Jack the Skipper boards La Niña

Jack emailed this after visiting the faithful reproduction of the famous ship while it was tied up on the Willamette.


This was the best boat show I've ever been to. As an avid armchair sailor, I had enough reasons already to visit what is called the best reproduction ever of one of the three boats in Columbus' first fleet. But I am also reading at this very moment the new book by Tony Horwitz about Columbus and all the other early visitors to the Americas.

Anyway, La Niña is moored on the Eastbank Esplanade just north of the Hawthorne Bridge. Several times I almost turned back before arriving because I couldn't see it and was sure they had got the dates wrong in the paper. You
can't see it at any distance at all because it is incredibly small - just 66 feet long on deck, with 17 feet at the beam (think a mere 1 1/2 times Aurora). Its color is dark and dull, and I doubt its masts go as high above the water as ours does.

Keeping our beloved Valiant 40 in mind again, "primitive" does not even begin to describe La Niña. Of course no head, propane galley, diesel heat, VHF, GPS, roller furling, winches, cabins, or berths. This very heavy tub (200,000 lbs, almost 10x our displacement) can not even dream of sailing to windward. With its square-rigged sail plan, it can only run with the wind. In fact, lacking a serious keel with any bite to it, La niña can't even take advantage of winds smack on the beam, because the boat gets pushed faster to leeward than it can move forward. I also noted that the boat, for all its weight, still rocked around a lot on the quiet Willamette mooring. "Oh yes," said one of the crew members. "She bobs like a cork."

So, my respect for all the early explorers is only greater seeing what they had to work with. And I also now appreciate that, even setting aside diesel engines, GPS, and the like, modern sail boat design extracts so much more performance out of the wind than was the case in the old days.

Rail (not ours) in the water

May 11, a short Sunday morning sail into a good stiff wind. The only other boat out was a neighbor's ketch from Port Hadlock which flew past us with its rail in the water most of its length.

This was a much anticipated weekend with Kinza. On Saturday hiked the Dungness Spit, getting distracted on the way by an intriguing logging festival in Sequim, featuring a very long community parade with floats from all the little festivals around Northern Washington and the Olympic Peninsula. The Dungness Spit Light - only 5 miles out in the ocean - is really far you walk on soft sand. The lee side of the spit is an off limits nesting area, and you need to make periodic jaunts to the highest part of this very narrow spit, to see the birds on in the calmer water. We painstakingly identified a duck with a headdress and a gull known to interbreed with another in that area. But I can't remember their names!. Driving home through Sequim we also saw a herd of Roosevelt Elk right in a semi residential area at the foot of the mountains.

Mid-winter cruising north of the 48th parallel

To celebrate my birthday on December 3 we spent the weekend on Aurora. Sunday morning broke clear and beautiful with a fine breeze. We sailed up Port Townsend Bay and into the Strait. Then it turned windy and cold, so we tacked back toward home. Sailing into the wind made it all the colder and then it started to snow. Soon we were in a blizzard, with snowflake clumps an inch and a quarter in diameter coming at us at 35 knots. It was a complete whiteout and we needed to use radar to find our way back to port. We spent the rest of the weekend cozily snowed in, the furnace working like a charm. No photos from this cruise!
Compare this with the most perfect mid-winter cruise imaginable. It wasn't until February that we made it back to the boat again. (A holiday drive to California for Christmas with the family was followed by Jack's Mom's passing and a larger gathering of the family for her memorial. ) In the midst of one of the heaviest winters on record we found ourselves surfing across the water while basking in the sun surrounded by the Cascades on to the north and east and the majestic Olympics to the south west. Point Wilson, home to the spookiest waters around, looked like something on a postcard from the Caribbean.

Baggywrinkles?

Baggywrinkles? What's that all about? Worried I'm losing my self-esteem? Well, not really. Beyond what sailing into the wind is doing to my face, the name has a certain ring for me.

