Happy I went. Happy I’m back.

Silhouette shots are the way to go when a swimsuit model is 67 years old. Your correspondent gets moist in the Med — in October.

I SWAM IN THE LUSCIOUSLY REFRESHING MEDITERRANEAN just a week ago. It was warm and sunny in the Peloponnese region of Greece.

And when I returned to Center Island on Sunday, the weather forecast for the week included the “S” word. I’m not talking about sunshine.

Yes, they were threatening me with snow by midweek. Just a few flakes mixed with rain, probably. But still. It’s not yet Halloween.

To rescue the moment, I built a roaring fire in my woodstove. That would show the Weather Gods, such as they are around here.

In Greece, they really had Weather Gods. Zeus threw lightning bolts.

My head is still there, though my body shivers as a cold rain falls here in the San Juan Islands. Such is the magic of modern travel. Last Thursday, I was on another island — the sunny isle of Rhodes, the largest of Greece’s Dodecanese Islands. Instead of edging the Salish Sea and looking across at Lopez Island, I was in the Aegean Sea, looking 11 miles across to Türkiye, as it now spells itself.

After an idyllic five days on the other side of Greece with my friends Jackie and Joel in the Mani district of the Peloponnese — Jackie is now known to me as “Mani Mama” — I caught a plane out of Athens for the hour flight to Rhodes.

Just getting to the airport was an adventure. Rather than make the three-hour return to the capital on the comfortable intercity bus, which would deposit me at a bus station many miles from the airport, with Jackie’s determined assistance I got a ride with a local guy who regularly made a few extra bucks by ferrying folks to Athens in his Ford minivan.

My Rhodes lodging’s door, left, and the narrow alley I had to navigate in the dark, at right. The steps led to a rooftop terrace with a view of the walled city.

He charged almost four times the bus fare, but he got me directly to the airport for my evening flight, saving me considerable trouble at the Athens end.

The thing was, the driver (I’ll call him Spiro, not his real name) didn’t let on that he would have a fully crammed van, with five passengers going to several different destinations. Or that he would rocket at 80 mph once we hit the tollway. Or that, as we arrived at the airport, he would cagily ask for payment before we got to the departures curb, so police wouldn’t see. (I suspected Spiro wasn’t a licensed taxi driver.) It felt like we were refugees fleeing Syria.

Rhodes was a challenge and a delight. Having booked an Airbnb inside the medieval walled city where narrow cobbled passages limit traffic to pedestrians and motorbikes, I doubled my challenge by arriving after dark. Finding my lodgings was like navigating a corn maze by moonlight. But bless the resourcefulness of my Greek hosts, who emailed photos of the appropriate entry gate, a tiny door to a souvenir shop across from my domicile’s side alley, and another photo of my arched brown door with two gray steps. I was glad I’d brought my mountaineering headlamp.

My hosts also suggested a place for dinner: Kostas’ Taverna (which is like saying “Joe’s Diner” in the U.S.A.). It was a five-minute walk through dim stone passages with only the feral cats to keep me company, but when I got there it was brightly lit and comfortably full of happy diners. A stooped little man with an obsequious grin — Kostas himself? — brought me a generous glass of good Greek wine, followed by platters of roasted eggplant with feta, onion and parsley, and a splendid salad generously garnished with manouri cheese and aglow with crimson tomatoes. It was my favorite meal outside the Mani.

The Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, dating to the 7th century, dominates the Old Town’s skyline.

My next day was filled with wandering the Old Town and marveling at its varied history. Walled or not, the place had a virtual revolving door for invaders, with occupations by European Catholic knights, Ottoman conquerors, Persians and Saracens. A highlight was the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, which could easily have starred in a Monty Python movie with a taunting Frenchman atop a turret.

Elaborate mosaic floors fill the Rhodes palace. My favorite featured Medusa. Just don’t step on the snakes.

Back to Athens for a quick overnight in a Muppet-sized rental flat mid-city, then up hours before dawn to catch a train back to the airport. Thus began one of my longest and most challenging travel days ever.

On the trip out of Seattle on Turkish Airlines 12 days earlier, I mysteriously lucked into having a row of three seats to myself in the Economy section of a nicely appointed, otherwise full 787. For the 10-hour overnight nonstop to Istanbul, I was blessedly able to stretch across the seat and get some real sleep.

The flight home, almost 12 hours of bucking headwinds, was karmic payback. (Sometimes life really is fair, I guess.)

