On to the Next Bucket List Item

Linda and all the gear we collected for our trip.

We are really close to starting our next adventure. For the past year, we have been planning a sailing trip in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington. We first started exploring this idea when we tried to put together a sailing trip with LTD Sailing out of St Vincent and the Grenadines. A friend, Jon Totten, is an instructor/guide for the tour/teaching company and we were eager to get a group together and explore that area. These plans had to change due to the distance and time needed for other friends to join us. Our group slowly got smaller, and finally the remaining couple, Ryan and Holly Edwards, suggested that we look closer to home for a sailing trip. That is how we locked into chartering a boat through San Juan Sailing out of Bellingham, Washington.

Linda and I committed right away; a sailing trip has always been a bucket list item for us. Together, our team of the Bennetts and the Edwards’, Holly, Ryan, Zane and Anika, started planning. We Googled “Sailing in the San Juans” and found two companies in western Washington that had good reputations and high marks for chartering sailboats. Further digging informed us that they both had good information concerning how to put this type of trip together. We contacted another friend, David Kilmer, who had worked for San Juan Sailing and also had their boat in the sailing charter fleet. He provided us a huge amount of information and advice and we finally chose to go with San Juan Sailing for this charter.

Jeanneau 409

At a pizza dinner in November, 2016 we looked over the San Juan fleet and chose a sailboat that we felt would fill our needs for a week-long adventure with six humans on board. The boat we chose was “Tivoli” a Jeanneau 409.  She is 40 feet in length and sleeps 6 comfortably. We contacted the folks at San Juan Sailing  and reserved the boat for the week of July 28 through August 4^th. The deposit check was in the mail and we were committed.

In talking to the folks at San Juan Sailing we then found that they could give us recommendations for a sailing captain who would guide us on our exploration of the islands. This was a necessity because even though I have sailed quite a bit and Ryan was familiar with sailing, neither of us have the certificate that would allow us to charter a boat and sail it.  We could hire a captain/instructor from San Juan Sailing and they would guide us through this adventure and, if we paid them, they could instruct us and give us the certification needed to rent a vessel in the future. We gathered contact information on their captains and then sat back and waited until the winter faded away.

When we returned from our winter in Mexico we again called a pizza meeting and started the process of hiring our captain. Two captains were available at the time of our charter and we did phone interviews with both. Holly and Ryan were able to interview the female captain and the entire group was available to interview the male captain. Both were very interesting and we felt both could do the job for us, but when we interviewed Captain Bob, we were able to get a real good feel for his style. This was due to the fact that he was chatting with us while he was supervising/teaching a couple students out in a sailboat on the Sound. We could hear the calm teaching presence in his voice as he spoke to us and then called out suggestions to the students on board the boat he was sailing. This sold us on Captain Bob and it was a unanimous vote from our group.

We have the boat; we have chosen the Captain and paid everything we needed to pay to sail for a week in the San Juan Islands. By this time we were about three months out and we kept in contact with Bob while we waited.

At our final pizza meeting at the Edward’s house with less than two weeks and counting, we planned our meals while splitting up duties and assigning tasks.  We talked about fishing gear and all the items we felt we needed to bring. We left that evening with lists galore. From that point on we spent our time gathering and packing clothes, putting needed items on the spare bed in the little bedroom and buying food items for the trip.

The week prior to departure I took the camper out to Rayelle and Mike Anderson’s and unloaded it. Part of our post-sailing adventure plans includes a visit to friends on Vashon Island and it would cost a fortune to take the truck with camper onto the ferry. To save money, we dropped our little home off at the farm for the next few weeks.