Baggywrinkles is a historic textile term. A lot of sailing is textile art - think of all the sails and all the lines. Baggywrinkles are where the two meet: If a sail chafes against a line, both wear out. Baggywrinkles are protection. They're those funny things that look like a merger of a hairy caterpillar, a feather boa and a lambswool duster. They're easy to make. All you need is some worn out or left over ends of rope.
These baggywrinkles are on the rigging of the Raglan, a fine schooner that towers above us here in Port Townsend. It was built in Denmark to haul lumber from the Northwest. Later it was purchased by Neil Young and fitted out with quite a luxurious interior.
Aurora is spending the week here getting a new traveller. (Basically this is hardware on a track with a bunch of pulleys offering a 1:5 effort:energy ratio that lets us position the mainsail. See Glossary of Nautical Terms.) The folks from Port Townsend Rigging have removed all the old, party frozen blocks, installed a new rail and a car with ball bearings, and lines that lead into the cockpit. This traveller, along with our new roller furling system designed by Liza of Port Townsend Rigging and the brand new genoa designed by the Carol Hasse, will make Aurora an easy boat to sail and save crew energy on those long hauls.

The Columbia River

On these rapidly shortening, often freezing winter days, Aurora is safely moored at a lovely spot at the south end of Port Townsend Bay. Bald eagles soar overhead and at night it's hard to identify constellations because the sky is so crowded with bright stars. But to get here, we start by driving down the Mighty Columbia.
What a river! It starts in the Canadian Rockies and 2000 km later emerges at Astoria, Oregon. Columbia sailors know their stuff. They contend with relentless current, bridges that must open to let them pass, ferocious winds out of the Gorge, commercial shipping, and The Bar. And yet hundreds of Columbia River sailors, including OWSA women, cross The Bar every summer, navigate blue water along the unfriendly coast of Washington State and sail into the Juan de Fuca Strait just to get to where Aurora starts her northerly voyages.
We were reminded of this on the day after Thanksgiving when Selena and Brian joined us for a pilgrimage to Astoria to visit the Columbia River Maritime Museum. We stood awestruck before the huge map of the shipwrecks strewn upon The Bar, deservedly known as the Graveyard of the Pacific We lived through dramatic Coast Guard rescues. We toured the light ship that was moored at the mouth of the river, endlessly tossing its crew. We saw how a small band of bar pilots guide thousand foot ships over The Bar.


Then we came upon a modest display on the USS Constitution, which had visited Astoria following its restoration earlier in the century. The USS Constitution was my first experience with a sailing vessel. It was the 1950s and Mom, Dad, Barbara and I took a road trip through Massachusetts. We got an essential civic education following the dotted yellow line of the Freedom Trail through Boston's old streets, imagining Paul Revere tearing off on his horse, putting the Minutemen on high alert. But the whole while, Mom kept talking about the USS Constitution, and getting us mentally prepared by reading Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous poem "Old Ironsides".

A remarkably impressive ship, indeed, but it was only last week that I understood why it meant so much to Mom. Although it had been saved from destruction in the 1830s by earlier patriots like Oliver Wendell Holmes, it fell into utter disrepair by the turn of the century and the US Navy decided to scrap it. Again the public stepped up. And the restoration of the USS Constitution would not have been possible, I learned standing in front of that display in Astoria, without the contributions of thousands of school children in the early 1920s. Mom would have been part of all that! Of course she was excited to show us "her" ship.

Mom passed away in February, the first weekend we spent on Aurora, where we were with Selena and Brian when we learned of her stroke and death the next morning. Thinking she would have wanted us to, we took a short memorial sail that same day. But now I see it was the right thing to do.

Fog

My favorite organization, Oregon Women's Sailing Association, is full of wonderful energetic women who do amazing things. I don't know where to start. They invented Sail for the Cure and this year raised nearly $30,000. They have workshops on neat stuff like hull integrity and electrical systems. Racers organize a racing series; cruisers get everyone out for Wednesday Night Sails. Just look at their website. I simply enjoy myself. And to hold up my volunteer end a bit, I help with the newsletter. Here's what I wrote for newsletter, but editor Alice Patten contributd the first sentence that says it all.

