Summer's over and now comes the best cruising season in the PNW--- fall, winter, and spring.
All the yard apes are back in school, their parents are slaving away at their two jobs apiece trying to make ends meet, all the guys are glued to their TV sets watching the worlds most pointless game, and it's just cold and rainy enough to keep almost everyone else off the water.
Most boaters have buttoned up their boats for the winter, the marina parking lots are nearly empty, and the bays and anchorages are pretty much deserted except for a few boaters who know how to be boaters.
The wildlife has all come back from wherever it is they go to avoid the noise and exhaust fumes of "boating season," and the air is fresh and clean again.
This is the best time to be on the water in the PNW and up in BC. We took the boat out last couple of Sundays for spins on the bay and around a couple of nearby islands. Both times it was sunny, in the high 40s-low 50s, with a nice 15 knot breeze out of the southeast. The the entire time we were out we saw exactly one other cruiser. There were a few tankers, tugs and barges and one or two sailboats taking advantage of the wind, but they are all as nice a part of the scenery as the islends themselves.
So we now face six months of great boating. Come mid-June we'll start tackling boat projects in the slip and confining our boating destinations to a little bay in the islands where the public cannot go, and suffer through the summer "boating season" until next September whent it all starts getting good again.