Instead of three seats for Brian, I shared my row with a little man who was almost as wide as he was tall, sitting in the middle seat and taking up a quarter of my space as well, with his wife huddled in the window seat. Added to the long hours of being squeezed warmly against him, every time we encountered turbulence (worst I’ve ever experienced, and frequent) I watched his wife go into a ritual of moaning, chanting and raising her arms to heaven, all in Russian except for the word “Jesus” frequently intermingled, loud enough for all the plane to hear. (It really did not help the stress level.) At one point I put on my headphones and tried to find soothing music on the sound system, only to get stuck on some very unsoothing jazz with the volume at full blast, and for the life of me I couldn’t find the volume control. Unintentionally, but only partly to my chagrin, she heard it and stopped her chest-beating. Of course, that was only supplanted by the shrieking of an emotionally overtaxed toddler two rows away whose lung capacity and endurance will someday make her a champion pearl diver.

By the time I was staggering through Passport Control at Sea-Tac, I’d been on the go for 22 hours since Athens, with only about an hour of dozing on the plane.

Oh, well. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, is my take on it. But I don’t know that I will tackle long-distance travel on my own-some again anytime soon.

The flip side of ranting about my seatmates: Once I came round to chatting them up like human beings (yes, they spoke English, while I could say only “Da!” and “Nyet!” in their language), I found them to be kind and interesting folks. Born in Kazakhstan during the Soviet era, he was retired from a 30-year career as an airline pilot for Aeroflot. His wife had “won a lottery” to get a green card and they now lived in Tacoma, with family in Snohomish. On parting he gave me a heartwarming handshake and sincere wishes for my good health (after likely noticing that I kept getting served “diabetic meals”). Another example of how travel brings people together in good ways if they open their hearts.

I recovered with a couple nights of intense sleep at sister-in-law Julie’s north of Seattle. On the drive home Sunday, at a Skagit Valley farmstand I bought a cinnamon-orange pumpkin for my step. This week I’m busy planning a Halloween costume for the annual family party.

Glad I went. Glad to be home. That’s how journeys should go, don’t you think?

Editor’s note: I later learned that “Spiro” was, in fact, licensed to transport passengers, and that he asked for payment before reaching the curb in response to new rules designed to expedite traffic at the air terminal.

Cats are everywhere in Greece, including the cobbled passageways of Old Town Rhodes. These naughty twins almost came home in my knapsack.

It’s all Greek to me (and that’s mostly a good thing)

Your correspondent again feigns consciousness as the rising sun peeks through the Parthenon’s columns during a dawn tour of the Acropolis. Go early to see this monument to antiquity in golden light with smaller crowds.

MY GRECIAN DAYS ARE PASSING LIKE A SCIROCCO from the North African deserts.

Happily, those dust storms aren’t happening during my visit to the cradle of civilization. I’ve had day after day of warm and sunny October skies.

I’ve kept moving and kept busy, from a pre-dawn wander through the rabbit-warren streets of Athens to find the meeting point for my fabulous sunrise tour of the Acropolis; to my challenging cross-country bus ride to Kalamata (the language isn’t easy for me); to calming and restorative days in the scenic little villages of the Peloponnese where my hosts of the last few days, American expats Jackie and Joel Smith, have made their full-time home for six years. (Kirkland, Washington, was their last port of call.)

Jackie, a longtime friend and a colleague in the newspaper business, from Yakima to Seattle, has agreed that our lives, mine on isolated Center Island, and theirs in a fairly remote corner of what’s known as The Continent, bear similarities. We both have little challenges in shopping and dealing with the modern “supply chain,” in staying in touch with family and old friends, in making home repairs when needed, and so on.

But we both have the tradeoff of living in our own little slices of paradise, and nurturing friendships made there.

Jackie and Joel Smith and the view from their front door. Nearest village: Agios Dimitrios, an hour’s drive south of Kalamata.

Since arriving at their charming Stone House on the Hill, looking downhill to the blue Mediterranean and across to high, rolling hills, I’ve enjoyed a rich sampling of the spectacular scenery, the warm village social life, the great food, more of the great food, and, oh, have I mentioned the great food?

My first day, we ended with a sunset dinner on their village waterfront, dining on Fava beans, spinach with black-eyed peas, fried zucchini balls and fresh calamari that was delicately imbued with the best flavors of the sea. Went to sleep with windows open, listening to the distant howling of jackals on the hillside. (There are jackals!)

On a driving tour, we lunched in Gerolimenas, with this view, including a traditional-style, double-ender Greek fishing boat. Sad trivia: The European Union is paying fishermen to destroy such vessels, to help preserve the fishery.