FOG

Fog makes you feel stupid and powerless. So when you are suddenly engulfed by fog, what do you do? I tend to panic while my skipper remains calm. Eventually the fog breaks or we break out of it. Here’s what we did to manage several episodes.

Our first encounter with fog was as brand new sailors out on the Columbia in an Island Sailing Club Cal 22 in comfortably light winds. All of a sudden the lovely wispy clouds ganged up on us in a white out! Where were the riverbanks? The shipping lane?

We opted to leave the sail up so we’d be more visible should the fog break around the mast. And we left the motor off so that we could listen for shipping and for cars on the I-5 bridge. When the fog loosened a bit, we slid back into our Hayden Island slip.

Our second incident was smack in the middle of Juan de Fuca Strait, where the shipping lanes converge. We’d deliberately waited for a bright calm day and were motoring back to Port Townsend. Out of the blue the fog closed in. Visibility dropped from miles to about 25 feet. We were in blinding white dome!

We did three things. Switched on the VHF for calls from vessels that might catch us in their radar, blew on a cheap but loud fog horn and ran the folding radar reflector up a halyard.

Last summer, cruisers along the BC coast got fog in July as well as “Fogust”. Fog is more likely in the morning but early birds enjoy solitude and get good anchorage or mooring buoys. Following our clear, crack of dawn departure from Victoria, the Vancouver Island shoreline gradually disappeared and we were socked in. We switched from charts to our hand held Garmin GPS chart plotter and crept up the coast. Finally we spotted a buoy near Sidney port and circled it for an hour. When the fog broke slightly we found our way into the marina. Over lunch the blue sky returned.

Our last incident was in the Boundary Channel. On the chart it looked idyllic, cutting a clear path between the San Juans and the Gulf Islands! Little did we know it was also a major shipping lane. The fog caught us on a short leg to South Pender Island. Grey fog, thick as mashed turnips, and with rain that did nothing to dispel it. Rocky islands studded the shores. We tethered ourselves in. Jack managed the helm while zooming in and out on the GPS plotter. Suddenly, we heard ourselves being hailed on the VHF. “Sailing vessel in the shipping lane, can you read me?” The captain of what was likely a huge vessel informed us he was moving at 14 knots with us in his path! As I answered the call, Jack struggled with the GPS plotter, which had chosen chose that moment to break down! I explained the problem and the pilot gave us our optimal heading. We got back on course, deeply grateful for his kind encouragement and navigational expertise.


Without the GPS plotter, we could only rely on radar. Sitting on the top step of the companionway, I zoomed in and out on the radar screen. Every 45 seconds I’d emerge to do a 360º scan of a “horizon” that was 50 feet away. At one point I “saw” a vessel at 12 o’clock and yelled to Jack to turn sharply to the left. As he did, an ugly “deadhead” slid by on starboard. But this log stuck into the bottom helped us find our location on the chart.

Was there more we could have done in these situations? Certainly. As lessons are learned, sailors develop mental checklists. Please add your strategies for managing fog to this list.

• Sail, don't motor if there’s any wind. You can hear much better and your sails may break through low lying fog and be visible to commercial vessels.
• Go slow.
• Blow your fog horn at regular intervals.
• Hoist a radar reflector.
• Monitor VHF channel 16.
• Use a GPS chartplotter and/or radar if you've got them.
• Circle a safe, known navigational aid such as a buoy until visibility improves.
• Be patient. Fog recedes as quickly as it arrives.

Heavy Weather

The sun is not rising until about 7 am these days so we had a leisurely rise and shine, got off a couple of emails, and listened to NOAA: 15 to 20 knots with some rain in the afternoon. It was very low tide just after dawn when we pulled out. Just as well as going under the Indian Island Bridge is always terrifying for me; my lousy depth perception says the mast will hit and we'll be destroyed, even when low tides gives us another 9 vertical feet to fool around with. Jack the Skipper plowed ahead unfazed. Raised sails out of the channel, opting for one reef and the staysail.

