Of frozen pipes, boiling water, and small island pleasures

Wee Nooke is my 6 foot-by-6 foot writing hut on the rocky knoll behind Nuthatch Cabin.

HOORAY, I’M BACK IN THE NOOKE, with no more water to boil. That’s my good news for the day on Center Island in the San Juans. (More about boiling water in a minute.)

Sitting here eating my sack lunch in Wee Nooke, the tongue-in-cheeky P.G. Wodehouse-inspired name for my writing hut, is good news because I just love working here. Perched on the rocky knoll behind Nuthatch Cabin in a little meadow that dazzles with wildflowers each May, the Nooke is a 36-square-foot cedar hut. First erected as a playhouse for then-preteen daughter Lillian 20 years ago, it came on a couple of pallets as a potting-shed kit from British Columbia.

Handmade postcards from Stuart Island, a neighbor in the San Juan archipelago, festoon Wee Nooke’s walls between windows that can open to welcome breezes on warm days.

It did its duty as a daughterly retreat for several years, hosting at least one rather cramped sleepover with one of her middle-school girlfriends before Lillian handed off the keys — or the padlock combination, as the case may be — to her old man.

I installed a small writing desk with lamp, snaked an ethernet cable up the rocks and added an electric oil-filled radiator for January days like this. With a wall of mullioned windows looking out on craggy firs and the occasional grazing deer, it became the perfect place to write, even with the retained pre-teen decor of zebra-striped rug and beaded entry curtain.

Besides countless installments of the “Reef,” the Nooke and I have produced a handful of freelance travel stories, a recreation section of the Mountaineers-published “We are Puget Sound” book, and (with Barbara’s collaboration, in her day) more than one mystery novel.

Mailbox as art: Rescued from Lopez Island Dump, it perches on Wee Nooke’s front railing. The flag is always up.

My custom is to bring a lunch up with me, along with a Thermos of hot water. A tiny table holds a variety of teas and instant coffee. As I write, I usually listen to my favorite music-streaming channel. Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, Bill Withers and other mellow rockers of the 1970s ring out from the nice Polk Audio computer speakers I got for free at the Lopez Island Dump’s Take It-or-Leave-It warehouse. When the weather doesn’t keep her curled up in the cabin, Galley Cat is a regular visitor as I work. I slide open the door whenever I hear her scratch, and she leaps up on to a bookshelf to be rewarded with cat treats. On a warm day, she’ll be in and out every five minutes. (She shirks duties as a mouser, however. I must set traps on occasion.)

Lillian made this sign for the writing hut.

Yes, I love the Nooke. With the portable radiator pulled under the desk this afternoon, I’m snug as a bug in a rug.

Oh, and that bit about boiling water. It’s just a reminder that this is still January in the winter-wild San Juans. When I returned Sunday from visiting my sweetheart in Thurston County, our island’s community water system was under a “boil water” order until further notice. In the hard freeze while I was gone, our water system froze up again. With the required rerouting to different pipes and another reservoir tank, once water was flowing again the purity couldn’t be trusted.

A jug of emergency water ensured that I could brush my teeth without worry.

But Monday morning our caretaker took a sample to the mainland for testing. By Tuesday we got the “all clear” signal to again drink our tap water without first bringing it to a roiling 212 degrees F.

So, yes, living on a remote island has its challenges, sometimes big. But it always has its wee delights.

With howling winds and picture-postcard snow, winter keeps us guessing

The rambunctious Chevy dog tugs owner Carol on a snow-frosted January morning in rural Thurston County. Winter weather wasn’t as benign in other parts of Western Washington, including my San Juan Islands.

WINTER THROWS ITS TANTRUMS whether I’m on my island or off. This most petulant of seasons stomped into the San Juans last night with puffed out cheeks and a decidedly icy demeanor.

I left Center Island Wednesday to spend 10 days or so with my sweetheart in rural Thurston County, where we’ve been enjoying a scenic Friday of light snow. Because the National Weather Service predicted frigid temperatures on the way to my island, before leaving I took measures to ensure that Nuthatch Cabin would weather the deep-freeze. Among other things, this involved clearing out the kitchen pantry’s bottom shelf, yanking up an access hatch in the floor and doing a couple of fancy limbo maneuvers to fold my lanky 6-feet-two past the upper shelves of spare olive oil and unopened pancake syrup and down into the dank and murky crawlspace that is the dominion of spiders, water pipes and the occasional hapless mouse.

