Vol 1 Iss 2: If adventure's what we're looking for...
Discover more from Co-Captain's Log
Vol 1 Iss 2: If adventure's what we're looking for...
July 5, 2021 | Pelican Beach, Cypress Island, WA USA | 48º35’33” N 122º41’39” W | Winds: 5-10 SSW | Weather: Sunny & Clear 70º
Pelican Beach, Cypress Island, WA USA
The plan right out of the gate was to satisfy the U.S. Sailing’s Coastal Passagemaking certification requirement of a night sail longer than 45 miles: Sail from Anacortes to the southern end of the San Juan Islands at Iceberg Point then on a beam reach across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, crossing the shipping lanes 3 times in the dark, and landing at John Wayne Marina in Sequim at 2 a.m. It was going to be a long night, an important night. Luckily we had our instructor, Captain Phyllis Woolwine, to coach us through the exercise.
This wasn’t just hoop jumping for a certificate. This skill is a practical necessity. Any journey longer than 50 miles for us will include a night sail. Night passages are a routine part of cruising. Night passages are also terrifying. You can’t see anything right in front of you, like logs, crab traps, other boats. You can’t see anything far away from you, like the Olympic Mountains or Mt Rainier to tell you which way you’re headed.
We started strong: practicing single-handed tacking and jibing, heaving-to, reefing the mainsail. Sailing was smooth, smooth enough for me to go down below and cook soup for us. Big mistake. While I was below, we rounded Watmough Bay and faced straight away the winds and waves of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I climbed out of the galley into the cockpit to fight the nausea beginning to gurgle in my stomach. The best way to quell seasickness is to steer so I took over the helm and sent Andrés Jacobo down below to fetch motion sickness medicine. Sending someone below and forward to look through hundreds of tiny pill packets: Big Mistake #2.
The winds continued to build, but the waves built bigger. “Check the weather forecast.” NOAA says: West wind 10-20 kts, 5-8 ft wind waves. Yes, that feels about right. Let’s beat upwind to Iceberg. But the more we beat upwind, the more the waves beat back. 8 ft waves then 9 ft. The winds from the Pacific Ocean were weakening, but the waves had spent all day and 80 miles building in the Strait. That’s a 10 ft wave! Steer into the wave, bear away. Push the tiller into the wave, pull it away. Push, pull. Push, push, push, pull. 10 ft wave, 11 ft wave. PUSH PUSH PUSH, PULL PULL PULL! 12 ft wave. For an hour we pushed and pulled. The winds weren’t favorable and the bottom of our boat not clean enough to allow us to make forward progress. And finally a warning on the VHF: A gale warning issued for the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Facing 5 more hours of forcasted winds of 25-35 kts, 12 foot waves, and 2 crewmembers struggling to keep dinner down, we remembered the wise words of our South African rigger, Hal, “Never go out in a Gale because then you’re the idiot who went out in a Gale.”
We abandoned our best laid plans and tucked into Hughes Harbor on Lopez. Sometimes good seamanship is less about reaching your destination port and more about finding safe harbor for your crew and your boat. We’ll have to make a second attempt on the night passage.
Click here to see a short clip of us sailing through the 12 ft monsters:
The Mainsail
The definite highlight of the month was finally seeing our parents after 19+ months! Mark and Becky met us at Rosario Resort on Orcas Island where we ate seafood, explored the art and ceramics scene, and swam every day in the beautiful pool looking out over the islands. Andrés and Jackie met us in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island where we ate seafood, rode Cannondale electric bikes for the first time to circumnavigate the island, and tried to keep cool in the PNW heatwave by swimming in local lakes.
Both parents said the highlight of their trips was sailing with us on Ana María. For 3 years they have patiently listened to us complain about boat work and celebrated with us successes, big and small. Andrés and Jackie have helped us for weeks at a time and been with us as we tackled the hardest jobs. When we finished the sail on East Sound, Becky said, “It’s like the ultimate recital: all the years of work to get the boat ready and all the training and practice to use her…and we get to see all that work on display.”
Andrés Jacobo remarked after we waved goodbye to his folks, “We both have really great parents.” Indeed we do. What a pleasure to feast with them and savor every moment of togetherness!
The Lingo
A gale warning sent us searching for safe harbor on our first night because it indicates strong wind and big waves. We need to motor in anything less than 10 kts of wind. Ana María sails well in 10-30 kts. A gale isForce 8-9 winds (34-47 kt winds) and the conditions begin to get rough. After that it’s storm warning and once you’ve hit 64 kts, you’re in hurricane force winds. We have a sail inventory that should keep us comfortable in all but the most extreme conditions, but are comforted by the fact most long-term cruisers experience gale force winds only 1-2% of the time.
The Wildlife
Bald eagles daily. Blue herons. Seals. Ducks, loons, pigeon guillemots, cormorants, and seagulls. Porpoises. Whales at Iceberg Point on my birthday!
Our Coastal Passagemaking course is the culmination of 4+ years learning to sail with Capt. Phyllis. It’s quite rare for adults to pick up new skills from scratch. As adults, you forget what it’s like to climb the learning curve. Learning as an adult is plagued with impatience and frustration. You make million dollar deals. You design programs used by thousands of people. Why in the world can you not figure out how to drop a hunk of metal into the ground so it holds a boat in place??!?! Luckily, unlike some of the learning required as children, passion fuels adult learning. We are eager to learn and build our skills.
We try to be patient with ourselves and each other for the rest of the week as we build skill after skill: deploying the life sling and retrieving a person-in-water under sail, navigating by radar alone, setting a bow and stern anchor, perfecting knots and line handling, jibing with the preventer in place. Each day we know a little more. Each day we’ve grown a bit more confident.
