Saturday, February 8, 2014

Eating in Seattle

It was my birthday today so Marilyn took me out for dinner.  A couple of days ago when we went to 2nd Wave I spotted a place called Blue C Sushi in Fremont and that’s where we ended up going.  It was thoroughly enjoyable.

Marilyn says this kind of place is common in Japan.  It has a central cooking and food prep area with an endless conveyor belt that runs by all the tables.  The food prep guys put stuff on the conveyor belt and if you see something that you like going by, you just grab it off the belt.  They use different coloured plates to indicate the price of each item and when you’re done they just add up the value of the empty plates to determine your bill.  The place we were at had prices ranging from $2.00 to $6.00 per plate.  For $2.00 you got 6 pieces of avocado roll – for $5.00 you got ahi tuna instead of avocado in the rolls.  I didn’t have anything over $5 so I’m not sure what you got for $6 but overall it was fun, good food and not really expensive.

 

We’re still waiting for the weather to warm up but its looking hopeful now.  They’ve got shit pumping regs in Washington so today I checked with the fuel dock to see what the story was on their shit pump.  As I expected, it is still froze up but the guy was optimistic that it might thaw out tomorrow.  We’re not desperate yet but it would work well for us to pump our tank on Monday before we cross over to Bremerton.  At home we just look for deep water and I fully expect that’s what happens to it here as well.  If we pump out in Victoria our shit gets mixed with the city shit which is then piped out into Georgia Strait and dumped (raw) into the ocean. 

As Frank Bond said years ago – the solution to pollution is dilution.  Collecting shit just leads to a bigger pile of shit to dispose of.  However, we’re guests of Washington State and they have regulations so all our valves are tied closed per regulations and we’re waiting for the dock pumpout to thaw out.  One thing I will say in Washington’s support – the regs are arguably stupid but they do have lots of free pumpout stations.  Their marine parks generally have at least one self-serve pumpout and most marinas have a pumpout which may or may not be free but at least is readily available.  Finding a Canadian pumpout station is pretty well impossible – there’s one on a float across from Newcastle Island but that’s actually the only one I can recall seeing in all our travels.

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