Dancing with somebody new…

Port Townsend, WA, 30-OCT-2021 – Should I be careful about what I wish for? Should we all?

Bluewater sailing: having the expertise and being known for it. That’s what I wanted, and perhaps, possibly, because I write about it, I am becoming known for it. Do I have that expertise? Well, that’s a different question.

The day after Jennifer and I arrived back in Port Townsend, our friend Grayson, who I have mentioned in other posts, sent a text, would I like to sail her boat, X-Wing, with her partner Drew from Port Angeles to Oakland? Well, hell, yeah.

I contacted Don, the owner of Grace Ridge Brewery, and asked for a tremendous favor: would he go to Caro Babbo and get my foul weather gear, lifejacket, etc? Everything to do with sailing and a whole lot more is on Caro Babbo. In many ways we live on Caro Babbo, the rest of the time is traveling before we return.†

It took Don two trips because he had to get a ladder. After Don delivered the package to UPS the weather forecast changed. X-Wing would hang out for a week in Port Angeles. UPS overnight Homer to Pt Townsend (which is actually two days, because you can’t get here from there in one day) was $237.

Sailing on X-Wing with Drew would be the first time since 1979 I had been on a boat for more than a few hours where I wasn’t in command and it wasn’t my boat. This would be the first time I had been offshore when it wasn’t just Jennifer and me. This would be a new experience.

I drove to Port Angeles the same day Drew sailed over from Victoria, BC. Drew would be arriving at the city dock and coincidentally so would Anja and Thomas aboard Robusta. They found each other before I got there.

Since I had a car, we went out to a dive Mexican restaurant in Port Angeles, which despite its hokey name has great food and(!) pickled carrots and other condiments that are had to find in the anglo versions of Mexican places.

The man behind the counter’s first language was Spanish, though he spoke English fine. Anja addressed the man in Spanish; he was thrilled. They spoke happily, laughingly for a few minutes.

I have a typical American education: I speak one language, though I believe I speak it well; I didn’t learn to speak it well in school. People raised in other countries generally speak more than one language, oftentimes more than two. Anja speaks Swiss-German, Spanish, and English, all well. (I suspect she speaks other languages but these are the ones I know about.) Drew is fluent in English and French and can get by in Spanish. Thomas: Swiss-German, English. I suspect both Thomas and Anja speak Swiss-French and Romansh and Italian. It’s always intimidating. Yes, I should study another language. There is nothing stopping me.

X-Wing is an Islander 34, a partially cutaway full keel, medium displacement hull that Drew bought in Mexico. Only fourteen were ever made. He dropped a bucket of money into sails, electronics, and all the other things that one buys and replaces for a newly purchased sailboat. She is a very, very different sailboat than Caro Babbo, which when dry weighs about 8000* pounds and is considered a rather light displacement vessel.

The differences between X-Wing and Caro Babbo (Islander 34 vs Maxi 95) show up in a number of ways:

• X-Wing is considered more sea-kindly: she doesn’t bounce as much and the period of her movements is much longer. Think sedan vs two-seater car.

• She should track better (go in a straight line more easily), which turned out not to be true.

• She will not point as close to the wind, because the shrouds are outboard further.

• She is much slower: Drew stated , though I was skeptical, that X-Wing is a 100 (nautical) miles per day boat; he was correct. Caro Babbo is 125 nm/day boat. This would play out in how many days it took us to get to Oakland.

• And, most importantly, she was not Caro Babbo. This alone has the most major side effect: I was completely seasick for three days. I had read about this. Because the movement of the two boats is different, seasoned sailors used to one boat will get seasick on another, and was I ever.

Jennifer and I drove out to X-Wing on a Wednesday around noon. We spoke with Drew for a bit and then went grocery shopping.

I had met Drew twice before. The first time at the Ketchikan Yacht Club at the finish of an R2AK race from Port Townsend to Ketchikan. He was the sole male on the boat if I remember correctly. A daughter of our friend Jennie Agard was one of the other crew members. Drew and I spoke about a project he has underway and is fascinated with: traveling to the Antipode of his birth. If you were to drill a hole through from the center of the earth from the place of your birth, where would that hole come out? For most people on earth, that place is in an ocean somewhere. To find yours, go to Drew’s website https://farotherside.com/.

Interestingly, if you’re born in New Zealand, there’s a good chance your antipode will be somewhere in Spain. Congratulations. And most of Argentina will land you in China. Everyone will need to swim, like me.

A conversation like that sticks in one’s head. It also points to the things that interest Drew. I met Drew a second time at Jennie Agard’s daughter’s house in fall 2020, about a year ago, with Grayson. That was the first time I met Grayson, and she and I stayed in touch.

So, more than a year after our second meeting, Drew, Jennifer, and I are grocery shopping in the Port Angeles Safeway; discussing what we will eat and that we each sail a dry (no alcohol on board) boat. I encouraged Drew to buy too much; I ended up cooking only a fraction of what I planned. That same Wednesday afternoon, we left the dock with a favorable tide heading west to the Pacific Ocean through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Anja and Tomas left a couple of hours before us.

