Ft Bragg to San Francisco Bay

It's difficult to really know what the weather is going to do when you're getting ready to go sailing. Even when the planned passage is only 25 hours, as our passage from Ft Bragg to SFO was, it's hard to predict. Basically there are two things to watch, the wind and the waves. When going to sea for a longer trip, it's nice to have the wind at your back, or at least on the beam. The waves are created by wind, but not necessarily by the wind that we're sailing in. Local winds certainly make waves, and we call them "wind waves". They're usually steep and close together, and they can make the ride rough. The waves from far off storms arrive as swell, and a bigger swell is not a problem if they are far enough apart.
We departed Fort Bragg with no wind, but an approaching cold front was promising winds from the south. The forecasters were telling us that the south wind would not kick up until the next day, and the real issue was whether we could get south faster than the cold front and avoid the headwinds and resulting wind waves. I had a bad feeling that the cold front would move more quickly than the forecasters were telling us,    but I could not find any evidence that they were wrong, so we launched. The swells were about 12 feet or so, and the period was 17 seconds. It was a good ride and they was no wind so we motored south. A wind started blowing from the east, so we unfurled the main and sailed on a beam reach. We went around Point Arena sometime after dark and turned left, following the coastline about 6 miles offshore. The wind on the nose, so we motored for the rest of the night. We passed Point Reyes early in the morning, and the cold front caught up with us, and the wind clocked around to the south. Happily, after passing Point Reyes our reading was pretty much east, so again we were able to sail on a beam reach.
Our plan was to stay north of the main shipping channel, and use the Bonita Channel near the shore. This would put us between the shore and a nasty place called "four fathom bank" and the "potato patch".  By the time we entered the channel, the wind was up to over 20 knots from the south, and the seas were getting very confused, with wind waves from the south and swell from the west. It rained a little, and the wind waves were making the boat pretty salty, but we were never in any danger and were in good spirits. The seas gradually subsided as we approached the Golden Gate Bridge, and we arrived on a 1.5 knot flood tide. It took 26 hours to make the trip, but it went well!
We motored up into Richardson's Bay, near Sausalito, and anchored for the night. I slept soundly as I always do after getting off the ocean. We did not have internet access, and we needed to do laundry, so today we moved to a marina in Sausalito. The laundry is now done, and our plan is to leave here tomorrow and go to an anchorage in SFO called Aquatic Park. It is supposed to be very near Ghirardelli Sqquare and Fisherman's Wharf. We'll stay there a night or two, and then start looking at the weather and making plans to continue down the coast.
I shot some exciting video while crossing the bar, but so far have not been able to upload it to the web. Bear with me, please!

Fort Bragg

We left Eureka on Tuesday afternoon and headed for Fort Bragg. The forecast called for winds 15 to 20 knots, and seas not bad. I have heard that Cape Mendocino can dish up scary big waves, so I was smugly happy that we were leaving in the afternoon. This would put us around the cape during the night, when the wind is usually lighter, and therefore the waves too. I like it when I get the chance to outfox Mother Nature. My watch ended at 2100 hours, and just before going off watch I turned the boat to the southeast, having cleared the point of the cape. The wind had been picking up a little, and when I turned the helm over to Teri the wind was blowing 18 - 20 with an occasional gust up to 23 or so. The wind was on our port quarter, and the seas were on our starboard quarter. The main was reefed and the genoa was doused because we like to keep it simple for one person watches at night and the broad reach was deep enough that the genoa would have been blanketed by the main anyway.  

So Teri took the watch and I went to bed. I was awakened about an hour later by the crashing of items in the salon that usually don't crash, and I could hear the wind whistling in the rigging. So much for outfoxing Mother Nature! Ed told me later that the wind had been above 30 knots for more than an hour. We did get to see lots of marine mammals on the way - a pod of Orcas, what we thought was a Humpback, and another that we think was a Fin whale. We have a chart to help us determine what kind they are, but it's not easy and we just bought it here at Fort Bragg.