I use the term “crawlspace” advisedly. With maybe two feet of clearance between the plastic-draped earthen floor and beams above me, I did more wriggling on my belly than actual crawling. The objective: placement of two low-wattage air-dryer units, leftovers from my sailboat-owning days, beneath water pipes that snaked from beam to beam. That done, I plugged the warming units in to a heavy-duty extension cord that I led back up through the pantry to an electrical outlet in the living room. Frozen pipes prevented, I’m hoping.

In addition, I plugged in a small oil-filled radiator next to the bathroom toilet (I’ve seen the tank’s water freeze solid once) and put another portable radiator next to the kitchen sink. As always before departing, I turned off the cabin’s water main and drained faucets.

Such prep seemed justified Thursday as I sat in Tenino reading an email from Center Island’s caretaker. He warned all island homeowners of a forecast for frigid northerly winds by the weekend.

Galley Cat looks out on my sweetheart’s snowy garden in Thurston County this morning.

“It is possible that we may not be able to provide water during the coldest part of this cold snap due to reservoir freezing. If you’re here on island, it’s a good idea to have some fresh water reserved for your household use,” he wrote.

It wouldn’t be the first time the island’s water system had seized up when the mercury took a skydive. I already had two five-gallon jugs of emergency drinking water stored on my back porch.

So I assumed all was well Friday morning when we awakened here in Tenino to an inch of sparkling snow on the ground, my first of the season, with temperatures in the low 20s Fahrenheit. The sky soon cleared to a perfect January blue, as pastel-soft as a baby boy’s blanket. My sweetie and I enjoyed walking Chevy, the high-energy dog, on an icy back road to a sun-dappled lake where armadas of winter waterfowl seemed bent on paddling fast enough to keep the water from freezing. It was a beautiful winter day.

On our return, however, a text from my conscientious island neighbor, the Mad Birder, gave me a big chill.

Fallen limbs litter the front steps at Nuthatch Cabin on Center Island this morning after a frigid windstorm. John Farnsworth photo.

He attached photos showing two very large fir branches — themselves almost the size of small trees — that had plummeted from far above on to my cabin around dawn after a night of banshee winds. M.B. described it as a “massive crash” that made him and his wife think fallen timbers had smacked their own roof.

I soon exhaled with relief as the missive suggested almost no damage to my cabin. A photo showed a large tangle of limbs and fir needles that had come to rest on my front steps.

A phone call to M.B. confirmed that the cabin’s metal roof appeared essentially unscathed, and the stairway’s railing suffered only scratches that could be sanded out.

Winds had diminished, but temperatures hadn’t risen. While we basked in the mid-20s in Tenino, Center Island’s high for the day was about 9 degrees, M.B. told me. I was glad for leaving heat on, and thankful for my generous neighbor who used his chainsaw to clear the mess.

Center Island wasn’t the only place feeling this first seasonal barrage, of course. Harboring hopes for some downhill adventures with my new honey, I’d recently signed up for the daily snow report from White Pass Ski Area, 69 miles from Tenino. A couple days ago the report showed mountain winds gusting in excess of 100 mph. Under “conditions” was just one word, all in caps: BLIZZARD.

I think of how native Northwest tribes ascribe wily ways to wildlife such as ravens. It seems to me that winter has its own wily ways, and I’m probably right in guessing there are more wiles on the way. Enjoy January’s beauty as you can. But let me just say “brrrrr.” Stay warm. Stay safe. And if you’re walking through woods on a blustery day, keep looking up.

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Does absence makes the moss grow lusher? Island homecoming is sweet

Behind Nuthatch Cabin, Galley Cat explores the rocky knoll where spongy moss has grown thick with winter rains.

HOMECOMINGS OFTEN TOUCH THE HEART, and my Wednesday return to the Nuthatch was no exception.

Galley Cat and I had departed Center Island on the Island Express water taxi along with daughter Lillian and our friend Lux on the day after Christmas. My destination was the home of my new sweetheart, Carol, three hours south. The next day was her birthday, which we would spend in a beachfront rental looking out on stormy seas at Moclips on the Washington Coast.

I spent another week with Carol and her rambunctious dog, Chevy, at their home in rural Thurston County. Her home sits on five wooded acres a short walk from the pretty Deschutes River, the waterway that skirts the old Olympia Brewery at Tumwater and feeds into Capitol Lake in the shadow of our state’s capitol dome.

