car, for example. On Friday I came across a private listing for a Hatteras 58 LRC in Seattle, just a few blocks from the boat on which we rode down from Anacortes. Reasoning that since we very nearly bought a 60, we could certainly look at a 58, we contacted the seller about having a look.

He had plans to be gone for the weekend but allowed that his son, attending law school in the city, would be aboard for the weekend and would be happy to show us the boat. So Saturday morning Bob and Shirley lent us a car and we drove up to have a look. For a 37-year-old boat, she was in great condition and immaculately kept. We found only a few technical issues on the whole boat. But it was not for us.

Even though the boat we nearly bought was two feet longer overall, this boat was actually much larger in volume, and it felt huge. While we had already settled on the possibility of three staterooms, one of which would be mostly an office/workshop, this boat had three staterooms plus an additional berth in a passageway, and four heads. While the fourth head was a day head on the main deck, a nice feature, we were a bit overwhelmed by it all. I will say, though, that the extra space in the engine room was quite nice.

In any event, we've concluded that this model is off the list. Likewise, I suspect, will most 58'-60' boats. The 60 footer that we liked so much was really an outlier -- low slung, with a small house relative to the deck, and a sharp rake to the bow making the water line length lower than many boats with less overall length.

Now that we have refocused the search, I have a list of another dozen boats we'd like to see around the country. Three or four of them are in the Midwest, and the remainder are on the east coast, so I have come up with a roughly 3,000-mile route that will take us past most of them after we leave South Dakota. That will take us a while, and the list will no doubt change in that time as some boats are sold and others come on the market. But we have the makings of a strategy, and we are feeling the need to get started.

In a few minutes we will load the scooters back up and pull around to the dump. Our route today should take us counter to most of the returning holiday traffic, but nevertheless we have set our sights only on the Snoqualmie Casino just 40 miles from here. It will get us out of the shop parking lot so we are not in the way of their operations in the morning, yet still let us save the sometimes-challenging Snoqualmie Pass for tomorrow, when the holiday will be over.

Boatless in Seattle

We are parked on the street in Kirkland, Washington, at our usual spot across the street from where the transit buses lay over. We have friends here in town, and we will meet them for dinner a short walk from here this evening. Louise's cousins drove down from Woodinville earlier today and we had a nice lunch with them.

This is the first breather I've had since my last post here, and I have a lot of catching up to do. It has been a whirlwind ride, and something of an emotional roller coaster as well, which I will describe shortly. Suffice it to say, we have not bought a boat, although we came very close.

There were two boats on our "must see" list at the show, a DeFever 46 and a Krogen 48. The DeFever was well out of our price range, but we wanted to see if we could make the boat work for us, as they come available from time to time and one within our budget coming along some day is not out of the question. The Krogen was also out of our range, but the selling broker had hinted that it might close inside our budget, so we went through it quite carefully.

We liked the DeFever, but not well enough to hold out long-term for one to come along. The Krogen had too many issues that needed attention for the price we'd have to pay. The boat that ultimately ended up being the front-runner for us in the show was actually the one we took the ride on that first day. She's a Dutch-built aluminum passagemaker in apparently excellent condition, with all the features and amenities we would want in any boat, and then some. We had looked at this same boat two years ago, but the asking price was well out of our range and we did not give it much thought. Since then, however, it has come down to within striking distance, and we thought we might be able to negotiate a price we could live with.

Since the boat was at the show and our very own broker was listing it, we were able to spend a great deal of time aboard and get many questions answered by the current owner. The boat is 60' long, a good ten feet longer than our comfort zone, and with three staterooms seemed enormous to us. But the longer we looked, the more appealing it became, and we worked past our discomfort with the length and size. The only other issue with it, as far as we could tell, and what probably kept her from selling for the past two years, was that she had two spiral staircases that were so steep as to hardly even count as ship's ladders. We are young and limber, as trawler buyers go, so we were willing to look past that.

By the end of the show we were pretty convinced we would make an offer on the boat, and our broker Curtis arranged with the owner to let us ride with the hired captain as he brought the boat back to Lake Union from the show in Anacortes on Sunday, a cruise of some seven hours. This would give us a feel for how she handled, and how she looked, felt, sounded, and smelled under way. It also gave us a chance to have the captain answer some questions the owner could not, and look around the boat without the worry of being in the way of other show attendees or potential buyers.

