Sequim Bay to Friday Harbor June 3rd

June 3rd we woke to more rain and decided to spend a good four hour part of the day cruising to Friday Harbor. To get there we had to cross intersection of vessel traffic for the Straights of San Juan, Rosario and Haro. The weather, although raining and slightly foggy, had no wind, which means a fairly mild sea. We also wanted to time our entrance into "Middle Channel" between Cattle Point on the island of San Juan and Point Davis on Lopez Island to a flood tide. This channel is about 3/4 of a mile wide and the currents in some of these passes can reach 15 to 18 knots. (3 to 4 times faster than we can go) As the water is funneled through these small channels it picks up significant velocity and you need to be cautious or you run aground or into trouble. We started off knowing it would be 4 hours in light fog and rain, carefully watching our radar and AIS systems. Boating in the delta and bay area has provided us some good experience. We are used to cargo ships, high speed and tour ferries, with plenty of pleasure craft thrown in. It is early in the season here and there is so much more space, monitoring vessel traffic has not been any more of a challenge than in the bay. On the way to Friday harbor, we did have a couple of interesting experiences. We saw some strange blip formations on the radar as we headed across the straight. We could tell the direction, so using the binoculars I watched that area while Alexus watched the radar and AIS. (AIS stands for automatic identification system and all commercial ships must have it.) AIS allows us to see what kind of ship they are, how fast they are going and most importantly where they are. There was nothing showing on the AIS, but the blips kept showing on the radar. You will see the picture here. As they came closer out of the fog, with binoculars, we could see five escort ships and a submarine. Being naval ships was the big reason they were not showing in AIS, but were on the radar screen. They were moving slow, were far to the west and would pass behind us unto Admiralty Inlet which has a large naval operations center. The next interesting event was moving through the channel at Cattle Point. The channel is well marked and by the time we reached it about 2 hours later the visibility had improved. What was fun for us, is that on a flood tide we were hitting about 11 to 11.5 knots through the channel. We get excited when we get to go a little faster, it is a pleasure, saves fuel and is just plan old fun!! We got into Friday Harbor late afternoon and ended up spending three nights there. More about Friday Harbor in the next post.