This time of year, her neck of the woods feels even moister than mine. In fact, much of her acreage is classified as wetland because of the marshy soil. Alders and cottonwoods are draped in lichen and fringed with moss. Fog frequently lurks among the trees this time of year. On a nearby lake, trumpeter swans paddle in the mist.

Wednesday, Carol was due to fly away to visit her daughter who lives in Washington, D.C., so I dropped her at the airport and came back to my island to rekindle the home fires.

While Carol’s marshy environs are beautiful in their own right, my rocky knoll seems much different. Rather than adorning trees, spongy, emerald-hued moss cushions the island rocks. After plenty of winter rains, the moss is inches thick and vibrantly green. In the mild season we’re experiencing, I still have fuchsias struggling to bloom in planters on my deck.

Galley seems glad to be home. At Carol’s, coyotes are a threat so Galley stays inside unless I take her out on a leash to stroll the garden. The only wildlife threat on Center Island is from foxes ill-advisedly (and illegally) imported by a neighbor. But there aren’t many, and Galley has proven herself adept at quickly climbing a tree if foxes are about.

In our haste to depart on Boxing Day, we left the Christmas tree up. Happily, it has lost few needles, so I’ve left it up for me and Galley to enjoy for a few more days. Tomorrow I start stowing ornaments back in my dad’s old Army trunk — the one that crossed the Atlantic with him aboard the Queen Mary.

Today, I look out the windows of my writing hut as Galley perches on the desk next to my keyboard and meows for kitty treats. Watching through the mullioned windows as trees dance in the wind, listening to Gordon Lightfoot and the Lovin’ Spoonful on my desktop speakers, we are content for a few days to be back at our home, sweet home.

Remember, 2024 is the year we can save democracy or lose it. Please join me this year in writing letters to encourage voting among marginalized citizens in swing states where our nation’s fate will be decided. It’s a strategy with proven results. Get details at votefwd.org.

My COVID Thanksgiving

We had some beautiful weather and superb sunsets on Center Island for Thanksgiving. Unfortunately I was a little distracted.

THANKSGIVING CAME EARLY FOR ME this year. It was a good thing, as it turned out.

Two weeks ago, my island neighbor The Mad Birder and his lovely wife, Carol, extended a kind invitation for a turkey dinner. The invite included my brother Doug, who was visiting from New Mexico.

M.B. and Carol had bought a turkey breast to take with them on a Thanksgiving Week camper-van tour of Vancouver Island. They realized belatedly that they couldn’t cross the Canadian border with poultry. So they popped the turkey in the oven and said “Come on over.” There were peas. There was gravy. It was delicious.

My actual Thanksgiving Day could be the subject of a new movie titled “HOME ALONE: Brian Catches the Crud.”

A little context: What worried me most about my travels to Greece and Turkey last month was that, like virtually everyone I know who’s come back from vacationing in Europe in the past two years, I would likely get off the plane in Seattle with COVID.

Living alone on a remote island has helped me avoid catching the lousy illness that has plagued the world the past four years. That was important to me, since my diabetes and my 67 years put me at higher risk. I’ve had more booster shots than I can count. After carefully masking up on the long plane rides and in crowded museums across Greece, I was proud of myself for making it back to Center Island with no cough, no congestion, no sore throat. My senses of smell and taste were intact and ready for another round of ouzo, perhaps with a pumpkin-latte chaser.

It took me barely four weeks of being back home in Western Washington to finally come down with COVID. Damn.

Not really sure where I picked it up, though I traveled last weekend from Anacortes to a funeral in Vancouver, Washington, with stops around Lynnwood, Thurston County, Centralia and several points in between. Masked sometimes, but not always.

Last Monday, my throat was sore. A friend down south had told me she’d tested positive the previous day. I did the home test, swabbing a half-mile up my nostrils, adding droplets to the little device, and waiting 15 minutes for the answer.

I’d done this at least a dozen times before. Negative, always. This time two lines appeared, not just one. It was the “positive” reading.

Not one to accept fate without a fight, I rummaged through my bathroom drawers and came up with another home test, from a different manufacturer. Swabbed, dropped, waited. Swore.

I had The Crud.