Since then, we’ve taken day trips on winding, narrow roads to see more of their beautiful Mani district, poking our noses into little roadside Byzantine-style chapels. I’ve taken a brisk morning hike with one of their American expat neighbors, a new friend named Chuck. Gone swimming with Chuck and his sweetheart, a firecracker of an Englishwoman named Boris (that’s her last name, and preferred moniker; first name: Caroline). And we’ve dined at different little waterfront cafes night after night, sometimes joined by passing friends, always doted on by familiar restaurateurs whom Jackie and Joel greet with a jovial “Kalispéra!” (“Good evening!”).

My new hiking friend, Chuck Bartlett, on an old donkey path we followed. This was the former “highway” between villages of the Peloponnese. Olive groves are seen below.

Jackie and Joel have carved out a comfortable and engaging expat life here, and I’ve felt privileged to share a few days of it. (Follow Jackie’s blog about their life and travels.)

On tomorrow to the isle of Rhodes for this wandering one’s last taste of Greek civilization (for this trip, anyway). On my own again, trying to remember how travel works (you get rusty!); savoring the good things, and trying to let headaches pass like a breeze off the sea.

Keep your passports valid. I’ll write again soon.

A stroll through ancient history in just a minute of your time

Taggers spare no surface in Athens’ gritty Exarchia district, where a wag with his spray paint declared that “You are original as a tourist in an Airbnb in Exarchia!!” But besides hosting the National Archaeological Museum, the district abounds with second-hand bookstores, comic-book shops and cafes with character.

ATHENS IS ALL ABOUT ANTIQUITIES, and most tourists flock to the Acropolis Museum. It’s a good museum, full of artifacts from the city’s most famous archaeological site.

But Greece’s lesser known, less-crowded, somewhat off-the-beaten-track National Archaeological Museum lured me to the gritty and counterculturist Exarchia district, thanks to a tip from my brother, Doug, along with the author of a Moon guidebook I’ve been using.

I could write a lot about what I saw in my two hours at the museum, and it might sound quite academic and informative — and set you snoring.

Instead, I’ve put together this lively video snippet. I find that a travel outing is often a montage of memories, of quick impressions. Sort of like this:

This is no place like home

Istanbul’s glitzy new airport is truly a crossroads of the world, and a monument to capitalism. In the background is the colorful video wall of the airport’s duty-free Louis Vuitton store.

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO GET OFF YOUR ROCK. Really off.

I’m sure not in Kansas, or Center Island, or anywhere near it, anymore. And if I were wearing ruby slippers, I expect I’d get blisters from all the walking I’m doing.

Your jet-lagged correspondent feigning consciousness on a morning walk at the famed Hagia Sophia in old Istanbul.

For a few days, your Cantwell’s Reef scribe is veering away from the San Juans. I’m on my first big overseas adventure since COVID, and since losing Barbara. It’s a very different world.

I’m awakening this morning for the first time in Greece, and tapping out a few lines before I set off on a day of wandering Athens.

I flew out of Sea-Tac on Sunday on a beautifully appointed Turkish Airlines 787 — they call it the Dreamliner for good reason — and had a quick one-night layover in Istanbul.

Long a crossroads for the world, Istanbul now has Europe’s busiest airport, newly opened in 2019.

It is a sprawling, huge facility, a monument to capitalism, with shopping glitz to rival New York’s Times Square. It is the hub for the ambitious, world-circling Turkish Airlines. On my departure day yesterday, they were barely managing the chaos and crowds. Finding gates for departing flights was a slow and apparently challenging task, despite the overwhelming size of the facility. Many flights were delayed, including my Athens flight, which left more than an hour late.

My mantra for this trip is to take things in stride.

Istanbul Airport’s gate board, with alphabets of every ilk.

Jet-lag has been a challenge. On my arrival in Athens late yesterday afternoon, I kept falling asleep on my feet in the crowded train from the airport. I am awake and typing this at 6 a.m. the next morning because my circadian rhythms are still off by several beats, like the orchestra’s percussionist who keeps missing his cue with the cymbals.

With all those modern-day challenges, today I dive into antiquity, with a visit to Greece’s National Archaeological Museum. I’m saving the Acropolis for tomorrow, when I’ve gathered my wits (one can only hope).

Now, time for a hot shower and to venture out to find a good Greek coffee shop in the bohemian Exarchia district surrounding the museum. Wish me luck, I’m going in.