Since our plan had been to check out Sunday morning and get rolling out of Anacortes, this meant we had to scramble around and make alternate arrangements. We stopped by the harbormaster's office and paid for another night in the RV parking area, and I booked a rental car at SeaTac to get us back to Anacortes from the lake. Curtis would give us a ride to the airport after we arrived.

By the time we tied up at the dock, we had decided to make an offer. We spent a half hour or so sitting on the boat with Curtis and Gill after the captain left and discussed the details, but we had one more step to take. Long-time readers may recall seeing me refer to marine consultant and Passagemaker Magazine technical editor Steve D'Antonio from time to time here in the blog. Steve was, as always, at the show, and we attended his most excellent technical seminar on Thursday, as well as his always popular engine room tour and lecture on Saturday. Seizing the opportunity wherein Steve, we, and the boat were all in the same place together, I asked him if he would have time to conduct an inspection of the boat before we moved forward.

Steve agreed to do this on Monday in the slip at Lake Union, and the owner agreed to the inspection as well. So after returning to Anacortes in the rental car Sunday night, we got Odyssey ready for an early departure Monday morning. There was no way we were getting the bus to Lake Union, so I followed Louise in the rental car Monday to the Tulalip Casino (map), a familiar stop for us, and got squared away in one of the courtesy RV spaces before heading the rest of the way to the lake in the rental car.

Steve spent the whole day with us aboard the boat. After a brief lesson on the metallurgy of aluminum boats and the special problems that presents, we started out in the forward end, working our way aft and opening every bilge hatch we could find. By the third hatch or so, my heart had sunk, and by the time we stopped for lunch at about the midships bulkhead, I knew there was no way we were going to end up with the boat.

Nevertheless, as we had paid for more or less the full day as a "light inspection" (Steve's full inspection, typically conducted after an offer has been made and the boat is under contract, is much more extensive and involves tools, coveralls, and more than one day), and one never knows how low a seller might go, we spent the afternoon finishing the job. The owner showed up at one point while we were removing an access cover on the hydraulically operated swim platform, and was able to answer a couple of questions.

The terms of a nondisclosure agreement we signed to have Steve conduct his inspection prohibit me from sharing the full details here on the blog. Neither do we want to have any legal conflict with the seller. But let it suffice to say that changes made to the boat on the part of one or more previous owners (not the current one) essentially compromised the inherent seaworthiness the boat had when it left the builder's yard in Schiedam, Holland some 28 years ago (yes, the boat is one year older than Odyssey). Several problems, while serious, were of the sort that a few hundred dollars in proper marine-grade materials and a lot of sweat equity on our part could have resolved. But at least two major issues would require the services of a well-equipped and capable boat yard, at costs running into the tens of thousands.

At the end of the day Sunday, we were ready to offer a firm 90% of the seller's recently-lowered asking price, an offer which we think had a good chance of being accepted. By the end of the day Monday, the most we could pay was considerably less than that, in order to have the critical yard work done and still be within budget. We passed this along to the broker, but we can't imagine the seller accepting such an offer unless the boat sits unsold for at least another six months.

Given that we had to talk ourselves into the boat in the first place, and having so thoroughly embraced it in the process, it was a huge letdown to come to this position. I was so exhausted Monday night I collapsed in the bed by 10pm. That might have been from poking around in the bilges, but more likely it was from the roller coaster of emotions.

When Tuesday morning rolled around, I could finally start thinking about how we were going to get the rental car back to SeaTac. Our cut-rate car (it was just $16 a day) could only be returned to the airport, and we had booked just two days, so it was due back by 4:45. There is a shuttle from the airport to the Tulalip Casino, but it's $24 apiece one way, making returning our $32 car a $48 proposition.

We decided instead to come straight here, even though I had told the casino security that we'd be there three nights (they allow up to seven). We knew from past experience that we could get here on a single bus from downtown, whereas getting to the casino is a three-bus affair, in what was likely to be pouring rain -- this is, after all, Seattle.

