I had been told that one definition of cruising is working on ones boat in foreign ports.  I had no idea of how true that statement was. We cast off from our slip at Casslemans cove with running lights disconnected, depth sounder and radar in their respective boxes and a GPS – computer system which worked fine 2 years ago. 

With the help of Jack and Ken from the dock, we had cleaned, prepped and painted the bottom in record time.  Since we were out of the water, I decided it was time to replace the old, non functioning depth sounder.  It turns out that you can buy transom mount fish finders fairly inexpensively, but when you start looking at through hull transducers, costs start to climb.  I ended up with a Rathion 710 and have been cursing it ever since.  Looking back on the situation, I would have purchased a plain depth sounder with a depth alarm,  That is I needed, instead I have a fancy piece of junk that only works at depths under 100 ft.

I installed the transducer in the boat yard but did not get the display installed until we were traversing the dreaded Cathlammet Channel. 

The process of leaving the dock for our world cruise was not what I had dreamed of all of these years: Sitting around in clean cloths, with our friends, tipping a few, enjoying a festive mood, listening to pleasant music and talking of the good times to come.  Instead, we were frantically tossing all of the stuff we had not stowed away – or given away - on the decks.  It was approaching dusk on a Thursday night in mid September.  LATE for starting down the coast from Oregon.  We had spent the last ten years working on Rolling Thunder, and the last 3 months, intensely working on preparing the hull, fabricating bow rollers and re-constructing our 11 ft aluminum dingy.  Stuff was piled hip deep in places, I was in painting rags and Jan was making dinner when we finally Hugged my folks and our friends from our dock community cut the final dock line and motored away into the descending darkness.  We made the short voyage to coon island without incident and collapsed into our bunks.  The great adventure had finally begun.

I sometimes (Jan would say always) have an optimistic outlook when I consider the time required to install equipment on the boat.  I did get the depth sounder installed just before we left the most risky portion of the Columbia River.  But I did not get the running lights functional until well after dark.  Luckily, a tour boat was able to guide us into the fine accommodations afforded by the Marina in Astoria.  Here we ended up spending several days installing the radar, setting up permanent lighting and poking around a bit.