“Living on a Yacht” The Questions You Ask Us & Photo Collage of 1 Year ….#28

adventuresonangelique

7 years ago

June 2018

Angelique left the Columbia River Yacht Club for her multiple year voyage.

I will answer the 4 of most popular questions we get from others

Give you a 1 year review with Pictures… Isn’t a picture are worth a 1000 words?

Question: Tell me about your worst weather event?

Surprisingly this happened while anchored not moving. Mainly because we try and watch the weather as close as we can before leaving…not to say it won’t happen in the future.

Wind Storm – Cabo San Lucas – On Wednesday afternoon of Nov 14th around 11 am we left the safety of the Marina Cabo San Lucas and anchored just outside the marina in the bay. When we anchored it was a beautiful quiet day and calm. So Calm Dan was going to go swimming. By 1pm the winds started picking up and getting tossed around. t around 3 pm the decision was made, pull the anchor. We had no place to go, but friends Dean and Roxanne found a place for us at San Jose del Cabo. We headed for safety and realized we had the worst (to date) beating of this trip. More info in Original Blog story = Picking up Pieces in Puerto Los Cabos, Whale Sharks & Thanksgiving in La Paz….#20

Question: What about Pirates?

Yes, this is a concern in certain parts of the world, but our worst event happened in California USA.

Scariest Event – Unauthorized boarding of Angelique – We had just come from a private island resort at Tinsley Island (sponsored by Jaren Leet ) an outstation of St Francis Yacht club in San Francisco. We stopped in Antioch Marina. At 3am I heard a noise that seemed like someone walking on the back deck. Dan got up to investigate and sure enough a 30-ish lady sitting in our chair on the back deck. When Dan asked her to get off, she didn’t. It took 15 mins or so to get her off. She also decided to show up again the next morning during daylight and ask again if she could come aboard. Both times the police were called. The second time we got good pictures of her. We think she was on some type of drugs. More info in Original Blog Story = Private Island Resort, Public Docks & “Repel Boarders @ 4 am”….#16

Question: Are you afraid of being boarded by officials?

We’ve been boarded twice, once in Canada by customs and once in Neah Bay by Coast Guard.

Canada Customs boarding, Training event – After arriving at our very first port from our Portland departure, we landed in Ucluelet BC Canada. We had to wait for the customs & board control to arrive, staying on our boat for over an hour. Once they arrived we were instructed to stay in one place and allow them to do their work. It took a couple hours for them to complete their search and seizure procedures. The two hardest parts were when they found Dans Grandfathers small hunting knife with butterfly handles and said it was illegal to have, confiscated it and charged him $500 dollars. The other event was when they thought Ken Williams had a warrant out for his arrest? Sorry no Pictures on this one. We were detained for a couple hours and then released to go ashore. No love for the Canadian officials.

Official Business – US Coast Guard -We were greeted by the US Coast Guard @ Neah Bay on August 6th. We had Evan Tozier with us and had just cruised from the Puget Sound area to anchor overnight in the bay before heading down south to Ilwaco WA.

We had a great experience with seeing the Navy on our way up. Now the Coast Guard wanted to board us and check out all our safety items. I call Dan “Mr. Safety”, so we had no problems at all, other than getting them on and off the boat. The Winds and waves were pretty bad that day and we had a hard time getting them on/off. They were very nice and had everything checked out in 20 mins and let us go. Original blog story = US Coast Guard & Navy interactions with Angelique….#10

Question: It must be nice to always be on Vacation?

We live on our boat, yes we are in nice places but we are always doing boat maintenance. Repairs, cleaning, maintenance, sewing, and basically fixing anything and everything is a daily event. We say….

“We get to do repairs/maintenance in exotic places”

Dan is monitoring, fixing and maintaining the engines on a constant schedule with lists of stuff to improve on always. Plus we did a huge list of repairs in the Shipyard at Opequimar in Puerto Vallarta. Original blog post = A SHIPYARD STORY –> What it Takes to Keep a Big Hatteras Going….#24 (I should do a blog on just his improvements/repairs…would you all like to see that??)

Biggest Unexpected Replacement – While we were North in the San Juan Islands we had stopped at a dinghy dock to get some coffee. It happened to be really rough, so Dan stayed put while I ran up for important provisions. On our way back to the boat we noticed one of the tubes was a bit low on air. When we got back, we found a 2+ inch hole on the bottom. After multiple repairs and months of success and then disappointments with the fix we finally had to call it quits and file a claim with our insurance. The inspector came and said that Dan did a great job patching, but the dinghy was totalled. We decided on a shorter, lighter weight & overall smaller dinghy. We got lemonade from our lemons … We had multiple write ups on this topic… Multiple original blogs = A Dinghy Saga, lemons in paradise….#8 & Girls In-Charge when Storm hits & Our Dinghy’s Final Resting Spot…#17