September 7, 2007
For those of you who just want the short version: It sucked but we made it. For those who are up for the “Sailing Across the North Pacific Massacree” in 4 part harmony, read on . . .
We stayed in Japan for as long as we dared, given general weather patterns and our next selected destination: Seattle, approximately 4,500 miles away. We were nearly ready to go: We’d gone over the boat thoroughly; we’d brought out the storm trysail and staysail, Jordan series drogue and sea anchor, stowed our anchor, set up the inner forestay and hanked on the storm staysail; we’d bought more jerry jugs to carry extra water and topped off our fuel tank and extra fuel jugs; we’d purchased mountains of hearty heat and serve meals; we’d stowed most of our Japanese charts and pulled out charts covering the entire north Pacific, plus Alaska, Hawaii, and the Pacific Northwest, all potential stops.
About 3 days before we planned to leave we noticed a deepening low east of the Philippines where northern Pacific typhoons usually form. (While typhoons can pass through this area anytime between June and October, typically they form east of the Philippines and pass through the Philippines towards Vietnam, Hong Kong or Taiwan until around August when they begin curving more northeastward towards Japan.) That low soon became typhoon Man-Yi and was forecast to come right to the Tokyo area, unusually early for passing this far to the east. In a well protected marina in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, we prepared the boat (moving slips, reducing windage and stringing a spider’s web of lines to the marina docks around us and placed huge Styrofoam fenders to protect the hull just in case) and waited for the typhoon to pass. Despite being physically and mentally ready to go, we had a week to wait before we could think of leaving, giving us the opportunity to do several more “final” trips to the store for more food. We even managed a trip to Costco (pronounced coostecoo by the Japanese). While we waited we received emails from friends scattered around Japan reporting the weather they faced as the typhoon passed. One set of friends suffered bent stanchions and pulpit and gel coat punctures in the Ryukyu Islands, but while we had torrential rains, our winds were quite manageable in the comfort of the protected marina. And so mentally we began our voyage across the Pacific, already so likely to be dominated by concerns about weather, even more acutely aware of the weather and feeling somewhat boat bound.
Generally we refer to Pilot charts to study general trends in an area to guide where we want to be and when. But since day to day weather can vary significantly from the averages and affects us so profoundly, we evaluate the weather every day. Over our years of cruising, we have grown to understand weather patterns in the areas where we've spent some time and identified good sources for weather data. The tools we use to check the weather include a number of websites when we have internet access onshore, plus grib files, a graphical depiction of weather systems resembling a pilot chart of an area that we select by latitude and longitude plus a range of details such as wind direction, barometric pressure, wave heights, fog or ice areas, etc. which we can via Sailmail, a very limited email we can access while underway through a very slow radio link. In addition to grib files, we can download weather faxes that are broadcast by weather bureaus on certain frequencies at certain times of the day for different areas of the world. That gets us the raw materials with which we can determine the conditions we might be likely to face and estimate the best time to leave - a weather window - for a certain passage, if we're smart.
Despite our years of learning, our experiences prove to us time and again how difficult weather can be to predict and how much we still don’t understand. And then we get to relearn old lessons when we get complacent! With so many variables to consider, we often see different actual conditions than the prognosis would suggest: predictions based on models that don't always agree that are then affected by local geographical factors. For example, off the northern coast of the Philippines we had very light winds suddenly build to 35 knots accompanied by short nasty seas. We were taken by surprise since we saw no obvious clouds hinting at a coming change in the weather - sunny hot conditions we'd had along that coast for days - and nothing in the 3 day forecast indicating any change was expected. With difficulty we returned to an anchorage we'd passed up while we'd had good conditions and the intensely strong winds totally vanished the following day as though we'd hallucinated the whole miserable episode. We surmised that we'd seen a lee trough effect like we see off the California Coast where a very strong sea breeze builds as a result of the land heating effect. Kicked in the butt by an old lesson long forgotten!
