OYC Labor Day 2014 Cruise—8/29-9/1

Olympia Yacht Club (OYC) was founded in 1904 and is one of the oldest yacht clubs in the West.  OYC is one of the “Grand 14” Yacht Clubs in Puget Sound so our Flag Officers go to events as some of the most prestigious yacht clubs around and it also gives our members reciprocal moorage privileges at over 40 yacht clubs in the West and Western Canada. 

OYC is located in Downtown Olympia, the State Capitol, with over 300 moorage slips and boathouses for our members.  We’re at the southernmost end of Puget Sound in Budd Inlet. 

Great Blue Herons are often greeting us at OYC

Our view is the State Capitol dome and the Port of Olympia.  OYC has a full schedule of cruises, social events, barbeques, TGIFs, and monthly lunches and dinners throughout the year.  Every member family is required to volunteer 25 hours of service to the club each year, keeping all of us involved in activities.  This is our tenth year of membership in OYC.

The Labor Day Cruise is always popular, as a symbolic end to summer cruising. 

Our Labor Day photographic story starts by walking towards the gate to the OYC docks, passing the red, white and blue flowers in our planters.  Once through the gate, we can see our boathouse on the 400 dock, 2^nd boathouse from the end.

Orange construction fencing to keep the river otters out of the boathouse

We unlock the front door, walk to the stern of the boat and open the 15’ wide curtain so the boat can exit.  The space between the boathouse and the dock behind us with sailboats is only about 50’ (boat length 37.5’) so we slowly and carefully back out and turn the boat 90 degrees with our stern thruster and the engine.  This can be tricky if the wind is blowing hard or a big current coming from the Deschutes River dam nearby.  Once out, if we’ll be away a few days or longer, we stop at an empty dock and close the boathouse curtain and lock the entry door.  Then the next job is to raise our hinged mast (the mast is much taller than the boathouse) and secure it plus raise the 3 antennae for our radios. 

Then we’re off!   This Labor Day cruise is at OYC’s outstation, about 12 nautical miles away, that we call “Island Home.”

Off we go--Olympia Capitol Building in the background

Flagpole at Island Home--All officers are in!

It typically takes us about 2 hours to make this transit, due to “No Wake” speeds required when leaving Olympia harbor and also when the tide is flooding, that is, against us.  So it’s Thursday morning, a day before the cruise officially starts. As we leave the harbor, we pass a number of other marinas, the Port terminal, which frequently has a large cargo ship or two loading logs for Japan or China, a waterside restaurant, then the ship channel out to the Sound. 

Eventually we enter Peale Passage between Squaxin Island and Hartstene Island and at the end, we cross over Pickering Passage to Island Home and tie up at either of our two long docks.  A lot of members came out even earlier for this cruise and the docks were full, so we rafted to Explorer II, a larger boat, whose owner is our neighbor back at the Olympia docks.  We tie up to him so our stern swim platform lines up with Explorer II’s swim platform so we can get off the boat easily by exiting from our transom door to our swim platform and over his swim platform to the dock.  Sounds complicated but very easy—just don’t fall in the drink, as the club has a special award for such incidents!

Wandrian rafted to Explorer II

If you check our pictures of boats at the docks at Island Home, at the Labor Day cruise we had over 45 boats show up with some rafted 4 boats deep!  We think that’s the most boats we’ve ever seen at Island Home!  Two months ago the club initiated 26 new members into the club at one time, a new record for OYC!  And we wonder why the docks are so full of boats???

Island Home is an island only at high tides so there is a long bridge connecting the “island” to the mainland where we have a parking lot and several hiking trails—great for the boat dogs!  Our clubhouse is on the island overlooking a wide expanse of water in front of a great lawn for all our outdoor activities with a nice hiking trail that goes all around the island, which is about 10 acres in size.  We have animals—a deer family that lives in a heavily vegetated part of the island, raccoons and otters, plus birds—ducks, geese, gulls, egrets and herons and kingfishers.  In the last few years, OYC has planted oyster beds and at low tide, there are millions of clams.

Sunset across the water over Hartstene Island

Here’s the schedule of activities for Labor Day weekend: 

Friday 6ish-bring your favorite appetizers to share and boy! did we have a huge variety!  

Saturday-also 6ish—people spent a lot of the day on the smokers that were brought over to the Island for this special dinner—you could call it the “Carnivore Dinner!”   We had a choice of smoked pork, ribs, smoked brisket, smoked chicken, pulled pork and more.  Plus salads, veggies, desserts, beer and wine—what a feast! 

Sunday noon—Taco Bar with flour tortillas, hard (aka cardboard) tortillas, hamburger meat, chopped tomatoes, lettuce, olives, sour cream, 4-5 different salsas with several handmade.  Very good and very popular!  We spent a couple of hours in the clubhouse kitchen helping prepare the taco ingredients and gaining more Club Service Program (CSP) Hours. 

Commodore Myra signing 10!

There were a lot of kids; mostly under teenage this cruise and they had lots of games going.  The adults had tournaments of bocce ball, Chinese checkers, bean bag toss, horseshoe golf and basketball.  Sunday, a sailing dinghy competition was held also.  Lots of informal games happened in evenings too.  The price for the cruise was $14 adults and $5 kids—very reasonable always!  We had to get back to Olympia on Sunday afternoon after the Taco lunch so we unrafted and headed back to our boathouse at OYC without incident.

When we got in Olympia Harbor, the last tugboat races of Olympia Harbor Days, a Labor Day weekend tradition was just over and several large tugs passed us heading home to Tacoma or Seattle.  What was left at the OYC guest dock  was a group of 8 beautiful Lord Nelson Victory Tugs, tug style yachts, all about 40’ in length that also participated in the races and were OYC’s guests for Harbor Days.  It was a very pleasant weekend with good weather and a lot of camaraderie!