Sailing in circles, the way we live life

As with many boat owners, we don’t have a lot of good photos of our boat under sail. (It’s hard to take a good selfie when you’re on a sailboat.) Here’s a grainy old photo of *Sogni d’Oro* from years ago, taken by a sailing friend as we plied the Columbia River at Longview, Wash. The boat’s name is the Italian version of “Sweet Dreams.”

FOR THE FIRST TIME in 34 years, the largest sailboat I own is less than 10 feet long.

Last week, I ventured to Seattle to meet with my new friend Lux Sloane Kirkham, and we drove to the credit union to meet with a notary and sign a bill of sale, which I mailed off to the Coast Guard’s National Vessel Documentation Center in Falling Waters, West Virginia.

With that, Sogni d’Oro, the dear old Westsail 32 that was home to all or some of my family for 30 of those aforementioned years, the boat that took us cruising the San Juan Islands every summer for decades, and on one of our lives’ great adventures, to Mexico’s Baja peninsula and the Sea of Cortez, has someone new to love her.

Just as we did, Lux has the ambitions, the dreams and the gumption to give Sogni d’Oro new adventures. For that, daughter Lillian and I feel content.

It was to that boat’s Columbia River moorage that Lil came home from the Portland hospital of her birth in 1991. On the bowsprit, a pink flamingo — not a stork — held the “It’s a girl!” sign above a swaddled bundle in its beak.

It was from that boat’s helm that I first navigated the Columbia River bar, the famed “Graveyard of the Pacific,” which we crossed back over in inky night after a day of traversing fearsome 20-foot-swells that our stout boat criss-crossed like a skilled skier.

It was on that boat’s radio that I called a Mayday distress call in the face of a piracy threat from an unrelentingly aggressive, silent, mystery vessel on another inky night, 20 miles off Ensenada. As soon as I called the Mayday, the other boat turned away. (Nobody ever responded on the radio.)

It was from that boat that my family and I watched a gray whale teaching her calf to breach, again and again and again, just off our beam in the Sea of Cortez. It was from that boat that we thrilled at the sight of hundreds of dolphins leaping all around us another day. And it was from that boat that, with a sense of awe and a trifle bit of anxiety, we identified two cetaceans spouting just off our stern as blue whales, the largest animals on earth.

After the recent final days of clearing our many possessions, logbooks and charts off Sogni d’Oro, I brought home a box full of memories. Sifting through, I discovered a log entry from our first San Juan Islands voyage in the boat that was new to us just two weeks earlier. Reflecting our greenhorn abilities and newbies’ knowledge, and featuring a longtime friend and my late wife and parents, it makes for a nice bit of symmetry on this occasion:

Log of the Sogni d’Oro

August 2, 1989

This was the first day Barbara and I sailed our boat alone, without [our sailing friend] Ken or my parents aboard. It was a momentous day, dawning with gusty breezes coming from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, to the southwest.

Our moorage at lovely little Turn Island State Park was the perfect choice — a 15-minute motor from Friday Harbor, where we had left my mom and dad after a perfect afternoon of sailing up to Yellow Island to see the old driftwood house where the island’s former owner, a San Juans hermit of wide renown, lived until 1960. The island now belongs to the Nature Conservancy.

We set out at about 10 a.m. Barbara was a little anxious about the winds and our first “solo,” so she didn’t eat much of the tasty fresh strawberries, yogurt and granola we had with coffee for breakfast.

Putting up sail off little Brown Island went smoothly. Barbara has become an old pro at it, helping and working with Ken Brinkley, so she needed my help only to get the mainsail to the top of the mast. I lashed the tiller with bungee cords, a moderately satisfactory solution, though a little wobbly.

Wind settled down to about 5 knots. Fighting the ebb tide in San Juan Channel (our customary habit by now), we sat and looked real pretty but didn’t go very far. Looked at Friday Harbor for an hour or so as Barbara handled the tiller. She asked for some sailing tips, so we played “20 Questions” about points of sail, boating right-of-way, etc. A good way to learn. Watched the little interisland ferry, the Hiyu (seems like a folksy, appropriate name for this little open-air bathtub) chug up the channel ahead of us. Comfortingly, it didn’t do much better.

Finally, as we came up even with Wasp Channel, the current seemed to change in our favor and the wind freshened, putting us on a broad reach for several miles, when the boat didn’t alternately decide (skipper be damned) to go wing on wing. Winds fluky, but we were moving comfortably.