As long as we had the rental car for the whole day, I dropped off a pump at Sure Marine that needed to be looked at, and we drove back to Elliott Bay Marina to look at one more boat that I turned up on Yachtworld after concluding we would not close a deal. We made it back to the airport in plenty of time after one final stop to gas up the car. Somewhere in the process, we ended up going over a toll bridge with no tolltakers, so the rental agency will get a bill for the toll in the mail. We wonder what they will charge us for the $3.75 toll once they get it.

At the airport we were able to hop on the most excellent Link light rail system, which for $2.75 apiece got us to downtown Seattle. We had a nice dinner there at the Columbia Tower Club, high above the city, before hopping on the #255 bus, which stops just a couple blocks from here. A long day, but we got the car returned for just $10, had dinner in the process, and ended up here where we needed to be for a visit anyway.

That last boat, by the way, was a non-starter, so we are back where we started more or less before the show, although wiser and further along the search curve. We always learn something new at these shows, have a great time socializing, enjoy going on a variety of boats, and now for the second time at Anacortes, got some sea time in as well. Steve's light inspection, while an expensive foray on a boat we're probably not going to buy, was worth every penny and the most educational thing we did while here.

Tomorrow morning we will head back to Sumner to collect our missing loveseat and brush guard, and perhaps take care of one or two more items before heading east. We need to start heading towards the Tri-Cities to sell our property in Desert Aire, and then on to South Dakota to finish transferring our domicile there. All things which need to happen before we buy a boat, anyway, and we would have been under the gun to get it done pronto if we had, indeed, made an offer on a boat this week.

Boat Haven

We are in the RV parking area of the Cap Sante Boat Haven at the Port of Anacortes (map), in Anacortes, Washington. I described this location when we stayed here two years ago, so I won't repeat it all, except to say that this time they are charging us the full $18 nightly rate and would not give us a Trawler Fest discount despite my pleadings. That's a lot of money for what amounts to a parking space, with no hookups, but it's extremely convenient, and I have to keep it in perspective by remembering we paid $50 per night for the same privilege at the Bahia Mar resort in Fort Lauderdale.

We also got a smoking deal on the show itself, since the coupon code I used when I bought the tickets (from an email for a two-day sale a couple weeks before the show) discounted our entire package by 50%, even though I think it was only supposed to discount the seminars by that much and not the meals. A glitch in their e-commerce system, no doubt, and I did offer to pay the other half of our meal package once we arrived, but they told us not to worry about it.

Between Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, Infinity coach wrapped up the last of the projects on our "critical" list, as we did not want to be committed to returning there after the show. That being said, both the penthouse love seat and the brush guard were still out at their respective refinishers when we pulled out mid-day Tuesday, so if we do not return to Sumner we will need to figure out how to get those items back.

After getting settled in here at the marina Tuesday afternoon, we met up with our friends Curtis, Gill, Chris, and Alyse and wandered over to dinner at a nearby Japanese/Korean place, after a beer with the Passagemaker Magazine event team. After six years of attending about two Trawler Fest shows per year, we are well known to the staff and they often treat us as part of the family; when we finally get a boat and can no longer make so many shows, we are going to miss them.

Our broker Curtis actually has a boat in the show, and it happens to be one in which we are interested, so Wednesday morning we went to the docks at 8am to ride along as he moved it from one of the transient slips on the outskirts of the marina to its assigned birth at the show docks. Curtis has a 3,000-ton masters license, and moving this 100-ton yacht a few hundred feet around a marina is a slam-dunk for him, but it is an older boat which turned out to have a glitch in the controls, and before we even got out of the slip the starboard throttle went out completely.

No big deal, really, but the stern was rapidly swinging toward the 62' Nordhavn in the next slip, and with no finger pier between us, all hands ended up scrambling around the side deck to fend off while Curtis fiddled around in the engine room getting the throttle unstuck. We learned the value of a full walk-around deck during this episode, and after a few phone calls to the owner and his usual hired captain the throttle glitch was ironed out and we backed out into the fairway without further drama.

After getting secured alongside at the proper pier, we all piled into the car and drove across the island to look at yet another boat, and then returned to Cap Sante to look at our final brokerage boat, at a nearby dock but not actually part of the Trawler Fest show. Of the two remaining boats on our PNW list, one is actually right down the street on the hard at one of the yards here, but the owner refuses to let us look at it on the hard (leading us to wonder what he is hiding), and the other is a long way away and at the very bottom of our wish list anyway, so we've dropped it.

