St Helens

On some Tuesday, not too long ago, we rousted ourselves out of our bunks futzed around for a bit, and once again moved our entire home out of Astoria just at the crack of 9:30. That seems to be a good leaving time, for us. We just idled slowly up the river and checked out Astoria again from the water. It's a different town.

The wind is always blowing up the river, except when we, the Starrs, are traveling up river. Then, it blows down. This is a well documented law of physics, which you can read about in any Physics 101 text book, and I would encourage you to look it up. We did get one long straight stretch when the wind was off the bow about 40 degrees, and we were able to turn off the old iron genny and sail into the wind for an hour or so. It was pretty sweet and quiet and the scenery down at the end of the river is spectacular.

I was all set to shoot by Cathlamet, but my children and especially Gracie over-ruled me, so we nosed in to see what we thought. It turns out that we love Cathlamet, Molly most of all, and we ended up spending almost a week there soaking up some peace, playing soccer, and exploring the town. Gracie had a book that she was waiting for and the local bookstore was holding it for her, so we waited until Saturday to head out. Momma would have waited for another week, or possibly two, or maybe just set up camp indefinitely.

We got out the inflatable kayaks while we were there, and journeyed up the river. Bald eagles and ospreys and great blue herons are as thick as crows up there.

We headed out of Cathlamet at low tide. Our depth sounder isn't working, but the marina is charted as being pretty deep, and I went up and chatted with the harbor master before we left. Everyone seemed to agree that there was plenty of water to get out, but everyone was wrong. We headed out at about half a knot, and I soon noticed that we weren't, technically, moving. We backed up, scootched over a bit, and tried again, with the same result. So, we turned around, tied up again in a new spot, since our old spot had already been claimed in the fifteen minutes we were gone, and went to play soccer until high tide.

The second attempt was successful, and we motored up the river, with a good brief sail, until we got to Rainier, late in the evening. We had nosed in behind Walker Island to spend the night but we're in the midst of boat club season, and one of the clubs was having a shindig back there. There wasn't room for us behind the dock at Rainier, so we spent the night enjoying the wakes of passing tugs and cargo ships.

Everyone was oh-so-ready to leave Rainier in the morning, and we came on back to our favorite, St. Helens. The trip was beautiful, we got to see Grandpa Bob's old stomping grounds, again, and we had a nice fair wind for most of the trip.

I think, if you've made it this far, you must have noticed that we've already come to the point that every travel log I've ever read comes to sooner or later -- I'm just listing places and glossing over all the fun, interesting, challenging stuff that's getting easier and seems less noteworthy. Suffice to say, we're still having fun, but starting to say things like, "That was a fun summer," and "We have to be at the qualifying tournament on Friday," instead of saying things like, "I hope this is a fun summer," and "We have to be at the Cascade Cup tournament on Friday."

It looks like we'll leave the boat in St Helens, come back to Portland and finally claim our new house, and start getting ourselves back in to the matrix for the next few days. We've got some pictures, though, which I'll post shortly.