La Conner mudflats, a narrow shallow channel.
Langley, Whidbey Island
Cast off from la Conner and made it down the narrow shallow channel without grounding. Arrived Langley, a very tiny tight little harbor. We did a few things wrong and lightly hit another boat’s aft swim step with our own. It took us quite a while to analyze what our mistake in communication was between myself watching the after port side while Dennis was steering on the starboard. When I called out “stern thruster” I mistakenly thought it was obvious which direction I wanted him to go but he misinterpreted me and so we hit. Not a lot of damage but some damage to our pride of boatmanship and handling. What I will aim for next time will to be more clear, “We are going to hit with our port stern, go to starboard with stern thruster”. This takes some time to say but is clear and a direct call to action. This does not happen very often at all thankfully, but probably is not the last time so we’ll try to be 100% clear in calls to action in the future. We eventually chatted with the boat owner and he thankfully agreed that this minor fender bender was no big deal.
The whole town is totally picturesque and quaintly funky.
Blow your own glass at Firehouse Studio & Gallery, here’s their kinky foreyard with great rocket sculpture and glass finial poles for the garden.
Chic Debris “Chic happens” is their motto. Eclectic little shop with collectibles and art.
Music For The Eyes, beads from all over the world, eastern carpets, smell of wool and lanolin, glorious richly colored walls, garments like eastern kimonos but not sure what these are called. It feels like a nomadic goat herder’s castle from deepest Iran or Turkey.
Eddy’s organic t-shirts, such a cute little shop with everything made locally, from great design printed on t-shirts to cute scarves and dresses, for adults and kids.
Wonderful cafes, too many to mention! The Braeburn Café has a cute little garden with oilcloth pennants twirling in the breeze.
The Star Store is a fantastic small department store with food to great clothes for women, men and kids, to lovely gifts and even some booze so something for everyone. At their healthy products and vitamins storefront, I finally found a face cream I would put on my face! Jason creams have good healthy ingredients and I have bought my last commercial cream filled with potentially dangerous chemicals. Honestly, I would rather just put a bit of canola oil on as a moisturizer instead of hydro-benzowhatsit and sodium laurel sulfate thingme number 26. If you haven’t started to look carefully at your skin care products ingredients labels, it’s time to start. I gave out 10 copies of a great book last Christmas, There’s Lead In Your Lipstick by Gillian Deacon that examines this toxic subject in good detail and presents alternatives and even recipes to make your own cosmetics! I am working towards this but just ran out of night cream aboard. Sunscreen lotions I do still use store-bought but Voyageur Soap & Candlemaking supply even has recipes and ingredients to make your own sunscreen! I’ll work up to that one.
Langley Fine Fabrics & Antiques had mouthwatering furnishing fabrics and trims, yum! Really special if you are looking for that sort of thing.
Museo is a fine little gallery this time showing delightful paintings by Lisa Snow Lady, amazingly enough her true name. We have bought a few things here over the years and I am very glad to see it still here and looking fine. Some other places, galleries, restaurants, taverns along the way are shuttered and shut, fallen on the hard times of current years.
Another fine gallery Brackenwood Fine Arts Gallery has a quite different flavor with a large focus on bronze sculpture. Artists that caught my eye were Michel Touris, Buffy Cribbs, Briony Morrow Cribbs, Gail Weir, Bergen Rose and Pete Jordan.
HA! Had a great game of boules or bocci is this perfect bocci court behind the Useless Bay Coffee Company and I whipped Den’s sorry little ass! Boules is a great game and this uneven bouncy ground was a perfectly uneven challenge for us both. Amazingly, I’ve never played this good and no doubt will never play as well again but I enjoyed it! HA! Really good players are sharp as sharks at it but we bumbled along and laughed a lot.
There’s always a huge abundance of juicy blackberries just at the top of the docks and this year was no exception so we picked 2 good bowls and will freeze them until our guests come next weekend. I barely moved more than about 6 feet and my bowl was full!
Published on: Oct 4, 2012