Great Ambition
"It's a rough life, but someone's got to live it!"
This is the continuing story of our new life as River Rats on the Columbia River aboard our Catamaran Cruisers houseboat we named Great Ambition.
If you want to see how we got here (and hints on how you can do it too) see Great Ambition, the beginning.
New! Click here to see a map of our travels!
And here we are! A short 5 hour cruise down the Columbia and up Lake River. We are parked in our favorite spot on the Northeast side of the island. There is a tinge of green to the trees and our old eagle was waiting there, saving our spot.
Looking North, so lovely.
We had an awesome evening. Conserving power we hung out on the front deck with the big Mr. Heater keeping us warm while we enjoyed the view of Vancouver from across the lake.
I got some nice shots of planes entering the pattern for PDX. Remember, these shots are taken from a boat. You gotta give my Kodak a lot of credit too!
Thursday was a nice sunny day. By 1:00PM the charge controller had us up to 14.4V, which meant that by 2:00PM the charge controller backed off to 13.5V, so I could use the extra power for charging camera batteries and other things. We are still being frugal with our battery power, we watched a half hour of Jeopardy! and then a two and a half hour movie using the little Honda generator. Our reward is that we woke up with our battery voltage at 12.1V even with the furnace running all night. By the way, shortly after taking the picture above I realized that I had forgotten to lower the VHF antenna. A shadow like that one, cutting across the whole panel severely reduces power output. Lowering the antenna when we are not underway keeps maximum charge going to the batteries.
With a change in wind direction forecast we went looking for another spot to anchor. Vancouver Lake is very shallow, we circled the island in 3 feet of water without ever finding a good hole. So off I went in the dinghy to scout out a new anchorage with April piloting Great Ambition.
We ended in a cove up on the Northwest side of the lake. It's over 6 feet deep here, and fairly well protected from the West, North and Northeast, but we are wide open on the East through Southwest. However, it makes for some spectacular night shots with Portland (far left), the Clark County PUC natural gas power plant, West Hills radio and TV towers, (middle) and the Port of Portland Terminal 6 all lit up, and the grain terminal on the Willamette (right). There are also two planes in the pattern for PDX
And here is a closeup of Terminal 6 on Hayden Island. This is a container port facility and here you can very clearly see the cranes to offload the containers from Asia into Portland to be transported by truck or rail all over Amercia.
After sun-up we turned on the news, the weather is going to go downhill and the lake depth is getting worse. Time to get out while we can. It sure was a nice three days though!
As before I had to scout a path out of Vancouver Lake from this Northwest side anchorage using the dinghy. I used a sneak path that allowed us to get off the lake without going all the way back out into the shallow inflow/outflow channel. This side channel of the lake is about 6 feet deep most the way at lowish tide, although it does shallow up to about 2.7 feet at the connection to the regular channel. It's also quite narrow and you have to come in at a slight angle to get in. However, it saved driving us over a lot of potential choke points and we might want to anchor in it someday, so it's worth a second look.
And here is a shot of us underway, that's Willow Point on the right. I would show you the picture of us going nose to nose with the cargo ship Long Beach but I was kinda busy right about then.
To be continued...