Still not fast enough for the skipper. So I finally convinced Barbara (who has suffered foresail anxiety ever since a Barlow winch disintegrated in her hands as we raised the genoa at the wrong time in Saratoga Passage) to let me hoist the dinner-napkin-sized tri-sail. Not much extra horsepower, but it made us look good, as a cutter rig should.

Back to present day: The remaining sailboat in the Cantwell fleet is the little Black Pearl, a plywood sailing dinghy that Lillian and I built under the tutelage of a Center for Wooden Boats instructor at a long-ago Lake Union Wooden Boat Festival. The Pearl is docked most of the year, snugly wrapped in a tarp, beneath the front porch of Nuthatch Cabin.

Another bit of symmetry: While we got much better over the years at reading and predicting San Juan currents in the big sailboat (and had a powerful diesel to crank up if all else failed), a sail outing these days in the little gaff-rigged Black Pearl is totally at the mercy of currents. As much as any point of sail, she’s perfectly happy going backwards, occasionally in circles.

Lil and I’ve learned to bring oars.

Happy days, friends.

And the drizzle comes

Maple leaves are falling on my knoll. Along with raindrops. Not much autumn color happening.

IT WAS A DRY SUMMER on Center Island, other than the bizarre 48-hour thunderstorm with hourly downpours that we experienced a month or so ago.

But since yesterday, the first full day of autumn, we’ve aptly experienced the weather phenomenon for which the Pacific Northwet should be deservedly famous: drizzle.

In fact, I glanced at the weather forecast yesterday morning — rain for the next week — and dashed outside in robe and slippers, before my first cup of coffee even, to put away the deck furniture for the season. Not that Galley Cat and I ever leave things to the last minute at Nuthatch cabin.

Many non-webfooted outsiders think Seattle is the wettest city in the United States, with constant downpours, but with only about 37 inches of rain in the average year (drizzle, drizzle, drizzle), it’s not even in the top 10. The wettest American city of more than a million people? A place most people go when they want get a tan: Miami, Florida, averaging 64.7 inches of annual liquid sunshine. (Rounding out that top 10 list, based on NOAA records: New Orleans, Birmingham, Houston, Memphis, Orlando, Nashville, Atlanta, New York and Tampa.)

Center Island, in the Olympic rainshadow, gets only about 13 inches a year. Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle, drizzle, drizzle.

It’s cozy inside looking out. I might build a fire in the woodstove. Maybe make a cuppa tea. Happy Sunday, all. Batten down.

The Murdermobile rides again

I MET MY GOAL. Whew.

Yesterday, as September arrived, I punched the “publish” button on “Murdermobile 4: The Fall Will Kill You,” the fourth and final book in the Portland Bookmobile Mysteries series.

My late wife, Barbara, and I co-authored the murder-mystery series over the past 10 years, writing under the pen name of B.B. Cantwell. The stories were inspired by her happy years as a bookmobile librarian in Portland in the 1990s. We last published Book 3 in November 2020, a Christmas-themed installment. It was our COVID-quarantine project, written in a six-month period when we rarely left our island.

Walla Walla friend Stevie Lennartson once again produced artwork for the cover.

This latest book took a bit longer, with me writing all on my own. But the project got me through a tough couple of years after her death, keeping Barbara’s spirit alive for me.

The first three books were very much an enjoyable collaboration. She was a brilliant plotter and idea person who originated most of the stories and characters. I was good at getting it all down on a keyboard and coming up with red herrings. Self-publishing through Amazon, we made a decent little pile of cash, but mostly we just loved doing it. Bookmobile librarian Hester Freelove McGarrigle and Portland Police Detective Nate Darrow became our favorite imaginary friends.

In her final months on this firmament, Barbara worked with me to plot out this fourth and final book in the series. Among other things, she wished to resolve Hester and Nate’s long-simmering romance (done!). Among other fresh storylines, “Fall” finally gets Hester to the coast to visit her brimming-with-personality parents. While a fatal fall does figure in the plot, it also happens in the fall, with a colorful Halloween theme. Who doesn’t love October?

Download it for free Sunday through Wednesday.

Considering that time element, I set Labor Day, September 4, as my publication goal. Despite a hectic and busy summer, with many hours in the writing hut I beat that by three days.

Whew.

If you need a fresh and easy read for the rest of your holiday weekend, you can download “Murdermobile 4” for Kindle in less time than it takes a trick-or-treater to chew a tiny Snickers bar. And the cost is less than you’d pay for a bag of those goodies. Want it in paperback? That option is coming soon. Drop me a note and I’ll notify you when paperbacks are ready to order.