There are two or three other boats in the show which interest us, and we will have a closer look at them today. I previewed them yesterday, but I did so alone because Louise was out of commission. That's because she took a header in the middle of the night, bruising her knee and conking her neck on our beefy handrail, which likely kept her from heading right down the stairs. She'll be fine, but she was mighty sore yesterday, and still sore today.

Even so, we are having a great time here at the show, reconnecting with old friends and enjoying the evening festivities in addition to the educational programs. There are 74 boats in the show, so plenty to look at as we stroll the docks, and, as always, we are learning a great deal. Tonight we have a "speakeasy" themed cocktail party and dinner, and I've got myself a zoot suit and fedora to go along with Louise's 30's-era outfit -- perhaps we'll get a photo before the night's out.

Empire built

We are back home, currently still parked at Infinity Coach, after our whirlwind trip to New York. We were so busy while we were there that I never got a chance to blog, although I managed to tweet exactly once, from our layover in Chicago on our way home. We've also been going full-tilt since we returned Thursday, and this morning it was blissful to sleep in. Now that I am caught up, I finally have the time for a post.

We had a great trip. Sound Transit got us to the airport in plenty of time for a late lunch before boarding our flight. My handheld amateur radio earned me extra scrutiny at the TSA, but all made it through eventually, including both the radio and my cheap corkscrew that I keep for just such occasions. We had a celebratory beer at lunch in honor of our ninth anniversary, and in anticipation of no further imbibing to be done once we boarded. My usual seat-booking trick netted us an empty seat between us, making the five-hour flight a tad more tolerable, and we arrived on time into Newark and were in quarters at the Hampton Inn there by midnight.

I have gobs of Hilton points, even though I haven't paid for a room there in over a decade, because two out of my three credit cards rack them up. A "free" room in Newark was available at Hampton, Hilton, and Doubletree, but Hampton includes breakfast and WiFi. We dragged our sorry behinds out of bed just in time to catch the last of the hot breakfast, and shortly afterwards my folks arrived from mid-state to pick us up. We had a nice drive north, and four hours in the car together to catch up since our last visit, during the Hurricane Irene NJ relief operation for the Red Cross.

After getting settled in at the hotel in Queensbury, where we met up with my aunt and uncle, we all headed over to a nice restaurant in downtown Glens Falls to meet up with my cousin, his wife, and their son, whose First Communion we were here to celebrate. The cover story was a pre-communion family dinner, but in actuality it was a surprise 80th-birthday party for my mother, whose actual birthday was just a few days away. She really was surprised, too, and one of our clandestine roles had been to ensure they picked us up in Newark in plenty of time to make dinner.

Our "nephew" (really first cousin once removed) had his First Communion at mass Sunday morning, along with four other First Communicants. It was a nice service, followed by brunch at a nearby restaurant with family and friends from both sides. It is a rite of passage for young Catholics, and I passed on to him the talismans that I myself received on the same occasion over four decades ago. A steak dinner at their house rounded out the day.

We had a great visit and enjoyed catching up with my family over the course of the weekend. Monday morning my aunt, uncle, and folks left for points south, and my cousins later dropped us off at the train station in Albany in enough time for all of us to have one final dinner at Rudy's, just across the tracks, which we can highly recommend.

Most of the trip from Albany to Chicago is overnight, but we did enjoy a bit of scenery at both ends. After checking in at the Metropolitan Lounge at Union Station, where we were able to securely store our bags, we had plenty of time to walk over to the Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower) for lunch. We have an affiliate club there on the 67th floor, with stunning views in all directions. We reminisced briefly about our dinner there, just about a month before we started blogging our odyssey here -- we actually drove Odyssey into The Loop and parked on the street overnight right outside the Sears Tower, possible only because we were there on the weekend.

Union Station in Chicago is a bit of history in itself, and Amtrak's first-class Metropolitan Lounge makes waiting there between trains pleasant. In addition to the baggage check, the lounge provides free WiFi, soft drinks, coffee, and muffins, as well as early access to the boarding platform ahead of coach class. As we passed the coach-class platform entrance, we noted for the first time a phalanx of TSA employees and scanners, and it appeared that the coach passengers were being inspected before boarding. Apparently, terrorists do not travel by first class sleeper accommodations, which would lend new meaning to the term "sleeper cell."

