After 9 days off at home, I flew back up to Seattle, grabbed a shuttle to where my car was parked, and then drive up to Dunlap in Everett. I immediately had to stow my gear, grab the company truck and head to Safeway to pick up our food order. It was a fairly sizable order, and I added another cart on top of it to round it out to a whopping $2500. That amount of food is usually good enough for about 2 weeks, then we re-stock when we are in port.
After loading the truck and driving back to the docks, we transferred all the food over to the boat via crane, threw it in the galley and cast off. We started out on the "Snohomish", but our orders were to transfer everything to the "Mike O'Leary" somewhere north along the way. After chatting with the "Mike-O" on the radio, we learned that we'd be meeting up with them around 04:40. So, we grabbed some fuel, grabbed our barge and headed north.
Knowing fully that all of our food was going to be transferred over to the Mike-O, I only unpacked the frozen and perishable times, leaving everything else in boxes. We had about 25 cases of food, (enough to fill a longbed Ford, with two layers of boxes) so finding storage space in the galley was challenging. I ended up putting about 10 boxes in my room and filling up the settee with the rest to get it out of the way. The Snohomish had a funky layout, so I was glad that it was only a temporary stay.
04:00 came quick and I been up since 03:00 re-packing boxes with frozen meats and things. We had to "flop" on the barge, break tow, transfer all of our foods, gear bags, and bedding over to the Mike-O and then make tow again to the barge and get underway. The crew of the Mike-O, had to break tow, leaving their barge adrift in the middle of the channel and come over to us, transfer their gear and bedding to our boat as well. It was a cluster F#%^, but we pulled it off without a problem. After all transferring was compete, we broke away, grabbed our barge again and went on our way. At that point, I started stowing ALL the foods, which took me about a 2 hours.
From that point, it was about a 4-day trip to Ketchikan where we would ditch some of our cargo and sweat off some pounds.
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