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My daughter and I took my 1985 Outrage 18 from Orcas Island up to the Desolation Sound area between the BC mainland and Vancouver Island last week. We left on Tuesday 9/5, and were home again on Saturday the 9th. Below is a link to some pictures we took. There are 3 sections.
The first shows chartplotter screenshots of some of the route, mostly from the 2nd night through the trip home.
Next are shots from the trip. The first 3 days were very smoky from wild fires in BC and Washington. The last 2 days were rainy, other than one rather glorious 6 hour stretch of sunshine.
We had some 19 hours of running, out of which 15 were on really nice water where we cruised around 30mph. The other 4 were nasty knee banging, hip hurting pounding rollers where a strong wind was opposing a significant current and we only went 10-15mph. It's not clear Tessa will take another trip with me...
We put on a bit over 400 miles, and averaged right about 5.5mpg, even with the slow crawl hours. I really like that Suzuki DF140A.
The last section has some shots of a sleeping platform I built for the bow. I made it out of 3/4" Coosa Bluewater 26 composite, and merged the 3 levels of the bow into one. This allowed using 6'6" air mattresses side by side in front of the console. With the forward shelter up, it was a surprisingly spacious nest. The raised walls of the anchor locker and storage compartments in front of the console allowed room to stash lots of gear. Since the Coosa board is fiberglass impregnated polyurethane, I epoxy-encapsulated all of the horizontal surfaces we would be sleeping on. I may gelcoat them this winter. Thanks to marko088 for his suggestions. I didn't use them all, but they certainly gave me great points to consider.
Thanks for posting your report. That is an impressive voyage you undertook! The enclosure and custom sleeping platform really extend the range of the Outrage 18. And the new Suzuki must be confidence inspiring too.
That is a trip I'd love to make someday. A hearty "Well done" to you and your intrepid daughter -- she certainly was a trooper to accompany you!
Looks like a nice trip. These are the kinds of trips I got my boat for.
Thanks for sharing the details of the sleeping platform. I've been pondering how best to set up for sleeping aboard. This also gets some secure storage which is at a premium in these boats. This might jump to the front of the list for the next big modification.