I was back on watch when we arrived here at Fort Bragg, and got the thrill and pleasure of bringing the boat across the bar, up the Noyo River, and into the slip here at the marina. The Noyo River is VERY small, and going from open ocean to something narrower than the Multnomah Channel in five minutes is pretty cool. We are definitely not in Oregon any more! I recognize some of the plants, but there are a lot of trees that I don't recognize.  The river is full of sea lions and seals. And fishing boats.

I went out today with my camera and took some pictures, hoping that my new computer would easily download them from the camera. WOW! It was simple, and the slideshow in iPhoto was incredible! We don't have WiFi here in the marina, but as soon as I get an internet connection I intend to try uploading to Facebook and hopefully will upload this blog entry and some pics with it. We plan to leave here soon for Bodega Bay.

Astoria to Eureka

We left Astoria  at 0930 on Tuesday, September 13. There was almost no wind blowing, so we ran the motor as we headed south. The breeze did come up, and we had the sails up, but continued to use the motor to help us along. We motorsailed for something like the first 32 hours or so. Then the wind came up nice and we shut the motor down. The wind was from the northwest, and it pushed up some waves to about 6 feet. None of us were seasick and the mood on the boat was good. We each had 2 three hour shifts and 1 two hour watch each day, so we seemed to get plenty of sleeptime, too. Sleeping on a sailboat at sea turned out to be more difficult than I had expected, because it's very noisy and the boat keeps rolling and my instinct is to brace against the roll, and the ocean did not have any rhythm because the waves and swells were from about 3 different directions.

The evening of the first day had us going past Cape Meares and Oceanside (Oregon) and I was happy to be able to see that area from the ocean, having grown up there. The sun was shining on Oceanside and it looked good from 12 miles out. Sometime the next day, we got far enough offshore (and the fog was hanging on the coast) that we could not see land at all. This persisted until we got to Cape Blanco, and then again pretty much to Point St. George.

We typically like to run the engine at night because the wind is lighter, and we need to charge the batteries, etc. Still sailing of course! When we were off Brookings, we started the engine and there was no cooling water in the exhaust. We installed a new impeller in the raw water pump, but that did not fix the problem. We rotated the cover plate on the pump, and this helped for a while, but then it quit again. This is not good. So we sailed sans engine and just went more slowly while thinking about our options. We arrived offshore Eureka late in the evening of the third day, and hove-to about 5 miles off the coast in 3 knots of wind and sloppy seas about 6 feet at 6 seconds. Next morning I had a plan that we tried and it worked - we removed the shower head from the flexible hose; removed the raw water hose from the output side of the pump, and was able to plug the shower hose into it. Then turning on the shower would pump cooling water into the engine! We got a funnel and a bucket, and filled the fresh water tank with sea water. We started the engine and started motoring towards the entrance to Humboldt Bay, about 6 miles away. Did I mention that the visibility was about 100 yards in the fog? We kept bucketing all the way in, because the shower was on full blast and we didn't want to run into trouble now! It worked perfectly, and the first buoy showed up exactly where the chart plotter and radar said it should, and in an hour we were inside the bay.

One thing that I should mention here is that we were hove-to one afternoon off the southern Oregon coast when a whale came to check us out. It swam around the boat 4 times, about 10 to 20 feet away from us. Way cool but a little worrisome, given that I know of 3 times in the past 2 years that a sailboat has been wrecked by a whale breaching and landing on the boat.

My camera battery was dead for this leg of our adventure, I have now fully charged it. The problem now is that my laptop computer is about to go. It has been getting really slow, and when we got here to Eureka, I plugged it in and turned it on, and it will not start. Well, it starts, and then restarts, and restarts, and restarts, and finally I get a blue screen, etc. Macs are more expensive, but I'm thinking that the cost of getting a PC cleaned up and fixed after a few viruses make the 2 about the same cost over the life of the computer. So I think I'll buy a Mac. Maybe when we get to San Francisco, I'll look for one on Craigslist. In the meantime, I'll use Ed and Teri's.

