The S/V Pirogie

I think my dad had one glass of whiskey too many one night, or maybe he was just inspired by Naomi and I's purchase of the NIcholas Allen, but either way sometime in december he bought a Bayliner Buccaneer on E-Bay for 650 dollars. IN WASHINGTON. good deal, bad location. Well, lucky for us, i just so happend to know some people who needed a boat, and although it is small, the price was right, and my friends Tom and Mel agreed to take on the lucky little dumpling they dubbed "the Pirogie" (Toms ukranian).

Great, yeah, except that its in the middle of the winter, well we happend to get a good little window of weather there last weekend, so the three of us went down and brought her up from Everett. Winds were mostly light, but we put the sails up anyway, and had a pretty good ol' time motorsailing up the saratoga channel the first day. We had a beautiful evening, and nice warm night with the heater on tied up at the oak harbor marina.


This beautiful little Pete Culler designed motor launch lives there too, and we had a peek under the hood to see what powers it, a perkins 4-108 diesel. Beautiful Little boat

the next day we got up at 6 and motored up through the canal past la Conner which was great, I loved seeing all the boats, and then refueled in Anacortes. This steel schooner in Anacortes is a commercial fishing boat from Oregon, can we hear a loud HELL YES for Working SAil!!!

I wont say that WE were drunk the whole time, but Mel did open a bottle of wine with lunch, and the only polite thing to do was to join her, cant let the lady drink alone after all. We had some fun in the afternoon beating into the wind up to Lummi island, and just as we were passing the northern end the coast guard came alongside and boarded us. They were pleased with our preparedness, and just wanted to check to see if we had all the necessary safety equipment. It was getting a little choppy though, and they actually slammed right into us as they were leaving and Tom later discovered they broke one of the internal bulkheads loose. We went back to Lummi point and waited for the wind to die down. Just before dark we resumed our trip and made it to Sandy Point, where we tied up to a darelict dock. Tom and i set about the difficult task of drinking the remaining beer, (there was something like 15 of them) and mel slept a solid 11 hours.

I was exhausted and cold, but luckily we woke up at dawn and enjoyed a beautiful sunny high pressure day of motoring all the way past Point Roberts and into the mouth of the Fraser. We tied up in Steveston, and Tom called customs. They came right down, and investigated the boat, luckily we had all our ducks lined up for them, because they thought for sure we were trying to swindle them in some way, they couldnt believe the value of the boat, but it all checked out, and they must have thought we were pretty clever kids. We celebrated in the way we know best, by eating pizza and drinking too much!