LaConner to Anacortes—Swinomish Channel to Padilla Bay (the water in Padilla is so shallow that, but for the well-marked channel we were in, at low tide it looks like one could walk through the water to tiny Hat Island.) We turn west into the sun. In a short ten miles we’ve come to the broad but very shallow Fidalgo Bay where dozens of channel-markers make me crazy. This is an working ship harbor, a ba-zillion vessels follow nearly as many markers to make their way to various destinations.

“But, why is the red nun over there?” I ask, pointing, but not worried.  

“Not ours,” says Dave. “That one leads to March Point. Ours is that one, right off the rocks on the right.”

Oh yes, I remember. A few years ago, we saw a small powerboat teetering atop a pile of rocks at the harbor entrance; right where the chart says, “rocks.”

“There are way too many channels here,” I said. Okay, worriedly. I was squinting into the setting sun that makes it all but impossible to see any color on any channel marker, can or nun, no matter. I check the chart but Captain Dave doesn’t need to, he remembers the approach—pilot advantage.

I’m crew today. I hang fenders and lines, Dave expertly maneuvers into Slip C-22. Well done, Dave, given that a swift current and a broadside breeze urged us toward an encounter with “Lazy Day’s,” the 40-foot powerboat on our starboard side.

“We are 14-feet wide and 44-feet tip to tip,” I told the Harbormaster last week when I made reservations here. We need a port tie and because we exit the boat from the swim-step, we can’t hang out of the slip.” I said it twice. 

“Not a problem,” she said. It’s a 46-foot slip. You will have plenty of room. C-dock, slip #22. 

“You can’t hang over the dock,” said a woman walking by as we secured PineAweigh as far forward in our slip as possible—so we can step off our boat. We had only inches to spare. “They are probably going to make you push your boat back,” she said. 

“Go away,” I thought.

9:00pm.

“I wonder if we are actually 45-feet long,” I say. Dave and I are finally having a bowl of soup before bed. “We barely fit in this 46-foot slip.”

“We’re forty-four,” Dave said. He’s very tired. He’s been draining hot oil from the port engine.“We’ve been 44-feet for twenty years.”

“Hummmm.”

Dave said it. 

I believe it. 

That settles it. 

I just need to remember to carefully step forward from the swim-step to reach the finger of slip C-22.