The San Juan Islands and San Juan County are a unique and special place to live, offering numerous benefits to both tourists and residents. Debbie and I were blessed to live and work in Friday Harbor from 1977 to 1979. We soon learned that access is both a natural defense in the islands and a severe limitation. You either arrive and depart by boat or airplane. This page is about our use of both transportation methods.
I started taking flying lessons soon after we settled in Friday Harbor. After my first solo flight, my “friends” told me the custom was to “trim the tail feathers” of the pilot. Here are Sheriff Don Brown and Undersheriff Ray Scheffer on June 14, 1978, conducting the ceremonies.
This March 1979 photo is a bit over the top, with the gaze into the distance and the scarf billowing in the breeze at the Friday Harbor airport, as I posed before a Piper PA-28 Cherokee, owned by a flying club I had joined. Unfortunately, it is the only photo I have of the airplane.
I became a student pilot in April 1978, flying in a Cessna 150 (N6989G), and made my first solo in June 1978. I completed my solo cross-country from Friday Harbor to Olympia in January 1979 in the Piper Cherokee 180 (N16351). It was an IFR plane because a club member, a former Navy pilot, wanted to fly on instruments, while the other members were VFR; however, we agreed to the upgrade. Again, a bit over the top!
We owned a San Francisco Pelican, a 12′ flat-bottom wooden class sailboat with a mainsail and bowsprit for rigging a headsail. The Smith Brothers built the boat on Samish Island, where we lived before moving to San Juan Island. This 1977 photo shows me at the tiller and Debbie tending a line as we are being launched into Padilla Bay at Bayview State Park.
In the San Juan Islands, a flat-bottom boat allows access to sandy beaches that other seacraft cannot reach. In the top photo, I am working on our San Francisco Pelican on “Pelican Beach” (aka Pelican Bay) on Cypress Island on July 2, 1978, with our friend Denny Stewart. In the photo below, Debbie is at the same beach the next day, snorkeling for seafood for the annual seafood bake on Pelican Beach. We sailed to Cypress Island from Friday Harbor to meet our group of friends arriving from the mainland for the Fourth of July weekend. More recently, the Washington DNR has installed buoys in the bay for larger craft to moor offshore.
