Cypress Island

July 1, 2011

A red letter day for sure.  Willie catches her first mooring buoy on her first try.  The procedure is for the Captain to maneuver the boat close to the buoy and for the mate (in this case the Admiral) to slip the bowline through the loop atop the buoy.  Some times this is very difficult with wind and currents, but Willie threaded the needle like a pro.

Hopefully these free mooring buoys furnished and maintained by the Washington DNR keep us far enough away from this rock shore.  They allow up to 3 days use before you need to move on to another location.  We did not have to use our Washington State Parks pass to tie up here.  You can use your dinghy (Jake's Ferry) to get to the beach.  There you will find composting toilets, camp sites and walking trails for public use.  Most of Cypress Island is public with very little private property.  There are 4 mooring buoys here at the place called Cypress Head.

After lunch and a brief nap, we continue our circumnavigation of Cypress Island.  We poke around in the various coves and bays following the shoreline closely.  There are two more sites on the East and North sides of the island, Eagle Harbor and Pelican Beach.  Both of these locations have several more buoys.

Plenty of pretty little islands scattered around the perimeter of Cypress Island.  We are cautious of the ones we do not see, those just below the surface of the water.  We have updated and hopefully accurate charts that show us these unseen surprises.  Not like the soft sands of our Gulf of Mexico, these rocks are unforgiving if you run upon them with your boat.  We have our paper charts, our Garmin 5212 main chart plotter, and up to date charts on our IPAD.

The waters are very calm today except as we return via the Guemes Channel.  The waters here are awash with the wakes of large pleasure boats rushing to get to their favorite spot in the San Juan Islands for this holiday weekend.  Interesting maneuvers as various ones crisscross in front of our direction of travel.

Walldog, Willie and Jake.