The Empire Builder between Chicago and Seattle is the real reason we wanted to return by train, one of the few great US train trips which we had never done. We were not disappointed; despite bringing three magazines and my laptop, we never stopped looking out the windows during the daylight hours, and our attendant put the beds down shortly after we returned from the dining car each night. We traveled a portion of this route in Odyssey two years ago (waving to the passing Empire Builder in several spots), and we enjoyed seeing some of the same landmarks from a different perspective.

We noted several places we had stopped overnight as we passed through small towns and station stops. As we passed through Glacier National Park, and later the Cascade Range, I was actually able to stare at all the passing scenery, something I generally can not do as I am focused on the road when we are driving. The meals in the dining car were acceptable if not gourmet fare, and we met several interesting folks at meal times. In all, a very worthwhile excursion.

The King Street station in Seattle is partly under construction, and we had a bit of a challenge finding our way to the bus stop for the ride to Sumner. There is actually a train that would bring us here, but it only runs southbound in the late afternoon, and we were in Seattle by 10am. We will, instead, take that train north back into Seattle Monday morning to meet up with our broker to view some boats; he arrives in town Sunday evening.

When we left Infinity last Friday, I left them with a to-do list that would have kept them busy the whole time we were gone, and then some. However their backlog of other work plus the loss of an employee in the interim meant they did not even get started until the afternoon we returned. You may recall that I had removed the toilet just before we left, in order to facilitate repairing the floor in the bathroom, and, not wanting to do that nasty job twice, we lit a fire under them to expedite the floor project that same afternoon.

Louise ran off to the flooring store to pick up some new vinyl; a 3'-wide strip of roll goods cost us all of $20. Meanwhile, the rotted subfloor was removed, a consequence of the same window leak, now repaired, that cost us the replacement of half the wall in that same room back in Las Vegas. Without hookups and easy access to a clean restroom there, we did not want to remove the toilet at that shop, thus could not replace the floor at the same time as the wall.

Infinity had new subflooring in and some leveling compound applied in just enough time to be able to glue down the new flooring at the very end of the shift. Louise and I were able to wrestle the toilet back into place and I had it all reconnected in enough time to avoid any clandestine excursions to the nearby bushes after hours. And after five full days of eating out two or three meals per day, we had a light snack for dinner before crashing completely.

Yesterday was another full day at the shop, starting with pulling into the lube bay at 8:30 for a lube, oil, and filter change. Disappointingly, while the bus was up on the lifts we discovered that oil is leaking from the air dryer, confirming my suspicions. The dryer itself has no oil supply, so this can only mean that oil is leaking at the air compressor. We've never had this problem before, yet as a precaution we replaced the compressor with a remanufactured unit when we had the engine out, at Choo-Choo Garage back in July. I have to guess now that the replacement unit has a problem; too bad, because getting it out now that the engine is in the bus is a major project.

The rest of the day was taken up by finishing up the work in the bathroom, to include caulking the new floor and replacing the trim, and recaulking the shower, as well as replacing the upper front windshield trim that had been damaged by the leaks there, repaired last month in Alameda. We also pulled off the butch 'roo bars on the front of the coach, now chipped and rusted where the powder coat has been damaged by eight years of road wear, and sent it off to be media-blasted and re-coated with more durable bed-liner material. Unfortunately, the employee who left the shop was the woodworking specialist, so the various cabinetry touch-ups we had requested are probably not in the cards.

You may detect a theme in all this, which is that we are now dealing with mostly cosmetic issues. For example, we are finally sending the cat-damaged love seat out for re-upholstery here, in addition to all the other work. We are working on getting Odyssey listed for sale, in anticipation of a move onto a boat, and these sorts of cosmetic problems can be show-stoppers when trying to close a deal. Long-time readers know that, when it comes to the seldom-seen underlying systems, we've always been on top of maintenance and repairs, whereas cosmetic-only issues have been a lower priority for us. Not so with many sellers, likely because surface appearance is so visceral with most buyers.

