Seattle – First Impressions.

Monday morning
We left Port Ludlow in a most relaxing manner, not an early start, but with a little wind blowing us onto the dock I thought it was a good time for Kathy to try springing us off using the prop walk. This is the way many big boats often get away from the dock when space or wind is making it difficult. Basically if you are port side too, as we were, you put the wheel hard to port, full ahead with the throttle and basically try to run over the finger, but before the boat makes any real headway, the stern has swung out, and you slam it into reverse, wheel amidships and back you go. It works a treat when you have the room for the bowsprit to swing over the finger, and not take out the mooring pile.

Once away we were out into the foggy waters of Puget Sound. Many other yachts and motor boats appeared and were all heading roughly the same way. We crossed through the Traffic Separation Scheme at one of the roundabouts and just a few hours out of Port Ludlow we were hanging out the fenders for Shilshole Marina, Ballard, Seattle. I hoped when we arrived, to find a shop with a lady selling shells, so I could point her out to Kathy and remark that “She Sells Sea Shells in a Shilshole Shop”, but we didn’t find one 🙁

Shilshole Marina is on the northern shores of Seattle City, on the edge of a district called Ballard. It’s a huge marina, hundreds of berths with some interesting boatsand is next to the entrance to Lake Union and Lake Washington, which you access via the Washington Ship Canal after passing up the Ballard Locks. 

We easily tied up, checked in for two nights then set off to get provisions from the local Safeway. My local supermarket in the UK was a Safeway until they went bust and Morrisons took over, so I was keen to see if this Safeway did the 6 brown rolls for a pound offer. Again I was disappointed, however they did have a stunning array of Artisan bread, but I’m past paying $4 for a loaf. On the way to the grocery store (as they call it here) we stopped by the Ballard locks, there’s a good chance we might be going through them soon, and watched some boats pass into the lake side, it all looked pretty straightforward. We also watched the salmon in the salmon steps making their way home. A special underground viewing spot has been built to allow you to watch the salmon trying to get back to their birthplace. You can also see outside the locks, many salmon waiting to enter the passage with the steps. This is a man made version of the rocky rivers and waterfalls they would normally be tackling, all built by the US Army when the canal was first created.

My first job was to get SIM cards for us and get some data connectivity. Seattle doesn’t seem too hot on giving away free internet, and most of the marinas don’t have it, but in Shilshole you can subscribe to a fancy service. However for $45 with AT&T we each got a month of free calls/text and 6gb of data, which isn’t bad, a lot better than Canada, but nothing like Malaysia where 1gb of 4g costs 50 cent.  We now have AT&T US numbers and are up and running on the net.

We popped into a bar on the way back and Kathy enjoyed her glass of wine while I spent an hour trying to get my SIM card to work. (It looks like they like the stout here)

I’m taking my time to get used to the American gregariousness, one one level, I’m sure the checkout staff at Safeway don’t give a monkeys about whether I have a good day or not, and I guess when you have said it/ heard it a million times, it probably loses its meaning anyway, on the other hand we meet some very friendly helpful people, who genuinely do seem to want me to have a nice day. Being a normally reserved Englishman, it’s a little confusing. A smile is usually sufficient 😉 Things are pricey here in Seattle, as they were in Canada, I could just be getting too miserly, if I divide the cost of everything by 2 then everything seems fine, but that plan has a long term flaw. Also we are coming from a few years in SE Asia where $3 gets you a very nice dinner.  It’s great to have a good choice of quality produce here, also I love the sights and sounds, big trains, pulling never ending cars (They call train trucks cars here). The whistle of the locos and the sounds of the police cars make me think of Casey Jones and Hill Street Blues!

Yesterday we headed downtown, we took in the Elliot Bay marina on the way as they had an offer for longer term visitors I wanted to check out. The city have made great bike trails here, but sadly for us the Seattle port Authority made a new cruise terminal dock on top of the trail, at least that what it looks like on google maps, so we had quite a detour to get to the marina.However once there we signed up for 2 weeks berthing. We cycled onto the space needle area, as we planned to spend a few hours in the Pop Music Museum there, however when we arrived it was getting late and I was surprised to see the admission fee was nearly $30 each, and I don’t even like grunge. $30 buys a lot of shackles! So we decided that Kathy would come back later in the week and spend the whole day there to get her moneys worth while I took my $30 down to the docks to see what I could find (In the chandleries).

One thing I hadn’t really appreciated about Seattle was the amount of hills around, for some reason I had always thought of it as a coastal town on a strip of coast in the NW of America, but looking at a map it’s a complete mess of mainland, islands, islands that are actually connected to mainland by spits, canals and lakes.Once again I find myself in a place where I think I need a year or more to fully get to know the geography and a bit of the culture.

After the Museum recce we headed back hoping to take in one of the other big supermarkets here. It was going to be a ‘Fred Meyer’ or ‘Trader Joe’, both great names I thought. We followed the shoreline of Lake Union on the way back.Then over to Ballard across the Ship Canal. There is no shortage of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks and in tents on grass verges here.

We ended up at a gigantic Fred Meyer, that was like a B&Q and Tesco in one. Good prices too, so stocked up we headed back to the boat.

This morning (Wednesday) we slept in, and at 11:30 slipped our berth in Shilshole and motored the 4.9NM West then South East to Elliot Bay Marina where we are checked in for 14 days. It’s lovely here, very peaceful,  It’s about 25 minutes to cycle into the centre of Seattle from here, so I expect to be doing a bit of that, also it’s close to Ballard where there are stacks of marine companies that can help me get some of the boat jobs completed.

Plenty of boats sending out AIS signals here.

Paul Collister