Mosaic Family Voyage: Salish Sea Cruising, Highs and Lows
2019 was a year of highs and lows for our family aboard our 40-foot sailboat, Mosaic, in the Pacific Northwest. By the time summer rolled around, we had surpassed a major goal in getting the boat, our home, moved north from the Columbia River to the expansive waters of the Puget Sound. Five years of effort and struggle had finally paid off. We’d made it.
My husband and I both had jobs that allowed us to work remotely. We were home-schooling our kids on the boat. We didn’t have a home port anywhere in the Puget Sound. Our adventuring was only limited by the constraints for work—we just needed to be some place every day that had good enough cell signal to connect to the internet for work.
The world was our oyster, or so it seemed. But on arrival in Seattle at the end of May, our alternator was completely shot. We spent a few weeks in a marina there getting settled into our new life, working on the engine and alternator, and planning our summer adventures.
Finally, toward the end of June, we were ready to leave the safety of the nest in Seattle. We’d replaced several components of the engine, and even had the alternator rebuilt; it seemed to be working. This was an important element as the alternator functions to charge the boat’s battery banks any time that the engine is running. Without being in a marina, we didn’t have readily available access to shore power to charge our batteries, and we needed to keep our batteries charged to keep the boat’s systems functioning smoothly and to be able to power our laptops for work.
We had a rough plan in mind to head from Seattle toward the south sound to explore our way all the way to Olympia. After a week at Blake Island Marine State Park just southwest of Seattle, we made plans with two other boats, Muse and Captain Musick, to meet in Oro Bay at Anderson Island. This would be our first time anchoring Mosaic and it felt like a big step. In three years aboard the boat, we’d never before spent a night away from the safety and security of being tied to a dock overnight.
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