SV Yohelah – Pacific Loop

One of the cardinal rules of voyaging is that you never make landfall at night. With the help now of radar and GPS, you hear people admitting that they do more and more, but I wasn’t even tempted. We were making a 580 mile passage from Alaska down the outside of the Queen Charlottes and Vancouver Island to Barkley Sound, which is truly the “Graveyard of the Pacific”. We had been sailing for three days and nights and motoring the last day, and were scheduled to come ashore at 6:00 am Wednesday. It should be light enough then, and if it wasn’t we planned slow down a bit and wait.

Our trip was quite wonderful, and we’re so glad to have the “first passage” under our belts. We used a weather routing service called Locus Weather since we were new to passage making and still in the North Pacific. Our forecast called for quite a variety of winds, but it was providing what we wanted – good winds for sailing without getting our butts kicked. And that’s exactly what we got, except the last bit of winds were delayed and we made such good time we ended up motoring the last day in no wind at all.

As expected, the boat performed marvelously. The windvane did all the steering, and with a nice balanced helm we easily stayed on course throughout the trip. We found a few shortcomings that need to be remedied before the next passage (reefing the jib needs to be easier), but they’ll get fixed here in Ucluelet. We sailed downwind, on a beam reach, and upwind, and on all points of sail the boat just charged on through.

The crew didn’t have quite as easy of a time, though! We’ve heard from friends that the first couple days of a passage are tough, and that is so true. We took some seasick medecine a freind got us in Thailand last year (thanks Shane) that all the yachties take. It made us totally lethargic, so we only took it for the first day and a half until we knew our bodies were acclimated to the conditions and we wouldn’t get sick (or so we hoped). We did two hour shifts, and on our off watches we just crashed instantly, foulies and harness and all. The watch scheduled totally messed with our sleeping rhythms, but eventually our bodies got used to two hour naps.

By the end of the second day we were starting to feel human again, and by the fourth day we were able to trade some sleeping time for showers. I had precooked and frozen all of our dinners before we left, so meals were simply heating something up.

The night watches were really incredible. It was cold and we had on four layers (thermals, two fleece layers, and foulies), and the first three nights were overcast with no moon so it was really dark. The last night was clear and starry, and it had warmed enough to rid ourselves of a layer, but we were motoring so some of the magic wasn’t quite there! But being out there in the dark while the boat is just charging through the seas is an awesome experience. The radar makes it easy to keep an eye out for other traffic, so it’s mostly just about watching your course on the GPS and monitoring the wind speed and direction and hoping you don’t have to wake up your spouse to make a sail change if the wind picks up.

Now we’re in Ucluelet waiting for Leslie to get here tomorrow. We crashed hard once we got to the dock and cleared customs. We’ll spend two weeks here visiting with my sister and Rob’s brother, and then head south again on our next passage. We’ll use the routing service one more time, since this will be a longer passage and a little more tricky to predict. And we’ll be checking the weather faxes he’s using for the forecast so we can learn more about it ourselves.

Today on Yohelah we’re glad the first passage is done and we’re getting ready for the second…..

Ucluelet is here

It was so good to see our sibs. Rob & I have travelled and worked away from “home” much of our adult lives, but for some reason when we left this time it made me realize how important the families are that we were leaving behind. Maybe it’s just being all grown up now (sort of), or not having our own kids and family, or the fact that we’re all getting older now, but for whatever reason it’s harder being away from them now.

So having Leslie up for three days and Stann for a week was marvelous. To get to share one of our favorite places in the Northwest with them was special. We were sad Leslie could only stay three days, but we’re looking forward to seeing her in San Diego in a couple of months.

We went to Turtle Bay and sat on a hook, visited the little town of Bamfield, and took the hike on Effingham Island that I’ve always wanted to do. We also got a couple quick tours of Tofino, which is a town in Clayoquot Sound north of Barkley (it was nice to have cars after three months without).

But now they’ve gone back to civilization and we’re getting ready for our next big passage south. This is the one we’ve been thinking about for years and we’ve prepared ourselves and our little boat. We’ll get a forecast from the weather guy again and decide when to leave. We’re getting the boat ready for a Thursday departure.

Of the eight hundred plus miles between the Pacific Northwest and San Francisco Bay, the ones around Cape Mendocino in Northern California are likely to cause the most trouble. The heat of the valley makes the winds blow strong and summer gales occur more frequently than not in that area. Our preliminary forecast Wednesday night called for light winds by the time we got to Mendocino. But, we’d have to pay for it in the meantime with big winds and big seas off the Washington coast. What we were going to see wasn’t gale force, though, just “bigger than you’d like”, as the weather forecaster put it. If we didn’t leave on Thursday, though, we’d need to wait until at least the following Tuesday, and by then there was no way to know what it would be like at Mendocino.

Of course by now you know what our decision was – Let’s go for it! With forecast in hand, 6 dinners in the freezer, fuel and water in the tanks, and everything stowed away we headed out into the North Pacific.

And for the second time the forecaster was right on. Unfortunately, the only variance was an underestimate of the winds and seas off the Washington coast! They started building on Friday as expected, and it blew 25-30 with sustained gusts of 35 knots all night and by morning there were mountains of ocean everywhere. Was I afraid? Of course I was at first. Than I realized I had nothing tangible to attach the fear to. The boat was solid, it’s systems were sound and we knew how to sail it. What we lacked was experience in big seas and the ocean, but it looked like our choices were little in that regard. The only twist was the horrible cold I was getting, and the strength it took from me.

There was significant comfort knowing the conditions weren’t going to last long, and they didn’t. Here’s a video Rob shot on Saturday after things had settled down considerably (there was no way we were thinking about the video cam in the huge stuff). We went nearly 100 miles off the coast and found little traffic. I saw a fishing boat on Sunday, but that was all until we got to San Francisco. We learned a ton about downwind sailing and used lots of different sail combinations, including our new spinnaker pole on our jib in the lighter winds, and a combination of our storm trysail and jib as the winds picked up again south of Mendicino.

Are we glad it’s over? Yes, but mostly because it’s just “been there” for so many years. Are we glad we went when we did? Absolutely. The experience was awesome and the passage overall was marvelous. There’s nothing good to be said about the 2:00 am to 4:00 am watch when it’s blowing 30 knots and the boat is screaming along in the dark, but it’s part of this lifestyle that we’re learning so much about and loving. We made quick time getting here in almost exactly 6 days, and only motored about 20 hours the entire trip (past Cape Mendicino and into San Francisco when the wind died on the morning of our arrival). The boat performed marvelously, and we experienced not a single piece of equipment failure or breakage.

Now we’re tucked into a city marina and got some seriously good sleep last night. Toady we’ll clean 3,000 lbs. of salt off the boat and get ready to enjoy the city and San Francisco Bay. Brittney is going to come down next week for a few days for a little pre-college jaunt, so we’ll have fun exploring the city with our neice. We’ve got a few boat jobs to work on (as always) and then we’ll start coast hopping down towards San Diego to get ready for the Baja Haha and our first winter in Mexico!

Today on Yohelah we’re several pounds lighter, as that North Pacific passage monkey is finally off our backs…….

San Francisco Bay is here