Click here and swipe right to see us navigate by radar:
The Challenge
Take a moment and think of all the routines you have in a day, a week, a month. To prepare to live aboard a boat full-time, write them all down in an Etch-a-Sketch then SHAKE IT. This is what our month has felt like. In fact, in all my years of moving about, I haven’t felt this kind of dizzying adaption since living with host families in France. There are new routines, new rhythms, new rules for every aspect of our life. Also like France, we’re settling down into the cruisers’ life we’ve dreamt about and adapting to life in our floating house by drinking instant coffee, storing produce according to ethylene production and sensitivity, closing seacocks at night and before leaving the boat, efficiently inflating and deflating the kayak whenever we need to run errands, conserving water by washing dishes with foot pumps…and the list goes on…forever.
The Galley
This month we ate PNW seafood galore: Fresh crab cakes from Bucks Bay in Olga on Orcas. Grilled halibut cheeks. Fresh wild caught King Salmon from Alaska. Seafood pasta. Clams from Westcott Bay Shellfish Co on San Juan Island. If you’ve never made a trip to the San Juan Islands, come for the food!
The Entertainment
This video has been our most delightful entertainment. Andrés Jacobo’s sister, Paula, drove with friends from Florida to Bellingham to see us post-vaccination and pre-cruising. We took them sailing on Bellingham Bay and they were treated to brisk 25 kt breezes! The video she took on a Super 8 mm film camera gives you a great sense of what it’s like to sail on Ana María.
Click here to view:
Password: lummi
And finally, the pinnacle of the 5-day class, maybe even the past 4 years we’ve been learning to sail. Prepping for the night passage on the final evening felt like waiting for fireworks on the 4th of July. You get all ready and settled. The anticipation butterflies begin to jitter in your tummy. And you wait. “Is it dark enough yet? No? …(5 minutes later)…what about now?” Finally it’s time for the grand finale to begin. We bundle up for the cool night in our foul weather gear, turn all the lights red to preserve our night vision and it’s anchors away!
The first challenge right out of the gate was to ‘thread the needle’ of Lopez Pass, navigating the small, reefy thoroughfare in the dark under radar alone. Thanks to the previous day’s exercises, we could identify the blotches of red and yellow on our radar screen and were able to carefully navigate without a visual on Rim or Ram Islands and without a map. So satisfying to use our newly acquired skills so successfully!
Once through the pass, we faced a new challenge: crossing Rosario Strait at midnight, trying to dodge cargo ships barreling through the Salish Sea to Seattle and beyond. If you hit a cargo ship, you don’t live to tell about it. If a cargo ship hits you, they don’t even feel it. Thanks to the AIS transceiver Andrés Jacobo installed, we can see cargo ships on our iPad long before we can see them with our eyes. As we prepared to cross I saw the ‘WSF Ferry’ marker taking, as expected, the last round of passengers from the San Juan Islands to Anacortes.
What was not expected was seeing a vessel named “Warship” appear on the screen. “Wow, someone is a little cocky about their boat.” Clicking on the vessel to get more information, I realized they weren’t being boastful but factual! “Military vessel engaged in military exercises. No length of vessel available. Speed over ground: 35 kts,” read the scary description of the vessel headed towards our final destination. I showed the other crew members the vessel and its heading and we made plans to stay far away. With the moving hazards identified, we got our binoculars and looked for navigation lights on Belle Rock, Burrows Island, Shannon Point reef, and Cypress’ Reef Point.
Slowly but surely we crossed on the peaceful seas of Rosario Strait, our path illuminated by the light of the mostly full moon and guided by the flashing patterns of the buoys and navigation lights. Right as we could see the blinking red and green lights indicating the entrance to Guemes Channel, the Warship beacon appeared again on the screen. I went to the bow to look for it: nothing. 5 minutes later still nothing. Maybe it’s a submarine? Listened for it: nothing that sounded like a Diesel engine moving at 35 kt.
We moved slightly out of the channel to give whatever it was extra clearance….and then suddenly it was next to us. The most frightening thing I have ever seen. A silent gray imposing behemoth of a vessel charging rapidly before us. Its movements were smooth and its noise didn’t betray its speed. With the weaponry mounted on its decks, it looks exactly like the silent killer it probably is. We’ve crossed a lot of wake in our travels so far and whether it comes from a fast power boat, a tiny fishing skiff, or a huge cargo ship, it all leaves the same pattern: streamers of wake coming off the back. Not the warship. Instead of streamers, the ship left a wake woven like a basket. A pattern that would thrill any textile artist. And we realized: it’s a stealth electric ship.
My heart was still pounding as I watched it disappear into the darkness. Terror. Excitement. Pride. Here we are, dodging warships under the light of the moon, navigating through dark waters using the nav lights as our guides. If adventure is what we’re looking for, by George, I think we’ve found it!
Motored our way around Cap Sante Head, leaving the marina entrance red light to our starboard and the green well to port. Docked safely at 1:30 a.m. in the sleeping marina. Felt the adrenaline pumping through our veins until we fell into much needed slumber.
The Horizon
We’re taking Ana María out of the water in Bellingham to complete some annual maintenance, do some repairs, and hopefully install a reverse osmosis water maker before we head out the Strait of Juan de Fuca for good.
Fair winds and following seas,
Katherine
P.S. We looked through the “Notice to Mariners” from the US & Victoria Coast Guards and found nothing about stealth nighttime military exercises in June. Not surprising, I guess. Google helped us to find what we think is the warship we saw which happened to be training on the West Coast in June. Click here to see a picture of the Zumalt Destroyer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer