What We Do for Fun

A wise man once said "I spent most of my money on women and boats. The rest I squandered."

We are seriously into boating. Not just any boat, but a very special boat - the C-Dory - supported by a very special owners group, the C-Brats. Virtually everyone who buys a C-Dory finds the C-Brats first. Some 3600+ members strong, it is one of the most active boating sites on the net. I tell folks the C-Brats will become your new best friends. We have quite a few get-togethers all over the country, and an annual "C-Brat Convention" in Seattle in January.

Our C-Dory is a 2005 25 foot cruiser named Daydream. It has everything we need, including a vee-berth, full galley, dinette, cabin heat and the all-important stand-up head! The full camper-back canvas turns the cockpit into another room.

C-Dorys have a flat bottom toward the aft, which means they can plane at a low speed and are very economical to operate. With their shallow draft, they are perfect for exploring places the deep vee boats simply can't go. Daydream is powered by a Honda BF150 main, with a Honda BF15 kicker. Dinghy is a Gary King Alaska Series. Dog is a Lhasa Apso named Baxter, who pretty much goes where we go on the boat.

Patty and I love this boat. We cruise mostly in the San Juan Islands and the Canadian Gulf Islands, but because it is a trailer boat, we have cruised a lot of other places too, like Lake Roosevelt in Washington, Lake Pend Oreille and Priest Lake in Idaho, and our new favorite - Lake Powell in Utah. in 2005 we cruised Desolation Sound in BC, and in 2006, I cruised from Blaine, Washington, to Ketchikan, Alaska, and Patty flew in to cruise around SE Alaska. Pix are here. The album highlight is a picture that appeared in Motorboating magazine.

From May through September, Daydream lives at Hilton Harbor in Bellingham, Washington, for easy access to the San Juans and Gulf Islands. During the winter, it lives in our driveway. In the winter, we get our boating fix with quick over-nighters at Andrews Bay in Lake Washington. A recent trip to Andrews Bay with our neighbors, Garry and Vicki Anderson, is documented here. Garry and Vicki have a Trophy, and we had a great outing together.

In September, we will be heading back to Lake Powell to meet up with a group of C-Dorys from all over. It was such a great trip last year. Weather in the 90s, water temps in the high 70s, swimming every day. Here are the pix on C-Brats of the 2008 Lake Powell trip.

In fact this blog is really only a trial canter for when I really have something to blog about - my great aspiration is to take a year, more or less, to cruise the Great Loop, a circumnavigation of the eastern portion of the U.S. and Canada. Right now work keeps getting in the way. But in a couple of years, look for a blog called The Voyage of Daydream or something like that.

By the way, this is my first post using ecto, great blog authoring software for the Mac. I guess we we will save the glories of Mac (and the evils of Windoze) for another day!