We got a text yesterday from some friends aboard a sailboat; still up in Puget Sound. “How’s it going out there? Where are y’all? “. These folks are new to cruising and all I want them to know is this: Stay in your home waters for another season. It’s too late in the year to make the big ‘left turn’. You won’t like what you have out there on the ocean right now. I want them to have a good time and not get in over their heads on their first adventure. Because if you want to know the truth, the passage from Newport to Crescent City had me being thankful that we are not new to this; that we know all things must pass, that we know the difference between discomfort and danger.
I remember thinking to myself: If I were a new cruiser, I might just take a plane home at the next opportunity. If I were new to this, I might not be able to appreciate the highs of cruising replace the lows of cruising just as surely as the weather highs can sometimes be strong enough to fend off the weather lows. Cruising is a “bipolar” experience. If a person has the impression that it’s all leaping dolphins off your bow and broad reaching under a sunny sky, they are bound to be real disappointed. For real. Especially in the North Pacific. Especially when summer is over. Since we’re not new, though, I figured we’d just stay the course. This, too, shall pass.
Cheerful fishing boats here in the Crescent City harbor marina. It’s mostly a place for commercial boats with a few recreational boats thrown in.
We had been in Newport for three days waiting out weather and seas that sounded too ‘interesting’ for us. The weather showed that the passage south should be fairly easy with some good sailing thrown in. Huzzah! There would be some very mild winds from the south, nothing worrisome; forecasted at 3-5 knots. There was a big storm brewing with gale force winds from the south, but we had an opportunity to get further down the coast before that storm reached our part of the world, so we took it. Our plan was to stop at either Crescent City or Eureka, with a bailout destination of Coos Bay if things were not to our liking.
This is the system we were getting into port ahead of. Nasty. No, thanks. Our position is close to the little house in the photo. The winds and rain arrived right on schedule.
Once underway, and under sail, I did a little research on Eureka and decided it was not for me. Most of the ports on this part of the coast involve crossing a river bar, and while that’s not a big deal most of the time, it’s hard to predict with certainty whether crossing will be safe until you are close enough to get a current bar report from the Coast Guard for when you need to cross. Crescent City has no river bar so you can enter anytime. That sounded good to me and took one stressor off the table. They also have a wide open harbor where you can anchor if you want to. Nice. We decided Crescent City was the destination for this leg of the trip.
Turns out that was a good choice. Not because of the lack of river bar, but because when we were about 30 miles out from Crescent City, our gentle 3-5 knot winds from the south suddenly became 12 knots from the south. Remember: south is the direction we are attempting to go. I kept looking at all the weather models, thinking “I’m missing something here” but nope. This was not predicted anywhere we could find, so maybe we missed something but I’d surely like to know what! One model showed 7-8 knots from the south but no one was showing 12 knots of sustained wind speed from the south with the accompanying big swells developing. At the end of the day, the weather you have is the weather you deal with regardless what the models predict.
Twelve knots of wind doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t. It’s about 14 miles per hour, barely enough to get Galapagos moving unless we put up the spinnaker. But when it’s directly on the nose, with big swells also on the nose, and you are honestly just needing to get into a port to avoid something worse, it feels worse than it is. At that point, it kind of sucks and it really slows the boat down. (I don’t like to speak unkindly about Galapagos, considering we love her just the way she is, but she does, ahem, not do well to windward.) Large swells from the northwest (which is the usual thing on this coast) and now also large swells coming from the south, plus 12 knots on your nose = fun times. There would have been no way we would have made Eureka that day. It was going to be hard enough to make Crescent City. (As an aside: we had plenty of time here. We were traveling on Friday, and the storm was ‘scheduled’ to arrive on Sunday afternoon, today. But I like to leave a lot of flexibility in these things. It reduces my anxiety quite a lot to have an extra day, just in case we need it for any reason.)
