Europa: SJI Summer Day 46

Europa turned the corner into Inati Bay to find a couple of small runabouts, and a sail boat. Not crowded at all. Another sailboat arrived…then they all left and we had the bay to ourselves! For a while at least – a trawler arrived in the evening. Still, a pretty quiet night.

It was interesting, however. Shortly after we anchored, Nick suggested we stern tie. (When you run a line from the back of your boat to shore…keeps your boat from swinging.) We did this for a couple reasons. We wanted to practice for sure, but also thought it would mitigate some side rocking and rolling created by large boats going past the mouth of the bay. And…we were a bit close to a rock cliff, and this would keep us from moving closer to that. It went quite smoothly. We found that we needed to make adjustments a few times - in both the anchor line and the stern tie line. We have enough line to reach to shore and back so when we leave, we don’t have to return to shore. The line is just looped around a tree, rather than tied. We’ll just release the end of the line from the boat and pull it on board. A friend gave us a reel used for crabbing line. We had replaced that line before we left home with the 600 feet of line we purchased specifically for stern tie purposes – it worked well!

And then after dinner the wind picked up...we ended up closer to that rock cliff than we liked. So, we hauled in the line, moved to what looked like a calmer corner of the small bay, and redid the whole thing. It was a good move.

Our plan is to continue north this morning to Semiahmoo, in Blaine. We have stayed at the resort there many times over the years, and it is one of our favorite getaways. The spit and beach are nice to walk, and the inn is lovely. We are leaving things a bit open, as Nick’s weather research shows less-than-awesome conditions coming our way on Wednesday, so we need to plan around that.