Rainshadow is a Nicholson 38 ketch built by Camper & Nicholsons in 1974. This web site will chronicle Rainshadow’s adventures with her owners (sic), Van and Marilyn.
[Editor's note: Any boat owner can tell you, the boat owns the people, not the other way around. The boat "owner" exists to tend to the needs of the boat.]
Rainshadow no longer has an actual homeport, though officially on the USCG documentation it is Seattle. We sailed her from Hilo Hawaii to Washington state in June 2023. Our plan is to cruise the Pacific Northwest in the summer, then leave her on the hard for the winter when we go back to our land home in Hawaii.
You can read Van's blog roll of our recent passage and current cruising here. Before 2016, we used a Tumblr site to post where Rainshadow had taken us. But that is no longer supported, so we don't use it any more.
After sailing for 6 years along the British Columbia coast and beyond, Marilyn wrote Taken By The Wind: The Northwest Coast to share all they had learned about weather and sailing in that area. You can find it on Amazon.
Rainshadow has done another long passage, this time from Hawaii back to the Pacific Northwest. The most common question we get is, why sail her back across the North Pacific to where we already spent so many years cruising?
March 13th, 2023 | by Marilyn | Comments Off on Getting a 49 y.o. boat ready for a passage
Rainshadow has undergone a refit while moored in our current Hawaii homeport. But Hilo is where wind goes to die so it’s past time for Rainshadow to have a new homeport, which means another passage.
December 1st, 2022 | by Marilyn | Comments Off on Replacing the Cockpit Canvas
The original cockpit canvas (that is, the canvas at the time of our purchase) didn’t fit well and was starting to fail. So we decided to make some design improvements and construct a new one.
August 4th, 2017 | by Marilyn | Comments Off on Portlight Problems and Solutions
Our boat has 10 portlights, 5 on each side of the cabin. We learned on our recent passage to Hawaii that they are leaking. There are multiple reasons why.
May 26th, 2017 | by Marilyn | Comments Off on How a 42 y.o. Nic 38 faired crossing the East Pacific
Rainshadow safely took us on our first passage from the Seattle area to Hilo Hawaii, but not without some failures. Here’s the list of things that broke while we were underway. [Editor’s note Dec 2022: I have updated this original posting with how we addressed each failure.]
May 26th, 2017 | by Marilyn | Comments Off on 2016 Passage to Hawaii: Days 20-28
This is the final segment about the saga of our first passage. Short version is – we made it. Long version is told here.
December 5th, 2016 | by Marilyn | Comments Off on 2016 Passage to Hawaii: Days 10-19
At this point in the passage, we are in the Horse Latitudes – that is between 30-40 N. Exhaustion is really setting in, and we are not jovial.
November 21st, 2016 | by Marilyn | Comments Off on 2016 Passage to Hawaii – Days 0-9
We finally did it! We made the “Left Turn” that sailors in Puget Sound talk about over beers with fellow sailors, and while sitting at home poring over old Pilot Charts and Jimmy Cornell’s World Cruising Routes. That “Left Turn” means we sailed to Neah Bay at the west end of the Strait of Juan […]
November 21st, 2016 | by Marilyn | Comments Off on Repairs and Updates Spring 2016
For months as we considered our upcoming passage from Seattle to Hilo, we worked on a list of things that HAD to be done before we set off. The list varied in size throughout the spring, but once we reached the boat, pragmatism and schedule reduced the list to a more manageable size. Here is […]
October 24th, 2015 | by Marilyn | 2 Comments
Yes, we finally made it all the way to Southeast Alaska. We traveled through B.C. as fast as we could on the northbound trip, reaching the Alaskan border in 3 weeks – we cleared US customs on June 21st.
October 4th, 2015 | by Marilyn | Comments Off on Repairs and Updates 2014-2015
In the spring of 2015, we left our land-based home in Hawaii and returned to the Pacific Northwest.