Here’s a link to the whole series, in case you missed any. In fact, if you’ve not already met Hester and Nate, you can download the original “Murdermobile,” the first book in the series, for free this Sunday through Wednesday (September 3-6). My treat, in Barbara’s memory.

Happy reading! We had fun.

A memorable blue-moon August

Mount Rainier turns colors in the sunset beyond the Indianola pier on the Kitsap Peninsula early this month.

SUMMER ON MY ISLAND is as much about going away as staying. It’s the season when invitations beckon me to friends’ sun-drenched decks, and calm waters call me to crank up WeLike’s big Evinrude and go exploring.

I started the month with a delightful few days with friends at Indianola and Belfair. My buddy Steve Miletich, with whom I started and ended my journalism career (at the Sammamish High School newspaper, Totem Talk, and in the Seattle Times newsroom), invited me to his family’s compound at Indianola on the Kitsap Peninsula. In a classic beach house from the 1920s I spent a few sun-baked days with a happy passel of extended family of Steve and his wife, Emily Langlie. (Emily was a newbie TV reporter in Yakima in the 1980s when I was starting there as a daily newspaper reporter; she went on to a stint with KOMO in Seattle, and now works in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.)

We all ate too much good food and watched the henna-tinted super moon rise over Puget Sound. One day, Steve, his brother, Dave, and I drove south to Belfair for a reunion with another Totem Talk alumnus, Mark Morris, who retired five years ago as photo director for the Sacramento newspaper. Mark’s family maintains a beach home, designed by famed Seattle architect Victor Steinbrueck, on the shore of Hood Canal. It was all several days of happy reconnection.

More bittersweet but still soul-nourishing was my solo outing aboard WeLike to Sucia Island in the San Juans a week ago. When my family and friends scattered my late wife’s ashes in those waters and dedicated a memorial bench on Sucia in Barbara’s honor a year ago this week, I vowed to revisit it annually. This was my first pilgrimage.

I took a sack lunch and ate it perched on the waterfront, bluff-top bench, which commands one of the island’s finest views, looking northwestward toward Waldron Island and into Canada. As kayakers paddled the sparkling waters, I chatted with Barbara. I told her about our daughter and her new bakery job, and how we’ve both been doing. The bench is on a lightly used trail, so nobody was there to wonder about my sanity. I took some spray cleaner, a brush, and paper towels and gave the bench a good cleaning, though it had weathered the year in very good shape. I was able to tie up to a state-parks buoy in Shallow Bay and slept in WeLike’s cozy cuddy cabin. Within sight of the bench, my chats with Barbara lasted into the evening.

My view as I lounged on Barbara’s Sucia Island bench. In the left distance is Patos Island, at the northern edge of the San Juans.

I returned to my island for just three days before heading out again Saturday morning on WeLike for Friday Harbor. An old Seattle Times friend, Greg Gilbert, was stopping over in Friday Harbor in his classic 1926 motor yacht, Winifred. In a class known as a Lake Union Dreamboat, the name well fits Winifred, which Greg maintains in cherry condition, with gleaming varnish and gilded name.

Winifred was built in 1926 at Lake Union Drydock in Seattle. She is named for the wife of Adolph Schmidt of Olympia Brewery, who once owned the boat.

This was a very special occasion: At age 77, Greg had retired as a Seattle Times photographer last Tuesday, after working for the newspaper since he was 21.

He generously let me invite my Friday Harbor friends (and fellow Inside Passage voyagers) Barbara Marrett and Bill Watson to dinner aboard Winifred, and we all got along like gangbusters. I procured two-pounds of fresh salmon from the fish shop on the Friday Harbor dock and we had a scrumptious dinner on Winifred’s open fantail as the almost-full moon dawdled across the sky. Barbara M. and Bill brought superbly fresh vegetables from their garden. Greg’s contribution, besides the perfect venue: three chilled bottles of Champagne. It was a memorable evening, even if the memory gets a little fuzzy toward the end.

Raising glasses of bubbly from Winifred’s fantail, from left: Greg Gilbert, Barbara Marrett and Bill Watson.

Before departing on Sunday, I accompanied Barbara and Greg to a San Juan Island ceremony commemorating the recent death of Tokitae, the last Southern Resident orca in captivity (at Miami’s Seaquarium), and marking the installation of a Lummi tribe’s carving depicting the orca known as Tahlequah, who carried her dead calf more than 1,000 miles around the Salish Sea and generated worldwide headlines in 2018.

Freddie Lane photographs the whale carving installed at Jackson Beach Park on San Juan Island. He is road manager for the Lummi Nation’s House of Tears Carvers, which created the work.

