Author / Tamara

Posts by Tamara

Sailor, mother, wife, writer, and not necessarily in that order.
by Tamara

Divorced and sailboat cruising with kids

Cruise the web for cruising families. You’ll see some differences: large families of four kids or more, sailing on a large catamaran; small families with a single kid, voyaging the world on a boat not much bigger than a daysailer.

They cruise in Fiji, Australia, Mexico, the Med, northern Europe and along both coasts of the United States.

In most cases, cruising families are made up of two married or committed parents and the children they have had together. And it makes sense. Balancing a weather-dependent cruising schedule with parenting plans, custody arrangements and divorce decrees requiring travel notifications is a formidable challenge indeed.

Our family has to manage all of those factors. My kids are from my first marriage. My husband is their step-father. Our boat is in Puget Sound and my kids’ dad, J, is in Portland. We have a 50-50 parenting plan.

And we are making it work so far. Here’s how:

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by Tamara

How family emergencies prepared me for cruising

As I write this, I am sitting on the back porch of my childhood home in Hutchinson, Kansas. I am supposed to be on Polaris with my husband and kids, cruising South Puget Sound.

But I got a text from my mom a little more than a month ago that she had been feeling short of breath and unable to even take a quick walk around the neighborhood. She was going to the doctor to see what was causing it.

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by Tamara

Sucia Island: A land of fossils and rocky dreams

The flood brought us to Sucia Island, pushing our speed over ground to 9 kts for most of our trip north.

Our goal was to grab a mooring buoy in Fox Cove. It’s a smaller and slightly more exposed anchorage near Sucia Island, but the forecast for the next few days was sunny and very light wind.

At high tide, Little Sucia—the tiny rocky island just a few hundred feet away from Sucia—works with its sister island to create a south entrance to Fox Cove. It’s a deceptive welcome that hides the abundance of rocks lurking just under the surface. We opted to round Little Sucia instead and entered from the west side of the cove.

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by Tamara

Finding culture and crowds at Roche Harbor

About a week before we got to Roche Harbor, I found an announcement on San Juan’s paper of record that the resort was curtailing its Fourth of July festivities this year.

There would be no games or parades. No bar entertainment, and attendance was being limited in a variety of ways to reduce the crowd size for the normally packed July 4th weekend. The tone of the announcement was full of regret and apology, blaming the party-pooping on COVID, of course.

Honestly, the idea of smaller crowds at Roche Harbor for the 4th was just fine with me.

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by Tamara

James Island stays quiet when the San Juans are busy

We didn’t plan to stop by the very first Washington state marine park we saw after crossing the Strait of Juan de Fuca. But when you come across an empty mooring in the San Juan Islands less than a week before the Fourth of July, you don’t hesitate to slow the boat down and pick up a mooring ball.

That’s how we ended up making James Island our first stop in the San Juan’s this summer. At first, we were lured by the lack of crowds here, but now I’d say James Island is worth a stop, no matter how many boats are in the moorage park.

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by Tamara

Summer 2020: First stop, Port Blakely Harbor

On late afternoon of Tuesday, June 23, with a lingering list of boat projects, crap still piled up on the settee looking for a permanent home, we shoved out of our home marina in Elliot Bay and pointed for Bainbridge Island’s Port Blakely Harbor.

Seattle was warm and blustery, a rarity on a Seattle summer day. After I took us out of our slip and motored us out of the marina, C and our 12-year-old daughter, A, raised the mainsail. With the wind coming out of the north, we enjoyed a lovely beam- to broad-reach sail with A at the helm for most of the time.

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by Tamara

Favorite sailing spots in south Puget Sound

It’s quiet, teeming with marine life and has epic mountain views. It’s home to about a dozen state-managed marine parks that make it easy to bop around from place to place and explore by kayak or on foot. And it gets little to none of the commercial shipping traffic seen between Tacoma and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

After spending two lovely, quiet, very socially distanced weeks in South Puget Sound recently, the only question we could ask ourselves was: How soon can we head back?

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by Tamara

Puget Sound’s awesome marine mammals

I wake early and achy in the back, a common occurrence nowadays. Not sure if my age is to blame. Maybe its the permanent skeletal tweaks two pregnancies have left with my body.

I curl my knees up to my chest and spin around out of my spot between my sleeping husband and the side of our berth, tucking my chin so I don’t hit my head on the low ceiling. With my feet facing out, I climb out of bed.

Once off the boat, the cool Seattle morning air douses me fully awake. The packed marina is quiet, the water still. I begin to walk toward the marina showers up on shore when hear a snort.

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by Tamara

Provisioning a sailboat for three months off the grid

There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who will find this blog post interesting, thought-provoking and maybe even useful. The rest of you will find it boring AF.

For those of you in the first group, I would appreciate you reading this and commenting with suggestions and even criticisms. See, aside from the freedom, adventure and beautiful scenery that cruising by sailboat provides, it also provides me with three other things I really enjoy: 1) Planning, 2) problem-solving and 3) organizing.

And provisioning on a sailboat for an extended amount of time requires all three.

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by Tamara

Mystery Bay Marine State Park: A bird-watcher’s paradise

Mystery Bay Marine State Park is a little bay outside Marrowstone Island, just east of Port Townsend. The park and the greater Killisut Harbor between Marrowstone and Indian islands are gems. Mariners willing to navigate the tricky, yet well-marked, shallow entrance to the harbor are rewarded with a protected bay teeming with birds and aquatic life easily explored by dingy or kayak.

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by Tamara

Our plans, they are a-changing

Well, that didn’t take long. 

Our plan to spend the summer cruising the Salish Sea up to Canada may have to be modified now, thanks to the ever-growing threat of coronavirus. 

This pandemic is changing all of our lives. As I write this, the Oregon governor has issued an executive order that all Oregonians need to stay at home unless conducting essential activities, more than 100 people have died in Washington state, more than 1,000 in Italy and chances are high that our kids extended spring break from school will turn into the beginning of a very early summer vacation. 

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