The sun finally broke through at the end of the afternoon and Phoenix looks good after sitting over the winter months. You don’t see the name on our boat because we removed the light boards (where the boat name appears) so we can bring the light boards home to apply a fresh coat or two of varnish.

Living in Central Oregon and managing a boat moored in Anacortes is a challenge in the winter. We try to make a few trips to Anacortes Marina during the winter months to run the boat’s systems and check to be sure all is okay. This year we haven’t been able to get away as often as we’d like, but this week we had a good weather window and headed for Anacortes.

It’s March, so we had no expectations that good weather would last the whole week. Monday was a sunny, dry day with good driving conditions, so it was a good day for the drive from Bend to Anacortes. The dry weather continued on Tuesday and gave us the opportunity to take care of outside boat maintenance—we adjusted the dock lines and added a chafe guard where one of the lines had worn, pumped up our inflatable and adjusted the cover (after bailing out water that had accumulated due to the cover being loose), took off the light boards to bring them home for a coat or two of varnish, adjusted the fenders, and did some basic clean up.

While we were staying on our boat this March, we took walks along the Tommy Thompson Trail in Anacortes. Today it was a little gloomy, but the rain had stopped.

Wednesday turned cooler and rain poured all day. So we did inside things…put water in the batteries, mounted the 2-meter ham radio, tidied up the wi-fi equipment, and more general clean up. It was also a good day to visit the remodeled Anacortes West Marine store…bigger, brighter and much more stuff (yea!).

Updates for 2013: these are the three publications we get each year to update our onboard cruising information.

At the first of each cruising season, there are three publications that we get to update our onboard cruising information. Even though we haven’t decided on a cruising plan for this year, we know we’ll use the information in these three publications: Ports & Passes for 2013, the 2013 Waggoner Cruising Guide, and the 2013 Evergreen Pacific Publishing tide graph calendar covering the local waters around Anacortes.

These are a few of the cruising guides that we keep on board.

Wednesday afternoon the power went out and stayed out all night. Some kind of failure happened at a local transformer, and it knocked out power to the marina and surrounding area. Since most of our boat is DC and runs on batteries, we didn’t even notice the power was out until we tried to access the Internet and found our wi-fi wasn’t working! So, we powered up our genset to keep the batteries happy, and continued on with our evening…except we still didn’t have wi-fi because the power was out to the wi-fi access point on shore.

Today we ran the engine, tested all the electronics, pulled out the knot meter sensor to take it home and contact Raymarine for advice to help us figure out why our knot meter isn’t working (since we never solved that problem last year), and ran all the plumbing systems. All is A-okay.

Tomorrow’s weather forecast is good for our return drive from Anacortes to Bend, so tonight we’re packing up the car and will get on the road in the morning. It was a short trip, but it’s always fun to be on the boat and good to know the boat is secure and that things are in good shape.

In addition to electronic navigation, we have paper charts for the areas where we cruise, and we store them rolled up above our helm station.