Chuckanut Island

Yesterday, my mom, dad, and I launched the inflatable and took it to Chuckanut Island. The inflatable is overpowered and really not meant for semi-open water with chop, so it slammed horribly and took on a lot of water. It was still fun! We landed on a nice little sandbar of the south end of the island, but the the whole place felt felt a bit "off". On all of our past visits, it had felt very inviting and full of life, but this time there seemed to be much less biodiversity and the island felt a bit foreboding. Our best guess as to what might have changed is that the island could have been hit with sea-star wasting disease. There were far fewer sea stars than we had remembered (we could only find about 12 on the whole island) and areas that had previously been bare rock and algae were covered in mats of young mussels and barnacles. We thought that this could indicate a huge reduction in sea star population due to disease, and a subsequent ecosystem destabilization. Hopefully we're wrong and I was just mis-remembering.

Google-Sourced picture of Chuckanut Island-
we forgot to take our own pictures.

Inflatable

We've gotten a lot done in the last couple of weeks. The flybridge and salon deck have been mostly completed and fiberglassed, the forward hawsepipes and lots of other bits of boat jewelry have been installed, and Randy has replaced two frames and installed two planks on the starboard side. David and my dad built the bench on the flybridge, and I spent and hour or two trying to put the teak trim on with my dad's frustratingly inaccurate miter saw. There ended up being a lot of gaps that had to be filled with epoxy, but it still looks pretty good. 

Fiberglass!

More Fiberglass!

Bench

Back of Bench

My next project on Misogi is a dutchman on a plank only a few feet from the waterline. It's not really proper repair procedure, and we'll probably just replace the whole plank in a couple of years. Until then, we need something to fill the hole, so I have some fun woodworking ahead of me. Picture of the hole is below.

Next Project