The weather in the north Pacific is quite different from the tropics, which is typically governed by large stationary highs that provide a nice steady flow of air that doesn't change much. Outside the tropics, we are affected by a series of highs and lows that move across the area and move against each other in often unpredictable ways, so the wind changes all the time and can dramatically change speed and direction. For a little peace of mind, we solicited extra help analyzing the weather to identify a good weather window, because once we leave . . . . So we asked our friends at Commander's Weather who provide weather forecasting for countless cruisers like us and also for many famous world record sailing attempts and round the world race and America’s Cup campaigns. We first met them while they were assisting the One World Challenge America's Cup Campaign and the Volvo Ocean Race ABN Amro team and enjoyed their company many times, including Thanksgiving and Christmas after One World lost to Oracle BMW in 2002. They confirmed our decision to wait for the typhoon to pass and then our decision to depart on our second proposed departure date as the adverse winds and swell from the typhoon abated. And their service includes monitoring our progress as we sail and providing warnings if any conditions threatened our safety or answers when specifically requested.
And so armed with a reasonable forecast for the start of our long voyage, we left the comfort of a nice marina with wifi access, shops and restaurants wondering if we were really ready for this. We again encountered heavy shipping traffic and fog as we exited the bay of Tokyo, with a nice northeasterly pushing us at speeds of 8 and 9 knots. A whale breached several times and then waved its tail in the air as we pulled away from the southern tip of Japan. Birds were everywhere. And the ships started to thin out as did the gloomly layer of clouds hovering over the densely populated Tokyo area.
We had wind on the beam and confused seas as we continued heading south to get away from the coast and the after effects of the typhoon. Our plan was to head down to around 30 degrees North, then turn east when we could ride the ridge between the lows rolling across Japan and the highs to the south so we'd have the wind behind us, on the bottom of the low and the top of the high pressure systems. (In the northern hemisphere, high pressure systems rotate clockwise and low pressure systems rotate counter-clockwise, opposite rotations in the southern hemisphere). A great theory, anyway, but difficult to execute when the systems are continually changing speed and direction, moving north or south, slowing or speeding up in their general progression eastwards across the Pacific. Our course took us across the Kuroshio current back eddy and we had rough waves making for a very wet and wild ride for a day or two. We just hung on and eventually the waves mellowed and the weather became pretty ideal, with beautiful sunny skies and 10 knot winds from behind or abeam which made for days of great sailing, where we could make progress to the East.
We settled into our watch system of 4 hours on and 4 hours off, a steady routine on our marathon relay, pacing our way across the ocean. With light winds and flat seas, we had comfortable conditions for sleeping, cooking, eating, washing the dishes, reading, plotting our position and course, listening to music, watching the moon, stars and constellations march across the night sky and always one of us watching for ships and fishing boats on the desolate horizon, making sail and rudder adjustments to stay on course and compensate for changes in the wind direction and speed. Sailing in light winds can be quite pleasant with flat water, though we nearly always have some swell or wind waves.
Little broke up the monotony of the dark blue horizon, though we saw lots of sea life. Storm petrels chirped at dusk and small albatross gracefully glided over the boat throughout the day. Dolphins often visited mornings and evenings, swimming alongside for a short while. Occasionally in the moonless darkness, dolphins cut torpedoes of phosphorescence through the water, making for a great light show. Huge tunas leaped out of the water, a number keeping pace with us for a time, though none fell for our lure as we dragged a hand line. We did snag something later but couldn’t reel it in fast enough before another predator feasted on our catch. Unfortunately an albatross fell for our trailing lure while we were eating dinner and became fatally snagged, to our horror. We were hesitant to put out the lure again, though we were desperate for some fresh fish. We did manage to “catch” several flying fish and squid with the sheer expanse of our deck (ha!), but they were always tiny and petrified, stuck to the deck in rigor mortis by the time we noticed them - Not exactly good eating. One squid inked all over the deck, leaving his signature in the throes of his last moments; Though we missed the drama, we may always remember him. Whales visited on quite a few occasions, some coming unnervingly close that were nearly as big as the boat. One morning I spotted a whale in front of the bow and altered course to avoid him as he slapped the water with his tail, passing just a few boat lengths to windward. Close enough for some great camera shots, but it was drizzling at the time and I didn’t want to miss the show while I went down and put the camera in its underwater case. Other whales surfaced, blowing and breaching nearby. Garth saw a huge sunfish swimming on the surface. We also saw lots of our namesake velellas sailing the waves, but getting a photo of these tiny creatures was nearly impossible until we caught a few when we had light winds.
