Her Waters

Puget Sound is an inland sea and it behaves like one. Two hundred feet of cold green water in the channels, tide rips that stand up out of nowhere, fog that erases the far shore before breakfast and hands it back by noon. It’s water with moods, hemmed in by mountains on both horizons, and it rewards a boat that goes slowly. Which is convenient, because slowly is the only speed she has. Everything she was built to be, heavy and honest and unhurried, makes sense here in a way I don’t think it ever quite did in Huntington Beach.

Her home water now is Quartermaster Harbor, the long protected bay tucked between Vashon and Maury. Herons on the pilings, gravel beaches, the kind of anchorage that holds in just about anything. The dock she lives on is full of characters and half sinking boats, and she fits right in, which I mean as a compliment to everyone involved. From the harbor mouth it’s an easy run out into Colvos Passage, or across to Gig Harbor and the south Sound, the same water she worked as a Seattle boat in the thirties.

Ninety-nine years, and she ended up a day’s run from where she started.