No, not that kind.

This weekend I went on my innagural trip through the Ballard Locks with my boat. Quite the adventure.

Originally I had planned on going with Mike Neil to a class on how to go through the locks, however the weather was just awesome on Sunday and we had a gorup of friends that had been through the locks before with us, so we thought... why not?!

The weather was great. With the canvas up to block the wind we got pretty warm. There was almost no wind, so the lake and sound was very calm, pretty much perfect conditions for our first time through the locks.

Before we went into the locks we discovered that the boat behind us contained one of Megan's coworkers, Brent Kawaguchi. They were on a Boston Whaler Conquest 28', which is our friend's dream boat.

Just before we got into the big locks (the Ballard Locks has a "small" locks for taking boats with a <12' beam (or something like that) and a "large" locks that can probably take a 40'+ beam boat.) an alarm started on the boat. Initially I thought it was the CO detector so we vented the cabin and kept driving. It was LOUD!

After a few minutes we called the dealer (luckily they where open) and after some debugging identified that I was low on drive lube. Interesting not, it is basically a completely critical fluid to keeping the engine running and has no gauges and the first sign of a problem is a massively loud alarm. On top of that the resevior is labeled "Drive Lube", and you actually need to put "Stern Drive Gear Lube"... i guess the manufactured figured that you should omit every other word when labelling the engine.

The night before going through the locks we met some guys who used to volunteer at the locks and we learned the most important rules: 1) always obey the lock workers, 2) always tie up the stern first, 3) for any other questions refer to rule #1. These three rules helped us greatly when going through the locks. The workers there are great, helpful, and know what they are doing.

After going out to sea, we immediately headed to Shilshole Bay to find the mysterious "drive lube" to silence the incredibly deafing alarm. Luckily there is a West Marine about two blocks from the marina that had everything we needed. Everyone from the fuel dock people to the West Marine folks were super helpful. Made it pretty much an uneventful event.

We then buzzed down to Bell Harbor Marina right on the Seattle waterfront and had a late lunch at Anthony's. At about 4pm we got back on the boat and headed back home.

Coming back through the locks we had a boat try to raft with us that lost engine control and started to spin out of control. In this case we (with our total experience of 1 locking) had to wrestle the boat to us. I was very happy that we have a lot of long lines on our boat.

Pulled back into our home port around 6:30, just about 9 hours after we left that morning. A big trip, but hell-a fun!