For a time the winds were very light and for more than 10 days our progress was quite slow, though sunny skies made for nice sailing. While we had pleasant conditions for living, every time the winds got light we worried about our small water tanks, limited propane supplies, and scant fuel capacity over the course of such a long voyage. We were in serious conservation mode: We cleaned our dishes in saltwater and reduced our use of fresh water as much as possible. I avoided making hot and water intensive meals when I could, boiling the occasional pasta (for the sake of variety) in one third saltwater, and eating lunch meats and cheeses with crackers as much as we could to save propane for colder weather. Our fruits and vegetables quickly dwindled. (Once refrigerated in the stores, fresh produce doesn’t last nearly as long as farm fresh produce like I bought when I provisioned in Mexico for our 3 week crossing to the Marquesas. After that provisioning, we had vegetables for months and actually reached New Zealand with a perfect jicama that we’d carried for over 7 months!) Even power was rationed since sailing at angles put our solar panels in the shade on even bright sunny days, limiting our ability to generate power, so we often had to curtail our computer and radio use as well. Balancing limited resources while trying to avoid feeling deprived became a constant theme of this passage. The distance we were covering and therefore the sheer length of the voyage was certainly daunting and we tried to set smaller milestones to keep our spirits up and avoid focusing on how much ocean still lay ahead of us.
Like a couple of gerbils on a perpetual treadmill around the clock with little to break up the monotony, we sailed on. To keep ourselves from going stir crazy, we entertained ourselves through a variety of means depending on our conditions: making a new Japanese flag to replace the shredded rag that we had to take down a couple of weeks before we left the country, decanting food stores into easier to reach locations whenever conditions allowed, decanting water from jerry jugs into our tanks as we used fresh water supplies, listening to music or short wave radio programs (BBC, Radio New Zealand, Radio Australia) when our power level allowed. Exercising while underway can often be a challenge due to the limited space and the motion of the boat, but stretching and doing limited yoga kept us from getting stiff from sitting in the same positions for extended periods. Besides meals, we spent most of our awake time alone on watch trying to keep quiet while the other of us grabbed some sleep. We blew through a huge selection of books, thankful that we’d been able to trade books with another boat before our departure so we’d have a good variety. And we worked on the laptop whenever conditions and our power situation would allow, weather taking top priority.
With the laptop we downloaded weather faxes and grib files, though we had trouble connecting and staying connected to the nearest Sailmail stations thousands of miles away. A problem we thought we'd solved was evidently still an intermittent one, compounded by poor reception: HF interference made for frustrating sessions of attempting to connect and being unable to or getting dumped partway through a transmission accompanied by a huge drain on our batteries for nothing. While we’ve had few mechanical breakdowns on Velella - probably due to good preventative maintenance - and have always been impressed at how well the boat has performed, we haven’t been so lucky in the area of electronics and seemed to have been plagued by gremlins that have been very exasperating. Not having Sailmail was a big disappointment, since on such a long voyage, we were counting on it more than ever. Without it, our weather resources were limited and our ability to keep Commanders Weather, friends and family apprised of our progress was missing. And it meant the loss of a key form of entertainment. Occasionally we’d connect to Sailmail without trouble but more often than not efforts to connect, send and received messages turned into an exercise in frustration and I drafted countless emails that became out of date long before we could send the messages, and we wasted precious power getting nowhere. We hoped that our ability to connect would improve once we got closer to the Hawaii Sailmail station. Fortunately we could still receive weather faxes passively through the SSB using a different program so we could at least anticipate coming weather.
We watched the weather systems closely as they moved across the Pacific to help us plan our route and avoid adverse winds. We kept adjusting our course so we’d be positioned to take best advantage of wind speed and direction for the various weather patterns as they moved. Sometimes that meant sailing a bit out of the way – further south or north than our ideal course to get on top of a high pressure system or stay below a low pressure system so we’d get favorable winds from behind as much as possible. After the initial calms, we began sailing more northerly to reach areas where there was more wind. As we found more wind to the north, our speed picked up dramatically and we made in a single day what had taken us 3 during the lighter winds. Plotting our location on the charts became much more interesting, as we wondered whether we’d surpassed our longest run of 179 miles in a day. With the wind and swell behind us we surfed, rocketing forward at *average* speeds of 7.5 knots, with peaks of much more. Though we only had so much control at the relatively slow speeds we were moving.
