Last year I went to Liberty Bay with the Shilshole Bay Yacht Club (SBYC) for the July 3rd raft up event. Liberty Bay is in Poulsbo, WA and is a large bay that allows overnight anchoring. Each year Poulsbo puts on a fireworks show for all the boaters. Last year’s event was so much fun that I had to go again this year!

My buddy Robert Dall came down from Vancouver, Canada to make the trip. Zippey was out of the water in the boatyard and we worked hard and got her splashed Wednesday for our Friday trip!

The trip this year was fast! Last year Zippey needed her bottom scraped and painted and it took 6 hours to get there. This year with a clean bottom Zippey got there in slightly over 2 hours!

We were the first boat to arrive around 14:44 with Antares following an hour later. The first night we had 5 boats, by Saturday night there were 12 boats. Sunday totaled our numbers 19. We were the largest raft by several boats.

SBYC members are some of the best people I have had the privilege of knowing. There was lots of camaraderie and sharing amongst our fleet. With Zippey having just been splashed her rig was not tuned. Joe Bozick brought along a rig tuner. After tuning Tom Madden and Joe helped rig her for sailing and we sailed Zippey through hundreds of anchored boats.