First thing, I messaged daughter Lillian to cancel plans for her and partner Chris to spend Thanksgiving with me at the Nuthatch. That was my biggest disappointment. Galley Cat and I hunkered down for the duration. I’d just brought home lots of groceries. Considering I’d had the latest COVID booster shortly before leaving on my October trip, I assumed my illness would be mild.

Yes and no.

By Tuesday, the sore throat was gone, but head-cold symptoms set in, with mild headache. I made sure to drink plenty of fluids. Discovered that my home thermometer was inoperable. By nightfall, however, I was sure I had a fever. My forehead felt warm while the rest of me was shivering. I donned extra layers and climbed into bed.

Beyond just jettisoning those extra fluids, my kidneys seemed to go on overdrive all night long. I was up every hour on the hour to empty my bladder. When finally I fell deeply asleep before dawn, my body fought the fever until it broke and I awakened awash in my own sweat. I had to change the bedding.

Wednesday morning, the headache had eased but the sore throat returned with a vengeance. By dinnertime I could barely swallow. Both ears ached. I couldn’t speak. That night, I barely slept, groaning and wincing with every sip of water that I swallowed. Did I have strep throat on top of COVID? I resolved to get to an E.R. on the mainland the next day.

But, oh, yes, I live on a remote island. I’m reliant on a water taxi. I texted an inquiry. Yes, they could get me to Anacortes. But it was Thanksgiving and they were knocking off early; no boats in the afternoon. I’d be marooned on the mainland.

I chose to gut it out till Friday.

I don’t remember much about Thanksgiving Day. I napped a lot. Sipped ice water to soothe the flaming throat. Made a fishburger for dinner, with every swallow a pain. Watched “Miracle on 34th Street.” Wished for a miracle on Center Island. It was about that time, as I gulped down a little carton of my favorite piña colada yogurt, that I realized that the lively pineapple and coconut flavors I love were…missing in action. The yogurt was white. It was creamy. It was flavorless. I had lost my senses of smell and taste. Aaargh. Another stupid COVID curse coming true.

Friday, securely masked and as isolated on the boat as I could get, I made my way to an Anacortes walk-in clinic. After checking in I had to wait outside in my car because, oh yeah, I had COVID.

Because of my painful throat, I didn’t think I’d be able to speak clearly, so I had typed up and printed a report of my symptoms and concerns. But by the time I saw a doctor, I could talk almost normally. She examined my ears and throat, saw no bacterial infection, and talked me out of a request for Paxlovid, the antiviral med given to many COVID victims.

“The thing is, you’re getting better!” the doc told me with a relieved sense of seeing something she hadn’t seen often enough.

She was right. It’s Sunday. I’m home now, almost through with the sore throat, the congestion. The Snot Factory is shutting down.

All is on the mend, and reports say most people get their senses back.

If not, and I go through Christmas without smelling a fairy-lighted fir, without sniffing a gingerbread man, without the aroma of chestnuts or an open fire — well, that would really stink.

But at least I lived to tell about it. Damned COVID.

Gifts of gold and friendship

My writing hut looks out on a rocky knoll agleam with golden maples.

NOVEMBER CAN BE LONELY on my island in the San Juans.

It’s rarely quieter. I’ve gone days without seeing another human being. Galley Cat and I have kept each other company as the rains have made it a time for quiet indoor days of writing, reading and a good quotient of pleasant napping. For me, a new friendship is blossoming as we correspond by email. So not so lonely.

Perceptions sharpen among the peace and quiet. Stepping up the back path on a walk with Galley this morning, I noticed with a start, as if a breeze had snatched my hat: The maples have changed.

Just yesterday I noticed that maples around my place were still mostly green with leaf, unusual this far into the season.

But overnight that changed, adding splashes of soul-gladdening color among the evergreens. It’s a short period every autumn, but memorable for how the maples enliven the landscape with this painterly contrast of gold peeking from the green.

My heart swelled at the sight, and I ran for my camera.

Like a dash of sriracha in a stir-fry, a fallen maple leaf nestles among a swordfern on my hillside.

Another happy note: The Mad Birder and his lovely wife, Carol the Wonderful Watercolorist, have arrived next door for a few days’ visit, and I’m invited to dinner. I baked cookies to take for dessert. Maybe Carol will daub a painting of the maples while she’s here. Perhaps an overflight of southward honking geese will catch M.B.’s ear.

As November arrived, the island was cold and wet. Tonight it’s feeling warmer. I’m enjoying a visit with friends, and a gift from Mother Nature.

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.

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.

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.