As we moved north the weather got windier and colder and blue skies were obscured by clouds. We saw water temperature drop from 80 degrees to 68 F in about a week and continued to fall. Arctic blasts swept down from the north. We pulled out fleece, foulies, and blankets, then gloves and hats. (We even pulled out our boots, but discovered that they’d disintegrated since we last used them.) Our days sailing in little to no clothing disappeared and soon changing the inside layer required courage and planning. Clouds enveloped us for days on end and everything felt moist and cold. Suiting up for going on watch meant piling on layers, often still damp from the previous watch. A pervasive mist seemed to penetrate to chill us to the marrow, reminding us of Seattle weather and making us doubt our sanity for proposing to leave the tropics where we’ve enjoyed nearly endless summer for years.
And so we continued our marathon relay across the Pacific, changing watch every 4 hours and doing our best to stem the boredom, the scenery ever the same with little apparent progress save for the plots trickling eastwards across the chart. And still so much ocean to cover. When conditions were wet and boisterous, our entertainment was reduced to watching the sometimes invisible horizon, conditions being too wet to risk the Ipod or a book, the moon and stars obscured in the gloom. Food became the highlight of the day and the best way to keep warm. The cold drove us to hover in the companionway and then eventually we took refuge inside as much as we could get safely away with while keeping a decent watch for ships. That proved to be important to keep us going.
One day, while trying to do Sailmail in vain yet again, the power suddenly went out on the SSB; Exploring for faulty wiring is difficult under the best of circumstances and the conditions we had at the time precluded even thinking about it. We’d been mostly unsuccessful getting Sailmail for weeks, but hoped reception would improve as we approached Hawaii, and now we were facing not having it at all for the rest of the trip? We reconnected our old back up short wave radio to the antenna but couldn’t get a decent signal to get a weather fax. So no weather information either? Then we got really depressed. But we tried again the next day and were able to get a barely readable weather fax and felt a little better.
And we sailed on: sleep, wake, cook, eat, suit up, stand another watch . . . Repeat.
One early morning just 40 minutes into my watch at 4:40am, I nearly had a heart attack. In a pervasive mist, a ship suddenly appeared from the murk, so close that I didn’t think I had enough time to react. We hadn’t seen a ship for more than 2 weeks and were nowhere near any shipping routes – or anything at all. Normally I can spot a ship more than 10 miles away, and have plenty of time to determine its heading and speed and plan possible evasive maneuvers and execute them with plenty of time to spare. But I was rocketing down waves at speeds of up to 9 knots with the jib poled out – not exactly in the most maneuverable of circumstances - and this ship was suddenly within a quarter of a mile on a collision course. And at the speeds they go . . . . we were closing the distance between us pretty fast. The ship appeared and disappeared in the thick fog while I was watching it and though I noted its bearing and knew where it was I often could not see it. My heart pounded in my chest and my body literally started shaking as I knocked on the hull to wake Garth. The simplest evasive action we could take was to call the ship on the radio and hope he’d hear us and alter course immediately but we didn’t have the VHF on (trying to save power) and turning it on required going down below and taking my eyes off the ship which I wasn’t about to do. Garth was awake by then so I got him to call the ship. Following our call, a whistle came through the speaker followed by 2 clicks and the ship changed course to our immense relief. Shortly after the ship changed course our preventer broke and we accidentally jibed. The preventer cleat ripped out of the back of the combing and the line positioning the preventer on the boom also broke. What timing! The ship disappeared and reappeared in the fog several more times while we watched him go astern of us. Then we reefed and worked on jury rigging the preventer line to keep the main boom from wrenching around in the swell causing another accidental jibe. Yikes, that certainly broke up the monotony and woke me up!
And we sailed on: four hours on, four hours off . . . Drizzle, fog, rain . . .
When wave conditions mellowed we found the problem with the SSB. Cleaning the contact for the power button did the trick and we were back in business. (Corrosion and rust never cease in life aboard.) But in the process of investigating the SSB power problem we created ones for the VHF and stereo. While working in an overly cramped compartment that houses a myriad of other wires, power wires for those got knocked as we moved about in the waves, requiring a revisit to the rats nest of wiring. Still no luck with Sailmail, but at least we could get good weather charts again. Jeez, this trip was getting long.
And we kept on sailing . . .