Now I’m back in the writing hut on my rocky knoll, where we’re having the first wet week of summer. The sound of raindrops plunking on my cedar-shake roof is punctuated now and again with kettle-drum rumbles of thunder.

On Wednesday evening, if there’s a clearing in the clouds, look for the Blue Moon, the second full moon — and second close-to-earth supermoon — of this month. Every which way I look at it, my August has been full, and at times super. I hope the same for you.

This preteen island feline rocks with surf-and-turf and the ‘Lollipop’ tune

Galley Cat, who only admits to being 9, trots across the mossy top of our rocky knoll on Center Island.

THE MARKETING PEOPLE saw me coming. Today is Galley Cat’s birthday, so I bought a big packet of BIRTHDAY beef-and-lobster flavored kitty treats.

That’s how the package is labeled, with “birthday” in all caps, along with graphics of party balloons, confetti, and a rather crazed birthday-hat wearing cat opening a beribboned gift box from which a frantic lobster and a pop-eyed steer are madly trying to escape. Surf-and-turf, wrapped and ready to munch and crunch.

The escape motive is my reading of the situation, presuming that the crustacean and the cow are properly reading the context.

On normal days, Galley gets three bite-sized cat treats every time she comes in from outdoors. They aren’t usually BIRTHDAY cat treats, but made by the same manufacturer, with a wide variety of flavors, most of which have an ingredient list prominently featuring the words “by-product,” “Ferrous Sulfate” and “dried cheese.” Basically, they’re Cheetos for cats, but without the orange powder that can be so pesky on the paw.

My late wife, Barbara, established this treats-when-you-come-inside protocol years ago on the premise that it would encourage our adorable feline to come home instead of taking up residence with a neighbor whose grass might seem greener — or supply of cat treats more reliable.

Galley has always liked this policy. In fact, she likes it so much that she will often go outside and come back inside every five minutes. Thank you, dear spouse.

Like a special promotion at McDonald’s, today is Double Treats Day at the Nuthatch cabin. On this eleventh anniversary of her debut to kittenhood, Galley is getting six of these special BIRTHDAY treats every time she comes inside.

I don’t think she knows what it’s about, but she seems to approve.

On the topic of her natal day: I’ve had a lot of cats in my life, but Galley is the first whose actual birth date I’ve known. Most other cats have either been mysterious strangers who wandered by the Cantwell manse (strays) or adoptees we liberated from chokey (shelter cats) who didn’t come with a pedigree. But Galley came from a newfangled pet adoption center in Woodinville that made sure every adoptee was spayed or neutered, immunized, and came with a birth record.

Galley Cat, whose adoption-center name was Mabel, or Marvis, or something equally unsuitable, came from Ellensburg, we were told. She was born on August 17, 2012. I’ve always imagined her one of a litter of very cute kittens born in a hay-lined box in a warm barn. (The “warm” part is a good bet, being mid-August in Central Washington. If she was actually born in a ditch behind a dive bar, I don’t want to know.) Little did she imagine, I imagine, spending half her life on a sailboat and the rest on a small island cooled by marine breezes.

Besides the extra rations today, we’re just having a small, quiet celebration with a few friends, mostly nuthatches and towhees.

Oh, and instead of the traditional birthday song, at my friend Dave Kern’s suggestion I will sing her theme song. (Doesn’t every pet have a theme song?) Hers goes something like, “Galley Cat, Galley Cat, oh Galley Galley Galley.” It sounds better when you set it to the tune of the Chordettes’ 1950s pop hit “Lollipop, Lollipop.” Click and enjoy.

Galley especially enjoys the part where you make the pop noise with your finger in your cheek. (How did Andy Williams get in this music video?)

Off my island and off my rocker

Barbecue smoke wafts lusciously through a Schafer State Park picnic shelter during a recent celebration staged by park lovers.

FEELS LIKE I’VE BEEN off my island as much as on it lately. And so busy, feeling a little bit off my rocker.

Daughter Lillian and I are in the final throes of selling our dear old sailboat, Sogni d’Oro, and it’s kept me hustling with last-minute fixes and general spiffing up so I can feel as good as I can about the whole process. It’s a bittersweet occasion, giving up the Westsail 32, Hull No. 777, built in 1977 (good karma, right?). The boat was my family’s home for the better part of 30 years, enabled us to explore almost every nook (and most crannies) of the San Juan Islands, and took us on one of our biggest life adventures, a 1990s sailing trip to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez.

