ESCAPADE in Search of a Whale

March 24, 2002

"Hey Mike", he said to me last week in an e-mail message. "If the weather is nice Sunday do you want to go look for that baby orca in Puget Sound?"

Feeling rather antsy after a couple of weeks behind a desk without any significant exercise, and without other plans to get in the way, I took Ron up on his offer. With the latest news relating to the whale claiming that it had been staying close to the West Seattle to Vashon Island ferry runs, we decided to launch at Seattle's Don Armeni boat ramp in West Seattle. This was six miles from the area where the whale was located, but it was the closest we could find a useful boat ramp. This meant that we would certainly be putting in a few miles on the water!

It was drizzling early Sunday morning at my house, but it stopped as the hour of departure approached. I was just finishing packing my lunch when Ron called on his cell phone from the ramp and wondered where the heck I was. He said that clouds were breaking up, and it looked like it was going to be a nice day.

Out the door I skedaddled, drove to the ramp--making only one wrong turn down a long dead end street that turned into a driveway. Oops! That was a bit of fun, going in reverse for a block or two up a hill on a single lane road with a trailer!

Ron was in his boat in the water waiting for me as I pulled up to the boat ramp permit machine with my car. After seeing that the automatic permit machine was refusing to accept my money I found one of the "manual" permit envelopes--except now I needed to find a pen to fill out the form! Sigh....

The launching of the boat went fairly quickly. It took only two or three tries quickly backing up my car down the ramp, braking with a jerk just as my car's rear tires hit the water, to get the Escapade to slide off its trailer. I quickly emptied my car of the rest of the stuff needed for the journey, placed it on the dock, and went off to park my car.

By the time I returned to the dock a small flock of crows had descended upon my stuff and were pecking at it looking for treats. As I yelled at them Ron pedaled up and shooed them away. Sheesh! Luckily for me they didn't steal anything.

At 10 AM we started pedaling north along the east side of the peninsula comprising West Seattle. Unlike most Seattle oceanfront, with its big piers or shoreline condos, here there is a shoreline drive with a mostly unobstructed view of the water. In addition to the rocky bulkheads there is a long stretch of sand and gravel beach running for about a mile to the Alki Beach Park.

The weather was mostly overcast with the temperature in the 50's. It was not long before I removed my layers of jackets and my nylon pants, though, as the exercise caused me to heat up.

It took us about 40 minutes to reach Alki Point and start heading south towards Vashon Island. As we had to cross some shipping lanes we kept our eyes out for any traffic coming our way. We had not very long to wait. From the south a freighter was coming, and from the north an empty grain ship was heading our way. Yikes! We decided to make for Blake Island (west) to try to get out of their way.

As luck would have it, the grain freighter was also heading that way, so we hung out and waited for it to pass before continuing on to Blake Island. As we approached the island another tugboat, towing a log raft, passed behind.

The little marina was rather crowded, with as many as three yachts tied to each other and then to the docks. Apparently a local Puget Sound yacht club had a group overnight outing to the island, and most of the people were still there. When we arrived there were no empty places, except for the inner side that could not be reached by the larger vessels. As such we had our choice of where to tie up, so I picked a spot closest to the park restrooms and picnic tables.

Ron munched on his Power Bars and water, while I dined on succulent baked ham placed between two layers of leavened wheat, along with dessicated apricots, imported home ripened bananas, aged imported rye crisp wafers, a natural flavored effervescent nonfattening nonalcoholic beverage, and several hand dipped chocolate coated mint cookies procured from a charitable source. I shared the Girl Scout Thin Mints with Ron.

Leaving the island at about 1 PM we headed south towards Vashon Island. Off in the distance we could see a couple of smaller vessels more or less sitting in the water to the northeast of the island, and there was a ferry that seemed to be tied up at the Vashon terminal for an exceptionally long time. Perhaps that was where the whale was!

The wind was starting to pick up a bit. As it was coming from the south we started getting a little wave action. Every so often the waves were large enough to spray a little over the windshield, but we hardly felt a drop. The waves did make it a bit more exciting, however, as they tended to obscure all the junk that was dumped by the log raft into the water; e.g., logs, wood chunks, mats of bark, tennis balls, St. Patrick's Day balloons, and seaweed. Ok, so perhaps the last few items were not from the raft, but they got mixed in with it.

We reached the "area of interest" around 1:30. Several car ferries passed by during that time, each with crowds of people crowding around the railings looking into the water. What could they see? As I later told Ron, "an innumerable quantity of whales". From our vantage point, however, we had a hard time making out anything that looked like a whale from the waves. Sigh....

At 2 PM I called to Ron and suggested that "we make like whales and get the fluke out of there". After the requisite groan he agreed. We both put up our biminis, and Ron also put up his curtain windows, in order to take advantage of the tailwind.

We reached the Alki Point lighthouse in about an hour. Both the tide and the tailwind helped give us a nice push, resulting in a speed of about 4.4 mph for that leg of the trip without overly exerting ourselves. However, once we rounded the point it seemed as though we both ran out of energy at the same time. The scent of fish & chips from the nearby restaurants didn't help, either!

I had a few more dried apricots and Girl Scout cookies, and gave Ron a box of juice. That seemed to energize us a bit, that and the fact that it looked like a storm that had been threatening us since our departure from Blake Island was finally going to get us.

As luck would have it, we encountered only a few raindrops before returning to the boat ramp.

This was the longest trip I have had in an Escapade. Not having a GPS (yet) I estimate the distance traveled to be about 18.5 miles. With about 4.5 hours of actual travel time, this works out to an average speed of about 4 mph. Overall, this is a great way to travel!

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This page last updated May 19, 2002