Mike and I just kept looking at one another and shrugging. I mean, what can you do? You have to deal with the situation and we’ve been in a lot worse conditions than that. Uncomfortable, to be sure, but not dangerous. We could have turned out to sea and raised the sails, tacking back and forth. Maybe that’s what we should have done. But just when I said, “It could be worse. It could be raining.”, fog descended on us. Let’s close the curtain on that little episode because it lasted way too long and as the sun began to set, I came to accept the fact that we would not be arriving during daylight. We had been scheduled to arrive by 5:00 PM, in plenty of daylight. Now, with our adjusted speeds, we would arrive after 8:00PM. We would arrive at night. In fog. This is, as we say, no bueno. We hates it, yes we does.
The old lighthouse outside Crescent City, like something from the cracks of Mordor as seen through fog. Note the waves crashing on the shore. Very dramatic, to be sure. The sun is setting on my dreams of getting into the harbor by day.
Had we been anywhere other than a part of the world where we can rely on good charts, we would have had to wait for daylight by going out from shore, away from all the rocky reefs that surround this port entrance, and maybe even heaving to and riding out the weather
. As it was, we have wonderful radar and the United States has good charts of its waters. We decided we would get into the harbor, staying well off of the rocky reefs, and then if we could not see well inside the harbor, we would just drop anchor and wait for daylight. Personally, when I am that tired, I would rather drop anchor than spend a night tacking back and forth at sea if I can safely choose the former. We had a reservation at the marina guest dock, but it’s bad enough having to go into an unknown harbor at night. It’s another thing altogether to go into a marina at night when that is not required for safety and there is a wide open anchorage available.
As we approached the harbor, Mike stood on the bow on the lookout for other boats (in addition to our radar) or crab pots in the water, and we used our headsets to talk to each other. I kept the chart on our chart plotter scrolled in tight so I could see every detail of where the boat was positioned and he made sure to alert me as soon as he could see the flashing lights of the channel markers. I could hear the low whistle of the red buoy to my starboard side, even though I could not see the flashing light of the first one. I got a visual on the second red buoy as we approached, keeping that well to starboard, and we eased into the harbor right in the middle of the channel, a big fishing boat with huge bright lights close on our tail. Immediately deciding we would anchor, we found 15 feet of water and dropped the hook. Anchor down. Safe. God, I love our anchoring system.
Michael contemplates the entrance to the harbor. It’s so big in the daylight. It’s so small in the dark fog. We got a day to just walk around and get our bearings before the bad weather came in. It’s so pretty in the daylight.
There is no sleep like the dead sleep one gets after a one night passage, especially one that ends up being fairly stressful, even if not dangerous. One nighters are absolutely brutal for us. Basically we get zero rest, even when off watch. We keep four hour watches. By the second night, we will get sleep because we will be so tired that it will just happen. But one night is not enough to get into a rhythm on this. The harbor water was quiet and we slept deeply.
The next morning we got the boat tied up to the guest dock. Let me just say this: the part of the dock we are on, because we are a big boat and when I requested the reservation, I said I wanted to be at the end of the dock if possible, is home to a gang of seagulls and therefore covered in bird droppings, and has zero running water. The harbor power washes the other part of the dock, so people on that part don’t have to walk through bird crap to get on and off their boat. It looks to me like they have turned this part of the dock over to the seabirds. Apparently it has been this way for many months with no end in sight. Did the marina offer up this information when I called for a reservation? They did not. In fact I asked if the dock had water and electricity and was told it did. Hmmm.
One of the overly friendly seabirds who poop here regularly. His friends flew off when they saw me come at them with my phone camera.
Bird crap and all, though, we are safe and tied up. And here we will be for a week, maybe longer. Today was a day for storm prep. There were lines to snug to the dock, windage to remove from up top, cushions to stow away from water blowing into the cockpit, halyards to secure away from the mast so they don’t keep us up at night with incessant clanging. I’m listening to the rain beating on the cabin top and watching the wind indicator clocking 20 knots here in the marina, truly grateful that we are not on the open water for now, bird crap and all.
S/V Galapagos, standing by on channel 16.