But it’s time for a new skipper to love her, and we’ve found a buyer with the right enthusiasm, energy and dreams — a close friend of Lillian’s, who over the past two months has become my friend, too.

Daughter Lillian makes Sogni d’Oro beautiful during a boatyard haulout last September. The boat’s name is the Italian version of “Sweet Dreams.”

Galley Cat and I spent a week early this month staying aboard the boat as I worked to resolve an electrical glitch in the engine room. The week reminded me of how at home I feel in marinas: Sipping the day’s first coffee in the sailboat’s teak-floored cockpit on a flat calm morning when the sun is just starting to glint off the other hulls. Watching a well-laden boat head northward on the first morning of a summer cruise. Ahh, we enjoyed many of those 7 a.m. departures.

More recently, I was on the mainland for a week of visiting with friends in Seattle and Olympia. Drinking good wine and eating delicious food during a sunset dinner on the deck of the lovely old Magnolia Bluff home of Carol Pucci and Tom Auciello (the “Puciellos,” we call them), all with an entertaining vista of passing ships and shuttling ferries. Two nights followed with Olympia friends Daniel and Jean Farber, where entertainment from the front window included an eyepopping view of Mount Rainier turning pink and purple with every sundown, and sailing dinghies scooting like water bugs across Budd Inlet.

My Olympia visit included two unique celebrations of Americana. Saturday, it was a gathering of Washington State Parks retirees, supporters and friends at Schafer State Park, a sweet little park on the Satsop River. The park hides out along a narrow and winding road between Montesano and Shelton in the most rural reaches of decidedly non-urban Mason County. This park rivals those previously-undiscovered-until-2021 Amazon Basin natives for being off the beaten path.

The Schafer gathering was sponsored by FOSLS (Friends of Schafer and Lake Sylvia), a group of local folks who successfully battled plans to close “their” parks during one of Olympia’s budget crises of recent decades. On a perfect summer day, this soiree featured free hot dogs and hamburgers fresh off the grill, along with groaningly well-laden potluck tables of toothsome salads (I love that one with broccoli, raisins and bacon) and desserts (from hunks of crimson watermelon to squares of sweet apfelkuchen).

Upcoming FOSLS events that might be worth a visit

Lake Sylvia Fall Festival	September 10	10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Schafer Park Salmon Bake	October 7	1 p.m.
Schafer Park Yule Log Celebration	December 3	1 p.m.

After a tour of the park’s astonishingly well-groomed new campground, we tapped toes to the music of the Grays Harbor Banjo Band, complete with a washtub bass, like they had detoured through Mayberry on their way from Hoquiam and signed up Ernest T. Bass. The band’s emcee possessed the self-effacing humor to tell banjo jokes. (My personal favorite, which I wish I’d stood up and shared: “A banjo player bemoaned the crime wave gripping his city. He told how he had parked on a city street and locked his car with his banjo on the back seat. When he came back to the car, a window was broken and someone had thrown in another banjo.”)

Topping the day, I won the big door prize: a state parks Discover Pass.

Back in Olympia on Sunday, Daniel sang in his synagogue’s choir during a street festival celebrating the 150th anniversary of organized Judaism in Washington State. Daniel’s place of worship, Temple Beth Hatfiloh, is the present-day offspring of the state’s first Jewish fellowship, established in 1873. Sunday, the temple was also marking the 50th birthday of their rabbi, and his 20th year of service in Olympia. This time, the hot dogs were kosher.

My friend Daniel Farber, right, pitches in with his temple’s choir. Oy, this number was easy to sing along with.

Back in Seattle, I spent another day working on the boat’s electrical problem. No joy; I ordered a new alternator. More satisfying was the next day, when Lillian and I scrubbed and polished Sogni d’Oro together. Almost ready for the hand-off day.

As much as getting away and visiting friends is good for me, it was with fondness and relief that I returned to the Nuthatch cabin yesterday. I reunited with Galley Cat, who had spent the week at the cabin with cat-sitters in the personages of niece and nephew Sarah and David and their two young boys. “They were fine, but I missed ya’, Pops!” Galley told me. Have I mentioned how she calls me “Pops”?

Likewise, I said. As I missed afternoons such as this, sitting in my writing hut with sun streaming in and a luscious light breeze cooling me through the open door as I peck away at my laptop and listen to Carole King, Bill Withers and the occasional Spotted Towhee. Galley sprawls in the sun on the front stoop. She doesn’t care who’s on the stereo.

Ahhh. It’s good to be home on my island. Back in the rocker, so to speak.