Popeye, the Friday Harbor Seal.
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Sunday morning after a good nights sleep, we decided we would spend two nights here, giving us a couple of days to try and repair the sail, relax a little, and explore the town. I think we had breakfast on the boat, and Deb walked up to the bathroom to take a shower. I wandered up to the little floating store in the marina that sells fresh fish and got some smoked salmon. I saw Popeye the seal there. This seal is famous in Friday Harbor, so much so that she has her own statue up at the entrance to the marina! Every time I walked past the fish store, there she was, floating sleepily in the water waiting for passing tourists to feed her.
Back at the boat I removed the broken sail slug to take with us into town. While on deck, I heard an odd popping sound that I couldn't identify. Was it a fender sliding on the dock? No... a fender line sliding along the lifeline? No... then I noticed it. An odd bulge in the inflatable kayak. A quick inspection revealed that the outer ballistic nylon skin was ripping on one side, allowing the inner inflatable bladder to bulge out! I rushed to let the air out of it, and realized that we had inflated it to "proper pressure" on a colder, overcast day. Now that it was warmer and the sun was out, the pressure had risen to something high enough to split the skin, leaving a 2 foot long rip in one side. Sigh... add that to the list of stuff to fix.
Once Deb got back to the boat, I broke the bad news about her kayak, and we headed off into town towards the West Marine. On the way there, we stopped into a store that had some hats. After browsing for a few minutes, I found the exact hat that I had lost!!!! But... it was way too small! It turns out it was a kids size, and that's all they had. They had adult sizes in other colors, but one after another, Deb vetoed them all. I was on the verge of sending Deb packing when I found it buried under all the others! An adult version in black, a duplicate of the one I had lost! Yay!!!!
With that out of the way, my spirits brightened, and we continued on to West Marine. Of course, they didn't have a sail slug big enough for my boat. They recommended the sail loft down at the marina, but it was closed until Tuesday. After thinking a little bit, we went back to West Marine and I bought a couple of flat head machine screws, nylock nuts, and a stainless pad-eye. We also bought a roll of sail tape to fix the kayak, and it seemed like a good thing to have on board anyway.
Back at the boat again, I set about making repairs. I filed the broken edges of the sail slug flat, drilled it out, and bolted the pad eye onto the plastic piece that fit into the mast track. That got lashed to the sail with some utility cord and tied off. The slippery utility cord promptly untied as soon as I put tension on it, so I re-tied it, and then sewed the ends to the knot with whipping thread. With the slug reinstalled in the mast track, everything looked good! Time to tackle the kayak.
The kayak was significantly more work. Fortunately there was a zipper that allowed access to the inside of the nylon skin where the bladder was. Even better, the zipper was pretty close to the rip. This allowed me to apply sail tape to both the inside and outside to hold the rip together. Then, I was able to stitch along both sides of the rip to make everything permanent. For this task, I used my Speedy Stitch Sewing Awl. Let me just say, this is a misnomer... there is nothing speedy about this method of sewing! It took me the better part of an hour to make two rows of stitching the length of the rip. But, the awl did a good job, and the repair seemed quite solid.
With all the repairs taken care of, we had a chance to relax a little and wander around the town. We had already walked most of the town on a mission for replacement parts, but with the critical stuff taken care of, we now had time to browse. We stopped at a small place for lunch that specialized in cheese, beer, and wine. The cheese was very good, but also fairly expensive. In fact, expensive was kind of the theme in Friday Harbor. We stopped at the grocery store to get some steak to grill for later, wandered over to the hardware store to get some lamp oil for my oil lamp, and even found a store that sold all different kinds of jerky. Alligator, wild boar, even pineapple jerky. Overall, the town of Friday Harbor is a neat little place, but is designed to extract every last dollar from tourists passing through. I found myself missing the quiet relative solitude of our previous stay at Spencer Spit. Worn out from walking around all day (so much for relaxing!), we had dinner on the boat, did a little bit of planning for the next day, and went to bed.
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