Over such a large distance, we passed through many time zones, which meant that the sun rose and set earlier each day as we traveled east. Time zones are spaced every 15 degrees of longitude, and to preserve a relatively constant meal and sleeping schedule, we chose to adjust our clocks as we crossed into a new time zone, splitting the lost hour between us. And when we crossed the International Date Line at 180 degrees, we finally recovered that day we lost over 6 years ago, by repeating the day twice. The repeated day seemed just as uninteresting as the day that preceeded it, and probably wasn’t quite as warm as the one we traded away in the South Pacific 6 years ago!
We were well stocked with treats and set mini milestones to keep up our spirits on our long journey. We celebrated my birthday, getting over the fold on the chart, reaching various waypoints for course changes to secondary destinations like Midway, Hawaii and Kodiak, crossing the International Date Line, passing the halfway point, graduating to a new chart, etc. We bribed ourselves with various kinds of food: olives, fancy cheeses, popcorn, pappadoms (cooked without oil), artichoke hearts, tapioca pudding, crab cakes with homemade chutney (fruit jelly, butter, cayenne, jalapenos and ginger), shrimp and homegrown alfalfa sprout salad (thanks, Sue!) and smoked oysters and, of course, sweets like coffee and fruit candies, chocolate, gummy crocodiles, and cookies; And then there were drinks like kahlua and cream, rum and juice, tequila and hot chocolate, wine, plus special books, movies etc. We had a glorious day to celebrate crossing the International Date Line, but the next few ugly days more than made up for it, with violent squalls, intense thunder and lightening, heavy rains and cloud or fog. The motion on the boat was unpleasant as the wind went forward of the beam and we sloshed in the sloppy waves and residual swell. But then the wind moved aft and conditions mellowed again. We had a day or two of light sunny conditions, a welcome respite. And then it clouded over again.
Then fog enveloped us, reducing our visibility to less than 200 yards. Such dense fog continued for over two weeks and began to feel claustrophobic. One afternoon we heard a fog horn getting closer and after blowing our whimpy fog horn that sounds more like a pathetic party favor, we called on the VHF and a voice replied that he’d spotted us on his radar. Whew! We never did see him, but heard his fog horn quickly fade. Another time we heard a fog horn and had a brief VHF conversation with a woman officer on a container ship headed for Long Beach and then her conversation with another ship in the vicinity. More ships we never saw. Once we heard the rumbling of an engine in the fog. We called on the VHF but didn’t raise anyone. Shortly afterward we smelled the ship’s exhaust though we never saw the ship that produced it. Now that was frightening!
Typically a high pressure system dominates the weather between Hawaii and the Pacific NW, but after weeks of steering to go above that stationary Pacific high, it started moving unpredictably, venturing much further south than usual. Instead of riding the top of the high like the textbooks suggest on a typical weather pattern that we’d been watching for weeks, our weather faxes revealed that a string of lows, gales and fronts would cross our path as we were squashed between the lows and the usually stationary high now way south. Oh boy! Low after low passed by and we carried on in a trough that stretched in a long line between us and our destination. The trough haunted us, producing gloomy fog and drizzle weather for another two weeks as we precariously sailed between narrow bands of gale force winds. While expecting much higher winds at any moment we encountered only 10-20 knot winds. We were blessed to escape gale after gale: Each time we braced ourselves, mentally preparing and sometimes physically, with course adjustments or sail changes and advance meal prep. Some gales went north of us; Some went south; And others dissipated before they reached us. Whew! We were feeling a little lucky. But tense.
And on we sailed, getting more anxious to get there with each passing day and drop in temperature. The fog dense continued, the moist cool air chilling us to the bone, making our journey seem endless. (Gummi bears get quite hard to chew at those temperatures!) We continued to worry about our propane and water supplies. Carefully monitoring our water supplies we determined that we were doing well on our fresh water usage, but we had no reliable way to measure our propane levels accurately and hoped we wouldn’t run out while we needed hot meals so desperately. Our craving for hot chocolate grew dramatically (to about every 5 minutes!) as the temperature fell but we had to restrain ourselves. The water temperature was down to 57 degrees F and we could feel the cold through the hull. The bedding and pillows, trapped between our (relatively) warm bodies and the cold hull became damp with condensation. We rarely wore less than a full set of fleece and the damp gear stayed mostly damp. Oh for a little sun to warm us and dry things out! Yeah I know I’m blowing the romantic image of life at sea.