I slept for 12 hours the first night here. The marina has good clean restrooms and the showers are free. Yester we walked into old town and had a beer at the Lost River Brewer (I think). We are planning to leave here tomorrow night or Tuesday for San Francisco.

Getting out of town is hard to do!

It's probably a good thing that we have been delayed in getting out to sea. We spent most of Saturday rethinking and redoing things on the boat. Ed worked on getting the fuel jugs secured on the deck, and I dismantled the radar reflector, put it together around a cap shroud, and went up the mast to the lower spreader and secured it there. Yesterday Ed and I went to Safeway and got some groceries, Teri found her foulies, and in general we decided that we are ready to venture out there. The wind was still from the south today, so we decided to wait until tomorrow morning. The forecast is for pretty good sailing the next few days, but in my experience the weather is usually worse than the forecast.

I have been trying to figure out how to get my passport reissued with a needed correction for about 2 years. To be honest, I have not been trying every day for the past 2 years, but on several occasions I have gone to the passport website and tried to figure out which form to use and how to fill it out and what other documentation to include with the application. It is not as simple as the State Department would have you believe! Amazingly, through Facebook I reconnected with a high school classmate who is the director of one of the regional passport offices. He helped me out and I got the application sent off about 3 weeks prior to leaving Portland. I paid the extra fee for expedited service and overnight delivery both ways. Unfortunately, the national passport center in Philadelphia would not accept the application because (according to them) I used the wrong form. It took the post office 1 week and 1 day to overnight the rejected application back to me, and it arrived the day after we left Portland. It's no wonder the Post Office is going broke! Any way, today Julia brought the application here to Astoria; I filled it out and she took me to the county clerks office to get it signed and sent off. Whew! I hope it all goes well now and the new passport is waiting for me when we reach San Diego.


We stopped at Safeway on the way back to the boat and picked up a tub of Tillamook Vanilla Ice Cream. Ed and Teri picked some blackberries this morning, and the ice cream was perfect on the cobbler!

some background

Last spring, I helped Ed and Teri bring their Hunter 356 down the Washington coast from Port Townsend, Washington to Portland. Shortly after completing that trip, we started talking about sailing it to Mexico and perhaps beyond. We set a departure date of September 7, 2011, and left the day after that (due to my needing a follow-up medical appointment). We motored to Saint Helens, and spent the night at the City Docks there. Next morning we motored down the river as far as Jim Crow Point, and anchored there behind the point in about 30 feet of water. The dredge Oregon was operating just downstream near Pillar Rock, and we saw lots of piping and infrastructure on the water as we ended the day. Saturday dawned - well, it didn't really dawn. The fog just got brighter. Visibility was about 50 yards. I don't know how it came to pass that I got to drive, but I did! It was my first time driving a boat in low visibility conditions, but radar, chart plotter, and an autopilot make it easy! I called the dredge though, and they advised me to pass them on the Oregon side, which I did. Near Rice Island I made a position report on Channel 13, and a tug towing a barge answered to tell me that they were headed up the river and the we would be meeting soon. I was on the "green side" and they moved over to the "red side" and it was still amazing how close we passed! I had nearly lost sight of the tug when the tow became visible. The fog lasted all the way to Tongue Point, and then it opened and lifted to glorious sunshine.

We spent the day readying the boat to go to sea. Lots of small jobs and we got them all done. This morning (Sunday) we checked the weather and decided to leave for Eureka, California. We decided this knowing that there was forecast winds from the south, because the wind speeds were not supposed to get more than 15 knots. On the way from Astoria to the bar, a distance of 15 miles, the wind kept building until it was sustained at 30 and we saw a gut to 38 knots. The sailing was fun, but we decided to return to Astoria and wait it out. Had T-bone steaks and yams for dinner.