Author: Kristen

We stopped in Friday Harbor for a few days to get the boat ready for a week offshore and watch for a good weather window for the trip south to San Francisco. It felt great to be in a place we know so well with time to wander.

Friday Harbor has it all: a brewery with cute fox merch, a small bookstore with an impressive kids’s section, a hardware store with free popcorn, a grocery store with a chocolate bar aisle, a farmers’ market with fresh eggs, a classy marina laundry facility with tap-to-pay machines.

On Saturday, our dear friend and frequent lifesaver, Brittnie, arrived with her girls for the day. It was a total joy to just stroll around the town holding hands with them one more time, looking for Chocolate Frogs, and impressing the locals with Esme’s old-school rock and roll aura. It also gave Steve time to knock off some to-do list items like installing straps in the galley to help with food prep in big seas.

At the end of the day, we all waited in the long Labor Day weekend ferry line until it was time to board, then the four of us ran back to the dock to wave and wave until we couldn’t see Minha’s pink dress anymore.

On Sunday evening, Steve’s coworker and friend, Cameron, will arrive by seaplane to join for the trip south. So far, we’ve been retracing familiar routes. Now it’s time to head out the Strait of Juan de Fuca and see something new.

We’ve been camping at Spencer Spit with this crew since 2016. Every year, these kids build beach forts and bike jumps, paint rocks, make up songs, and get really, really dirty. And every year, we mark the passing of time with some new milestone. 2025 was the first year every single kid pedaled themself into Lopez Village for ice cream, and the first time a 15-year-old had to use our boat’s Starlink to take online driver’s ed classes.

Among this group are friends who took our kids swimming at Greenlake all summer so we could focus on our to-do list, who prescribed us scopolamine patches for seasickness, who looked everywhere and found James’ forgotten AirPods under a knitting project. They carried us, as the kids would say.

Of the many hard goodbyes we’ve said this summer, this was the hardest. It was easy to pretend it was just another Spencer Spit departure while lugging gear up the hill from the beach to the cars, tripping on the same tree roots we’ve tripped on for years. It got a lot harder when we were hugging and crying in the parking lot. When our family headed alone back down the hill to our dinghy and rode quietly out to our boat, the leaving part of this adventure was feeling very, very real. 

We think a lot about our community in Seattle — friends, neighbors, schools, offices, dance classes and grocery stores that we love — but, boy, will leaving on a slow boat really give you time to consider just how much you’ll miss it.

Since April 2023 — when our sailboat, Flyer, arrived in Seattle on a ship from Chichester, UK — our family has been planning to spend James’ 8th and Paul’s 5th grade school year sailing around the Pacific. We finally pushed off the dock at Elliott Bay Marina on August 17. (Actually, we were pushed by our neighbors and fellow Boréal-owners, Randy and Diana.)

In the past two years, our to-do list exploded from a vague, shared Note on our phones (figure out school, spares) to a color-coded, multi-tab spreadsheet (install check valve at starboard bilge pump, add chain to drogue, order 19mm vinyl for cockpit cover side panels).

Thirty minutes into the first leg of the trip, we were still texting friends for help (Could you go to our house and look under the couch cushions for James’ AirPods??). Around Kingston, we finally looked up from our phones, took a breath, and enjoyed our last views of the Olympic mountains for a while. 

We’ve been so busy with the details of leaving our life in Seattle and getting our boat ready for a year of sailing that we really haven’t thought much about where we’re headed — after our annual camping trip at Spencer Spit, provisioning at Friday Harbor, and shakedown cruise to San Francisco.

Check this tracker to see where we end up. It’s guaranteed to be more up-to-date than this blog!