Tomorrow's project for us is to empty the area under the loveseat and get it unbolted so the upholsterer can take it Monday morning, and get the rest of the coach ready for a day of work in our absence. We need to get on the last Sounder at 8:15am, before the shop opens, to meet our broker in Seattle Monday morning, and we'll be back long after the shop closes. On their slate for Monday is to adjust both awnings, pull out the loveseat, and try to get Truck-Lite and their retailer to honor the warranty on our expensive LED taillights, which are still legal but look unappealing due to a handful of LEDs out on each one.

We need to be in Anacortes by Tuesday evening to look at some more boats and be in place for Trawler Fest, so we will try to wrap everything up here by mid-day Tuesday. With any luck, enough of the list will be ticked off by then that we will not have to swing back here after the show, but we are leaving that possibility open if need be.

Odyssey in good hands

We are at Infinity Coach in Sumner, Washington (map). As I have written here before, this is always a sort of homecoming for us, and it was good to catch up with the gang when we arrived yesterday. We have a secure spot with 30amps of power, and today I spent an hour or so going over the project list.

One of the principal projects on the list is to touch up the cabinetry finish, shop-worn over nearly eight years of full time living aboard. So it is good that we will be away for a few days, as the spray finish really should not be inhaled, and we don't want pet fur to get on the cabinets while they are drying. The cats will be in Puyallup at the PetsHotel there. They're already nervous, having watched us packing earlier today.

Louise will borrow the shop truck to take them over in the morning, while I busy myself removing the toilet. It needs to come out to effect repairs on the bathroom floor as well as replace the vinyl flooring in there. Since half the closet needs to be emptied to disconnect it, it makes more sense for us to do it rather than leave it to the crew while we are gone.

We'll get a lift over to the Sumner transit station around noon, and two buses will get us to the airport in time for our flight. We plan to celebrate our anniversary with a glass of cheap wine at 30,000', followed by a late-night arrival into Newark. We booked an airport hotel for the night, and my folks will come by in the morning and pick us up on their way to upstate New York. I suspect my next post here will be from the hotel in Queensbury.

Window dressing

We are at Peninsula Glass in Vancouver, Washington (map). We've been here several times before, and the company principals cringed when we pulled up. As I am typing, George-the-service-guy is working on the lone remaining leak aboard Odyssey, a small drip in the middle track of one of the windows that this company made for us.

Our friends in Portland turned out to be unavailable last night, so after a brief stop in that city to take on 200 gallons of fuel at a relatively low $4.09 per gallon, we proceeded across the Columbia to Washington. We arrived here at 3:30, just a half hour before closing time. That was too late to start the repairs, but at least they were able to take a look at it, and schedule us for first thing this morning.

I suspect they will be done in no more than an hour or so, and we will be back on the road. It's just about a three hour drive from here to our final destination, Infinity Coach in Sumner. We should arrive there before closing time today, to get settled in and chat about the plan of attack on our project list there. Tomorrow we have set aside for helping them get those projects started so that they can proceed without us while we are in New York.

Malldocking

We are in the parking lot of the Valley River Center mall, in Eugene, Oregon (map). We've stayed here before, and it is a wonderful spot, right along the river. The riverfront trail runs along here as well, and the mall itself is a short walk away. We spent an hour shopping after we arrived yesterday afternoon.

We had a nice drive up the Umpqua river yesterday, even though it was overcast and rainy the whole way. We stopped at Northwest RV Surplus and Supply just south of town to pick up a few replacement switches for the dashboard, where some of the older ones have simply worn out. I had also planned to put some fuel in, but it skipped my mind, and we were unable to run the generator last night when we wanted a little heat. Fortunately, the Webasto dip tube is a bit longer, and we had no trouble making heat that way this morning.

Last night our good friends Brad and Kathleen stopped by with their dog Jackson, and after a few minutes of conversation and dog affection the four of us walked over to Olive Garden for dinner. We had a great time catching up with them over the course of the evening, including hearing about his new venture, promoting RVing in Oregon.

Today we will continue north to Portland, where the cheapest diesel in the state can be found, and then across the river to Vancouver and Peninsula Glass for some service on our windows. I expect we will be in their parking lot overnight.