Our power dwindled without sun to charge the solar panels and though we are usually loathe to run the engine, we actually got excited about running the engine to charge the batteries because the engine warmed the interior. Even though we still had to watch our fuel usage, we could justify running the engine for an hour or so to bring the batteries back up to charge. But when we first turned on the engine, I immediately noticed that water wasn’t jetting out the transom like normal and quickly turned off the engine since that meant our engine cooling water wasn’t circulating right. Garth opened up the engine and discovered that the engine water intake was completely fouled with barnacles allowing little to no water in to cool the engine. With an old batten he chiseled out the opening through the open thru hull and we eventually got enough flow that we felt confident running the engine again. Our boat speed was agonizingly slow for the conditions we faced and looking over the side, it was easy to see why. Since scrubbing the bottom the day before leaving Japan, a sizeable crop of barnacles had attached to the hull. We found it telling that the varnished wind vane paddle had far less growth than the 8 month old anti-fouling paint! Already flirting with hypothermia, we shuddered at the thought of going over the side to clean barnacles off the hull to address the fouled thru hull (had our efforts failed) or to improve our speed. We worried the saltwater intake for the sink and head would have similar problems, but I guess significant use made that less of a problem – or so we hoped. But we had little choice but to tolerate the slow speeds and hope for the best.
“Will we ever reach our destination?” we wondered, feeling like kids in the back of the car on a road trip. A lengthy trip like this proved a definite test of our mettle. They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Yeah, well . . . We had to work to keep our spirits up, finding ways to lure each other out of our alternating days of funk. Sailmail remained elusive as a diversion, remaining merely a power intensive exercise in frustration and many of our best forms of entertainment were severely limited by our low power levels. I kept finding treats that I had squirreled away over a year before as our food compartments emptied – Almond Roca, dark mint chocolate, ganache . . . But, one can only eat so much chocolate. Oh for a long hot bath, a steak dinner, a full night’s sleep . . . Or even a day of warm sunshine and a view of a distant horizon.
Finally our prayers were answered and we had several warm sunny days with good winds, which markedly improved our spirits. We were ticking away the miles, reaching three quarters of the way and then less than 1000 miles from our destination - major milestones. At 250 miles, I encountered two ships at once, on a course indicating they’d originated in Puget Sound. One ship was on a collision course which never wavered. Though I called him on VHF repeatedly, no one ever answered and I finally had to alter course to avoid a collision: evidently no one was keeping a watch, listening to the radio or familiar with Coll Regs. When I first saw Pacific Northwest kelp again, I started getting excited for our arrival because then we seemed really close. After 43 days, our families must have been getting worried with no news from us for some time.
We’d mused about stopping in Midway, Kodiak and Hawaii, but hadn’t left ourselves a lot of time to enjoy these locations and still make Seattle this season. (Ultimately weather conditions dictated: As we neared points where we’d need to alter our course if we were bound to each of these places, adverse winds made these options unappealing.) As we finally neared the North American continent, where to make landfall became more than distant fantasy and something we could actually talk about. We considered clearing in to Ucluelet, Canada, the nearest port of entry only a hundred some miles away. Nearby was a favorite spot from our shakedown cruise – Hot Springs Cove - which offered a long soak in a hot spring in a beautiful setting full of fond memories. And after such a long journey what a great way to finish! We were running out of supplies and more than ready to get there. So we refined our course and began imagining our happy arrival.
You’re probably as ready to finish reading about this epic voyage as we were to finish living it . . . but wait, there’s more! (Like the never ending Ginsu knife commercial . . . ) Mother Nature wasn’t going to let us off that easy. The next weather fax showed a high followed by two lows and a gale – not a pretty picture. We’d been lucky so far and hoped that subsequent faxes would see these patterns shift as they often had. A little north or a little south might mean a world of difference in 24 hours. Besides, we might be in by then anyway. But the high rolled over us, sucking away the wind like a deflated balloon. We started motoring, but worried that we had too far to go for motoring to save us. Finally the wind picked up. And then “Land Ho!” Yippee!