NOAA got it wrong again: by the time we off Foulweather Bluff on Kitsap Peninsula (opposite Mutiny Bay on Whidbey Island), the only boat under sail save one hugging the shore into Hood Fjord aka Canal, it was blowing from the south against a flood, i.e. very choppy. At Point No Point (opposite Useless Bay) it was worse, with the wind unimpeded across the vast fetch of Admiralty Inlet. So we were dismayed and encouraged to see about fifty racing boats of all lengths rollicking toward us, spinnakers unfurled, often dipping in the water, pushing the limits, safe in their numbers and large crews. It should have gotten better at slack tide, but no. At one point when Jack was pinching we hit 48 knots apparent wind, which had to be 42 true! Aurora handled it with cool aplomb. For the first time, we installed the drop boards and tethered ourselves in the cockpit, thankful for all lines leading back.

I downed a couple flax muffins to settle my stomach as we tacked back and forth for a couple of hours criss crossing the path of a tug and tow whose forward motion was much slower than our speedy zigzags but velocity made good identical. (In the picture you can see the tiny tug between the staysail and main.)
Every twentieth wave reached us in the cockpit so we were drenched by the time we pulled into Kingston, having aborted our cruise to Blake Island. After tying up in an empty double but too short guest slip with tremendous difficulty, I found a 40 foot slip and got some reinforcement for our tie up. Passing on the good deed received, I spent the next 30 minutes helping a gorgeous Hans Christian dock against impossible stiff winds in the Port of Kingston.

After a good night's sleep, I awoke to a brightening sky, Jack's coffee, and the maritime forecast from NOAA. There was a small craft warning with breezes expected to reach 25 knots and reports of rain all day, which usually means there will be insufficient wind to blow the clouds away. So with huge spots patches of blue sky to the west and north we set out. As we lifted the main with the leftover single reef and opted for the staysail, a rainbow dropped down to light up Point No Point. We switched off the engine to enjoy the south wind, the broad reach, and the the sound of the boat surfing over the following seas. What a morning!

Our initial starboard tack would take us into the middle of Admiralty Inlet and a second, port tack would bring us home. After yesterday's zigzags this was refreshing. But winds steadily mounted well beyond 25 knots as we flew north. Jack managed the helm with his usual aplomb even when the wind gusted to 53 knots on the gauge and on another occasion when Aurora cut through the froth registering 9.3 knots, the fastest we've ever done.

We heard a coffee mug from breakfast jump from the sink to the cabin floor while the fire rings flew off the stove. We'd not thought it necessary to lay a jack line along the deck nor to bring up the drop boards to close the hatch. Lesson learned: these things must be done early in the game, before it's too dangerous to go below. We tethered ourselves in the cockpit and enjoyed the ride despite it all. No traffic problems. An 82 ft ocean-going yacht the AIS identified as "Sans Souci" hugged the shore and the super rapid Victoria Clipper, a catamaran ferry, raced across our bow, both northbound. An hour later, we encountered a 800 ft tanker coming south and went onto a fairly uncomfortable beam reach to let it pass. The captain, however, made a early sharp turn toward us, a clear signal that we could go back to a broad reach and safely cross the shipping lane perpendicular to his route. These are the kinds of signals that pleasure craft make in crowded waters but such a gesture from a large commercial vessel would be rare. This captain must have known a thing or two about sailing; we felt well taken care of.

By the time we reached Oak Bay there was still 40 knots of wind. We realized that we'd gone the entire trip - on a Sunday in early October - and not seen a single sail boat or pleasure craft of any kind. At that moment, there appeared a lone windsurfer, wetsuited black against a black and white sea.

We brought the engine to life with a turn of the key but ran it at a slow idle to let the waves push us into the cut between Quimper Peninsula and Indian Island...at over 5 knots. As we approached the ever terrifying bridge, Jack told me to sit down and close my eyes. Next thing I knew it was "Okay!" and we were floating in the bathtub of south Port Townsend Bay, several hundred feet from our slip.