August 1: Orcas Island to Roche Harbor (The Long Way Round)

Roche Harbor
This morning the sound of Breanna’s engines and the slow rocking of a moving boat awoke me from my deep slumber. Today we would make our way from Orcas Island to Roche Harbor, which normally, would be about and hour haul, but to make better use of our time we ended up circling around south past Anacortes, through the Swinomish Channel and stopping for a few hours in the small, aka tiny, town of La Conner. We started out walking through the town in one group, but then the ladies (Pam, Judy and Mom) found a store they wanted to stop in at while Bud and my dad just kept on walking. We ended up walking all the way to the other end of town and browsing around a shop called The Wood Merchant that had some really nice things. After the wood shop we wandered around some more and then found some benches and waited for the ladies to come over. Once they had browsed through and bought some stuff at the wood shop we headed back to the boat, once again splitting up into the shopping and non-shopping groups.

La Conner

When we all finally reassembled back on the boat we headed through the rest of the Swinomish Channel. We ate a filling lunch of smoked salmon sandwiches with chips and Judy had bought some Norwegian crepes filled with butter, sugar and cinnamon and some Norwegian pudding with berries. As we finished lunch we traveled through Deception Pass and then made our way to Friday Harbor again to drop off Judy.

Deception Pass

After dropping Judy off we left Friday Harbor and circled around to the northwest part of San Juan Island to Roche Harbor. Roche Harbor became famous for their pure limestone and the concrete industry that followed. Matt and Ross dropped anchor on the outskirts of the harbor and we took the tender in for dinner. The town itself consists mainly of the dock and marina, a hotel and a large house that is now McMillin’s Dining Room, which is where we had dinner. The food was quite good at McMillin’s with yours truly ordering crispy razor clams sautéed with tomato, capers, garlic and white wine for an appetizer and halibut cheek piccata. After dinner we headed back to the boat and capped off the evening with The Green Zone.

Roche Harbor