Laundry Day at Eucott Bay

September 17th and 18th (Tuesday and Wednesday)
As I have mentioned before, we have been getting isobar radio fax weather forecasts, and from those we have been formulating our own forecast for our area. So far we have been right! Yay! We had forecasted showers and wind becoming nicer through the day for yesterday (September 17^th) and nice for today (September 18th.) 

Yesterday we had some gusty wind and rain showers in the morning, and then the clouds slowly broke up until it was perfectly clear sky by night time. 

In the evening we watched for bears along the shoreline, and we saw both the single bear and the mom with one cub. Unfortunately they both only stayed on the shoreline briefly, they sauntered out through the grass, walked along the stream, and then back up into the grass. I was ready with my camera and big lens, but did not get much of a chance to get any good pictures. 

After dinner we put on our jackets, and sat out with a cup of hot chocolate enjoying our perfect view of the night sky. The sky was perfectly clear, and since it was getting close to a half moon it was not going to rise until much later in the night, so the sky was black.  We both saw a shooting star, and the view of the Milky Way was beautiful. It was a lovely cold fall night.
In the morning the sky was still clear. After some early morning high fog had burned off, the sun shone brightly. Since it was still clear blue sky, we decided to do laundry. Usually when we do laundry on board we heat up salt water on the stove for the wash, and then use collected rainwater for the rinse. It works quite well, and we have had no problem with residual salt in our clothes. The laundry machine that we have is from my grandfather, and it is a hand-crank machine. It works with the pressure created from putting in hot water, sealing it, and then cranking it. It works quite well. 

Today we took it ashore, and instead of heating up water, we made use of the endless stream of hot, fresh water from the spring. 

Laundry at the bathtub at the hot spring.

We washed, and rinsed, our three loads of laundry in fresh, hot water. What a luxury! Once we had everything hanging out to dry from our lifelines, and off of our jib lines and shrouds, we could relax. We just had to hope that it would have enough time to dry. As the sun dipped below the mountains we gathered up our laundry, and brought it inside. Some of it was dry, but most of it was just slightly damp. We got a fire going, and strung a clothesline through the boat, and soon had everything dried and put away.
In the evening we saw the single bear come out to the stream, and we could see him splashing around in the river, fishing for salmon. It was very low light, but we were able to make him out. Later, although we could no longer see him, we could still hear him splashing around.
For dinner we had goose burgers. We took the single breast out of the freezer, and ground it up. We ended up with enough meat from the one breast for three burgers. We were cooking fresh bread anyways so we used that as burger buns, and it was delicious.