I packed up my liferaft and EPIRB and headed to Everett to meet a former student to deliver his, new to him , Wauquiez Pretorien 35 from Astoria to Everett. Usually, I am reluctant to have owners join me on deliveries because I know so many well-qualified sailors wanting to crew with me. Some are fellow racers but some like this boat’s new owner Jon and his son Johnson, are alumni of GBA’s Advanced Sailing program. Both were aboard GBA’s former training vessel '“Journeyman” a Cal 40 when we did the Oregon Offshore in conjunction with an Advanced Coastal Cruising Class in 2019. Captain Gavin Brackett and Sir Martin Gibson were co-instructors. (See link)
“The other reason it’s good to do this before the bar is cramming yourself into the yogic pose in what most sailboat designers consider to be “engine access” is best done when the boat isn’t being tossed around. If you were lucking enough to hit up the Pig n Pancake before you hit the bar you might be feeding the fishes after a sub lazaretto boat yoga session”
The purchase had only been finalized a few days before so there were some things to do before we left. New batteries were to be installed and an AIS radio was going to be helpful given that the visibility from fires and fog would be limited.
I confess I was looking forward to heading to my favorite chandlery England Marine to pick up the radio and some last-minute items.
Unfortunately the only AIS radio they had at the store required two VHF antennas and an external GPS. I’ve owned two boats now that have the Standard Horizon 2200 radios aboard which has GPS built in. Oh well at least we had a fancy radio albeit without AIS and no GPS or radar. Don’t try this at home kids.
There's something about being underway in the fog not knowing what you will come across. First, there is stress and then you get so tired that you become all but totally desensitized to the discomfort of sailing blindly into air that is so moist that you can see only a few boat lengths ahead and in the dark, it seems like even less. Your eyelashes become saturated and heavy with water and without a horizon to get a bearing on the boat seems to move beneath you with an alien motion.
Before leaving I spoke with a friend of mine who is a lifelong crabber and asked him at what depth we would find the crab gear. Sometimes it's in close, under 200 feet and sometimes it’s out further. Sometimes it's only open to the aboriginal (native) fisherman. This information helps me decide where to go to avoid the gear and boats. He told me that the crab season had been a bust and that it was so bad guys were having to sell their boats. This was good news for us and the coast was going to be pretty much clear of crab pots and the boats that work them. I would also add that although fishermen have AIS they deliberately do not transmit their location to avoid sharing in their hard-won secret fishing grounds.
When we arrived at the boat in Astoria I turned everything on to check what worked and what didn’t. The boat had what seemed like no updates to its electronics since the 80s and I wish I had taken a picture of the Loran in the nav station to share here. For those that don’t know, Loran is an archaic navigation device that preceded GPS and that used radio direction finding to help mariners find their way in the 70s and 80s. Owning one was a mark of the successful fisherman as they cost quite a bit back in the day. Now with the Loran beacons required for them to work all long gone, it is only a weighty relic taking up space in the nav station.
While going through running lights and the other instruments I noticed the depth reading on the depth sounder. It was low, especially considering where we were on the tidal swing. Let me first say that the Port of Astoria is a wonderful place near to my heart. I have sailed through many times on deliveries and more notably it is where the boats have always gathered before the start of the Oregon Offshore; one of my favorite sailboat races. A race, for those that don’t know, that starts on the Columbia River Bar at buoy two and ends at the entrance to Victoria Harbor. Recently however the meeting location and name of the race were changed due to the decreasing depth in the Oregon’s Port of Astoria marina. Now the boats are meeting in Ilwaco on the Washington side and the race is called The Northwest Offshore Race or something.
Back to our depth sounder: as the reader may know a depth sounder can be calibrated in different ways. The transducer is mounted in the hull often in front of the keel. Without calibration, it reads a depth as much as 3 feet shy of the true depth at the waterline. (See fig 2) It can be calibrated to read the depth under the keel as I have found charter boats often do or the difference from the waterline can be added to its reading thereby giving an accurate sounding of the depth of water the boat floats in. The nature of a delivery captain's work is boarding a strange and disused boat with antiquated equipment and with little time to familiarize oneself with the eccentricities all boats are bound to have. This means bringing tools and a weary outlook that can make allowances for these often dangerous particularities. (LINK to delivery gear)
A measuring tape is not one of those tools in my kit but fortunately, Jon brought one and we could measure the depth the old way. Well not exactly, traditionally the water the boat was in would have been measured by a lead line which was a long line marked in fathoms (look it up) with a lead weight weighing about five pounds with recess for grease in the end to take samples of the sea bed that would have been thrown forward as the boat sailed so as to measure the depth as the boat passed over where the lead touched bottom.
