This article was previously written by Rachel Messerschmidt for and published by Vancouver Family Magazine in June 2021.
As liveaboard cruisers in the Pacific Northwest, I tend to think in terms of “cruising season” and “the off season”. The off season is the cold, rainy period each year from November to April. It is the time to grin and bear it, a time to simply get through, so that we can enjoy the cruising season in all its glory once again.
Unlike most boaters in the PNW, we do not keep a home slip year-round. Instead, we have worked to build our life to fit this lifestyle. My husband and I both work remote jobs, we homeschool our kids, and we have no car. We keep nothing that can tie us to a particular place. Our boat is our home and that allows us the freedom to travel from place to place as often as we like, while affording us the luxury of bringing our home with us everywhere we go.
During the cruising season, when the weather is nice and the outdoors welcoming, we spend our time exploring together as a family. So far this year, we’ve traveled from Olympia all the way north to the San Juan Islands. We’ve seen orca whales, more than once, and even had the privilege of enjoying their company for over an hour one day. We’ve explored state parks and visited some of our favorite quiet waterfront towns. Just yesterday, as we walked a couple miles along a waterfront trail, we got to watch a family of four river otters enjoy a snack as they drifted with the current.
Soon we will again visit the crown jewel of the San Juan Islands: Sucia Island Marine State Park. Accessible only by boat, Sucia boasts over 800 acres of forest, coves, beaches, and trails- all protected state park lands. It is home to Fossil Beach where you can walk the water’s edge and find hundreds of fossils from ancient times when the ground you stand upon was the bottom of a sea. It’s also said to be the only place in Washington where an 80-million-year-old fossil bone of a T-Rex has been recovered.
At the next bay over, you’ll also find the infamous China Caves where rum runners and migrant slave traders of the early 1900’s would stash their illegal goods inside the pock-marked sandstone caves when pursued by the authorities. The cell signal holds out and there’s enough room to find a spot for your boat even on the busiest of weekends. Primitive camp sites are available on the island and many people make use. The island’s largely untouched nature is a huge draw in the warm summer months.
We’ll spend another several weeks exploring the many amazing places that we love in the San Juans before crossing the Strait of Juan de Fuca once more to get back to Port Townsend. There, we’ll lift our sailboat out of the water for a couple of weeks’ worth of projects as final preparation for our biggest adventure yet, heading south down the west coast this August to take our family to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez.
Rachel Messerschmidt and her family are Clark County natives currently living and cruising full time aboard their sailboat, Mosaic. In the Pacific Northwest currently, they are preparing to leave for Mexico in August of this year. Rachel blogs about her life and journey at www.mosaicvoyage.com and shares her family’s adventures in a monthly column in Vancouver Family Magazine.
