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.