After finding that the depthsounder was properly calibrated and looking at the tide I realized that we would be aground the next morning when we were planning on leaving to catch the first flood after slack. I remembered Skippering a Hylas 42 about 15 years ago in the Oregon Offshore and “Rage” the famous local built Wylie 70 boat being aground before the start of the race. She has two keels to choose from and races with her deep one that draws 13 feet if I remember correctly. So we called the fuel dock and asked if we could tie up there for the night and leave once they opened and we filled up in the morning. They happily accommodated us and the next day we were underway to the bar.
The Columbia River Bar has an ominous history and its nicknames strike fear in the hearts of those that have and haven’t crossed it. “The Graveyard of the Pacific” is one that comes to mind. Without going into the whole history ill try to briefly explain why the bar has so many wrecks and dead sailors on its bottom. The Columbia River is the largest river that empties into the Pacific, as it does it carries sand and silt from upriver and deposits it in a constantly growing shallow delta and then sand bar or shoal that extends miles out to sea. This shallow water causes the often large waves born hundreds of miles offshore in the Pacific to shorten and steepen as they approach and this paired with the strong current caused by the river's outflow produces dangerous waves. If this wasn’t enough; the effect of the tidal outflow caused by the huge delta upriver can create a current that most displacement boats can’t outrun. The good news is that if you time it right: when the tide is flooding the effect to the tidal current slows the river and if only for a short while: even reverses it sometimes far upriver.
If the fuel dock hours and crew’s morning head visits allow it, I like to catch the last of the ebb downriver for the push to be at the bar at the beginning of the flood. This way the 11 miles to the ocean goes quickly and the bar is calm or calming down by the time I get there. This time however we didn’t get jack-lines run and jerry cans lashed as quickly as hoped so we ended up motoring against a negative current all the way to the bar. This concerns the captain because it uses more fuel and pushes the ETA at the mouth of Juan De Fuca 150 miles north, back. At least the bar was flat and the fog had momentarily lifted. This is a very busy waterway often teaming with commercial traffic and fisherman of every variety so good visibility is a huge plus. At buoy 10 we saw a ship of about 250 feet coming in on the south side of the channel only to be surprised by its standing turn mid-channel and off our port bow within a mile. After the boat’s do se do I noticed its day shapes and corresponding running lights indicating that it was at the top of the right of way precedence and restricted in her ability to maneuver and was in fact a dredge sounding and dredging the bar’s channel as we passed. As we passed it crabbed diagonally across and behind us. (See picture)
Without a chart plotter in the cockpit, we are using our phones and Navionics to navigate. This is a wonderful app but uses a lot of power. This can be offset by putting your phone on airplane mode but after we cleared the bar and I went below for a nap I noticed that this 1985 boat did not have was a cigarette lighter to plug in my phone or my laptop with the navigation software on it. I guess buying an old French boat is like buying a European car without cupholders. It was a little concerning that the only auxiliary power we had was my personal power pack (as seen in the “seabag” page).
We did however have a little handheld GPS and I had my old Magellan GPS in the ditch bag I had brought along with the EPIRB.
The next concern the captain had was the water in the Racor filter (water separator). One of the things that happen when boats sit for a while before they are sold is they accumulate water and growth in their fuel tanks from condensation. This water and growth in the tank, paired with the agitation of crossing a bar shakes things off the sides of the tanks and fills the water separator and combined filter. We had been underway for two hours before reaching the bar and my habitual check showed that it had indeed filled with water. This is best done before the bar so you don’t lose your engine on the bar and is especially important when there is no wind to sail with if this happens, which was the case for us that day. The other reason its good to do this before the bar is cramming yourself into the yogic pose in what most sailboat designers consider to be “engine access” is best done when the boat isn’t being tossed around. If you were lucking enough to hit up the Pig n Pancake before you hit the bar you might be feeding the fishes after a sub lazaretto boat yoga session.
This was going to be a regular check done at every watch change
End of part one
Next: watches, motoring in the fog, and a Millennial’s idea of provisioning.