But the next weather fax still didn’t look good. As we closed in on the coast, we started listening to vessel traffic control to monitor shipping traffic and the weather reports they offered. They issued a gale warning, but we continued to make progress, crossing our fingers. The gale was a predicted to be a south easterly and we were headed northeast – still doable. Then they upgraded the gale warning to a storm warning. Oh, shit! So we cracked off to head for Hot Spring’s Cove, the nearest safe harbor for those conditions. We'd have a great excuse for not checking in first. The southeasterly winds along the southern part of the coast became easterly in the middle part of the Vancouver Island coast and northeasterly further north but we were near the middle. The winds began building and were noted to be highest at Estevan Point. Unfortunately, that’s where we were. We reduced sail area but kept on fighting to make it in before the worst of it hit.
On the home stretch with a bad case of barn fever, after 46 days of sailing, we were crushed when within 18 miles of making it into a rather straightforward port entrance, we could no longer make any progress to the east – now to directly windward. So close but yet so far . . . A cruel joke, really. I think swimming would have been faster. (It surely would have put me out of my misery sooner!) Our tacking angles were 180 degrees at best, and we slipped sideways (our keel more closely resembling a double sided hairbrush with all the gooseneck barnacles than an effective hydrofoil). Land disappeared behind heavy rain sodden clouds; The sound of the wind howling in the rigging became intense; The rain blew sideways; And the seas became mountainous. And watching for shipping traffic became hopeless in those furious heaving seas; We reported our position to VTS so that ships would be aware of our presence in the area.
But there was nothing we could really do but hunker down and wait. We were basically hove to: We sailed back and forth, with minimal sail area, making no progress and enduring an unpleasant motion and torrential rain while we waited for the worst of it to pass. We worked hard to preserve our hard won miles as the boat hobby horsed in the choppy waves, but we were 35 miles away by the time the wind eased. The wind eased but remained easterly. Finally after 2 days the wind shifted and we could again sail east. As we unreefed the mainsail the stitching came undone just below the 3rd reef. So under a triple reefed main and large 150% genoa, we worked our way back into the coast. We encountered big clumps of kelp and the water turned from a dark blue to a dark green as we neared land. We picked our way through the rocky entrance to Ucluelet and barely made our way into the channel to tie alongside just minutes before dark after 49 days at sea. What a relief at last.
We used 52 gallons of water, leaving us with about 18 gallons of water remaining as well as surprisingly, 1/2 tank of propane that could have kept us going for another week at least. Thank God we didn't have to go another week. Arriving in port, we felt like we'd won the lottery rather than merely finished a rather long and arduous journey. At this point we could finally declare our circumnavigation of the Pacific complete, though we were not yet back where we began. Before we continue on to the US, we'll repair the mainsail as best as we can by hand so we can use more than 80 square feet of sail area, refill our propane tanks, scrape all the barnacles off the bottom and indulge ourselves at a couple restaurants. We plan to check into the US in Port Angeles, about 100 miles southeast, then head for Port Townsend and Port Ludlow before carrying on back to Seattle in the next few weeks.
This may be our last update. I hope you've enjoyed the fruits of my labor. To find out what we are up to from now on, you may need to email us directly at atomicsalsa@yahoo.com. We'd love to hear from you. We're looking forward to reconnecting with friends and family again after so long on our own.
We have set up a blog where we can easily post updates without necessarily having to send out mailers or have Internet access. Check http://yachtvelella.blogspot.com/ to see whether I've posted an update since our last email update.
Newest postings:
Kyushu, Japan NOW WITH PICTURES!
Strangers in a Strange Land: Gaijin in the Ryukyu Islands of Southern Japan
Delighful Stop in Lan Yu, Taiwan
Racing to the old Portugese colony of Macau
View our more recent photos at http://photos.yahoo.com/yachtvelella and our older photos of our voyage at http://photos.yahoo.com/atomicsalsa. We are continually adding to these as we have good Internet access and photos to share. Our photos of Valencia and Barcelona, Spain are posted here.
NOTE: OUR PHOTOS WILL DISAPPEAR FROM OUR YAHOO PHOTO ALBUMS ON SEPTEMBER 20! Look at them now while you can!
Cheers,
Wendy Hinman and Garth Wilcox
S/V Velella (Wylie 31)
http://yachtvelella.blogspot.com/
Skype name: atomicsalsa or wendy.hinman