Meridian 441
Friday Harbor to San Diego
It’s not often that I get to deliver a boat from my home port. I’m not used to the convenience. The job was referred to me by a somewhat antique local captain who told me he wasn’t interested in coastal deliveries but having been the caretaker of the vessel and its occasional captain he could attest that the owners were good customers. I coordinated with him after making some arrangements with the owners to get an orientation to the boat, also something I’m not used to. When we met on the boat we found that the port engine’s battery could not turn it over. Glad to be finding this out before I had a weather window and crew aboard I informed the owner of the situation. I told him the start bank and the thruster batteries were old lead-acid batteries and needed to be replaced to move the boat. He responded by saying that he had just recently spent $18,000 on batteries and didn’t know why I was having problems. This is an example of some of the frustration both boat owners and service people like myself deal with too often. The owner doesn’t know his boat or how half of the systems on his boat works and feels taken advantage of by the shipwright or mechanic who worked on his boat last because it feels like there is always more to repair.
This is because boats require a tremendous amount of maintenance and their increasingly complex systems designed to make the landlubber feel life afloat doesn’t require any compromises compared with the conveniences of shoreside life. In adision, some things like batteries are both parts with comparatively short-term lifespans and require regular preventative maintenance.
Then I come along to help him move the boat he owns and doesn’t feel comfortable operating and find that the maintenance has been deferred and the boat is not seaworthy for the passage. I am in a position where I feel like I have to explain and justify the work that the boat needs to move forward and the owner is running out of patience with the boating world. At this point asked to see the invoice for the previous work on the battery bank to confirm that it was the house bank, not the start bank that had been replaced. After confirming this the next hurdle was the time it would take to have the small local marine repair outfit replace the batteries. Figuring this would take a few months and conflict with other deliveries planned, I offered to do it myself and for a significantly better rate than those he had previously hired to work on the house bank.
Two weeks later and the batteries were down and I was learning all about how to program wireless transmission controllers that needed to be recalibrated. (Old school design uses cables that run from the helm to the engines to change gear and throttle, these engines used a more modern wireless remote system that looked like it came out of the bilge of a spaceship) Once running and after a while spent lashing the oversized dinghy to the undersized davits to raise it further from the water my shipmates Mark and Corey boarded and we were off to the fuel dock. Not long later with Brown Island off our starboard beam, I started to bring the throttles up on the two big Cummins diesel engines. A boat like this, without an oversized dinghy on the back, should cruise at 15+ knots. We were WOT (wide open throttle) and barely doing 12. This was not a good sign. A beautiful rare and long weather window had presented itself to make this passage on what is quite honestly not the most seaworthy boat and I was seeing this window slip away in the periphery of my mind. Already I had an important choice to make: continue on at this very poor performance burning too much fuel while going slow or turn back and lose the day or more to figure out what was wrong. My thoughts were that the boat’s bottom or the wheels (props) were foiled. I called the captain that had run the boat in the past for the owners and asked him what RPM and speeds he had seen. As it turned out in the past three years the boat had moved as many times and never over 7 knots. As luck would have it this captain was also a diver that worked professionally in the marina. As misfortune would have it he could not dive the boat till 3 pm and we would miss the second fueling in port Angeles I had planned on to deduce the fuel consumption on the boat. My fears about the window closing or feeling the pressure to proceed without a confident sense of our burn rate and range moved from the periphery to the center of my mind.
A raising pressure makes any prudent skipper keen to waste no time putting miles under the keel.
It was 4pm and we no longer had barnacle incrusted props. At 17 knots we going to make it to PA 30 miles away before the sunset. The transient dock next to the fuel dock is an easy approach, often available and more than makes up for the rustic patina of the Port of Angels and its main marina’s bathrooms.
We didn’t have a good idea about the fuel consumption of the engines because of the foiled props and our turning back in Griffin Bay, so I wasn’t sure of our range with the 400 gallons aboard. The Washington Coast has very few options along its coastline for fuel and they are on the other side of the least fun type of bars. These bars are minefields of crab pot floats best crossed only two times a day when it’s not ebbing, and the fuel dock hours never seem to correspond to when you’re there.
After a complete rerig of the davit tackle, we could safely run offshore. The weight of this dinghy significantly reduced our speed and fuel efficiency on the trip.
Mark and C
COVID and its effect on the aboriginal communities in the Northwest had caused the tribes to close their respective ports and fuel docks making the best fuel and ice cream stop out of the question. In other times Neah Bay is a wonderful place for a wayward sailor/delivery crew to stop. Their fuel dock attendants and breakfast at Warm House Restaurant are a welcome oasis in the otherwise remote and inhospitable NW edge of the country. We were going to have to make Westport, a place that makes Port Angeles look like a charming tourist town.
As we were heading through the shortcut between Tattoosh Island and Cape Flattery “Hole in the Wall” I realized that it was the perfect conditions to cross the bar at La Push, another port on reservation land. I thought that it was worth a try so I called the number I found before I lost my cell signal. It went straight to voicemail which said that due to covid they were closed to the public but there was an emergency number. Feeling brave and hoping to avoid Westport’s fuel dock and another night waiting for it to open I gave it a call. A nice man answered and I told him that we were a powerboat southbound.
The man on the phone said that he would be a real d*(k if he turned us away so he said he would call the reservation police before we arrived and we could fuel up. Beautiful conditions for my first crossing of this legendary bar.
This is one of those places you can’t help but find a part of yourself glad it is so inaccessible to the general public. A gem of semi-natural protection with the towering rocks you pass to port and in the lee of prevailing conditions. A winding sandy river snakes into the rainforested valley beyond the small but welcoming marina. My guess is no more than 50 boats could moor there. To our starboard just inside the small marina’s entrance was a dock 60 feet long with two pumps dispensing diesel or gas with debit card terminals. There were some fishermen moving crab pots on in the nearby parking lot and among them the man I had spoken to on the phone. He told us we had to swipe the card twice for each tank because any delay would restart the process.
Fueled up we headed out the now significantly less intimidating bar. Even more of comfort came from the new knowledge of the boat’s burn rate and subsequent cruising range.
A few more fuel stops later and we were faced with the reality that our narrow weather window could not accommodate the slower pace unforeseen maintenance issues inflicted on our plan.
Deciding Crescent City was the closest port to leave the boat until the next window could allow, we found a car rental company and headed home.
If we had clean props I have no doubt we would have made the passage in the window we had. Next time I’ll check..