West of Port Angeles the wind picked up, blowing a steady 30-plus knots**, gusting into the middle forties. We reefed down but were still overpowered. That didn’t bother us too much, but what was it going to be like outside the strait when all these currents start mixing with the hellacious wind? We decided instead to head into Neah Bay for the night. We left about 12 hours later in nicer winds.

As Jennifer and I had done in Caro Babbo, Drew and I headed about 100 miles offshore, this time solely to get away from the effects of the rivers flowing into the Pacific. Jennifer and I, using routing software, went about 130 miles offshore to avoid weather.

Emotionally, leaving the Strait of Juan de Fuca was so very different than when Jennifer and I left in 2019. Jennifer and I had never been offshore, we had never sailed overnight. Jennifer tells me she was terrified.

While I wasn’t afraid in 2019, this time was as close to mundane as I suspect I will ever get blue water sailing. I have written that over time, sailing at night becomes the same as sailing during the day, only it’s dark, and so it was. Any fear of night has disappeared as has the fear of being offshore – this is partially abated by being only 100 miles offshore where a helicopter rescue is completely feasible versus 1000 miles where a passing cargo ship is the only viable rescue.

Drew doesn’t use routing software, instead, he looks at the weather patterns over the next few days and makes his decisions. It is difficult to tell if he does better or worse than the routing software.

To get weather information and forecasts we had two methods onboard: Jennifer and my trusted Iridium Go, and Drew’s shortwave radio. Sitting at anchor in Neah Bay, I was blown away by how consistent and easy it was to use the shortwave to download the weather forecast grib files. The Iridium Go, while very reliable, loses satellite connections easily and can take a long time to download a grib because of the difficulty keeping a satellite connection. After we left Neah Bay, the shortwave connection did not work again for eight days. Who knows why, atmospheric conditions possibly, not finding a server within shortwave distance, or none that could be reached by bouncing off the ionosphere. Redundancy is what it is all about and that’s what we had.

Like all trips, the weather ranged from no wind to steady 25-to-thirty. We motored a total of 30 hours, about 150 miles. Thomas and Anja, who are quite hardcore, decided not to motor and sat just outside of Neah Bay for days. When heavy weather did come again, Drew and I were already in Oakland. Thomas and Anja took refuge in Crescent City California.

This year, unlike any year I can remember, the wind blew from South to North, great for heading to Seattle, but not so great for heading down the coast. This wasn’t great news for any of us. And, it wasn’t like this in 2019, when our friends Abe and Jill were trying to get their boat from San Diego to Port Townsend.

It seems all boats work out, over the course of the trip, a watch schedule. Daytime watches tend to be very laissez-faire, with everyone keeping an eye on things, napping as one wishes. For nighttime, I slept from 8 pm until midnight and then took a four-hour watch. If I am wide awake, I will let Drew sleep an extra hour or two. Some nights he has done the same for me. I have the advantage that I can sleep any time anywhere, courtesy of the clients and airlines who have taken me on many transoceanic flights.

We didn’t cook nearly as much as I had expected: I was seasick three of the nine days and Drew can easily draw most of his needs from energy bars – Not so for me.

The first few days of our sailing was sailing towards the wind, with the wind ahead of the mast on a close reach – when we weren’t motoring, The last three days were on a broad reach, with the wind general about 120-degrees behind us at 25 to 30 knots gusting into the high 30s.

In these winds, X-Wing carried a double reef in her main and a very small ‘‘gale sail’’ over her furler-reefed foresail. Our speed over ground varied from five to eight knots depending on wind speed and angle.

As we neared the entrance to San Francisco Bay, we jibed downwind more often to line up our entry. Needless to say, the wind died as we approached and the current was against us, but the sky was clear. It was also Ship Week with many Navy vessels in the bay and the Blue Angels†† due to perform the next day. We listened to the VHF radio describing parts of the bay and its entrance, the Golden Gate, that were closed to recreational traffic. By the time we arrived, the day had ended and so had the restrictions.

Motoring across the bay to the Jack London Marina was interminable – I didn’t remember it being this long when Jennifer and I were here in 2019, but it is 13 miles and with the current against us, more than three hours.

Drew docked X-Wing easily.

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*The listed weight varies by source. The manual, which is contemporary with my boast says 8400 lbs. Sailboatdata.com was just updated by some to read 9480 lbs. I expect this was done by the owner of a later boat built by a different yard. Maxi has been repetitively sold over the decades.

** A knot is 1.15 statute miles per hour and about 2 kph. A nautical mile is based on the distance of a degree of latitude. A nautical mile is one minute of latitude, so there are sixty nautical miles in a degree of latitude. This does not work for longitude, so be careful.

† Jennifer would disagree strongly and with Caro Babbo wintering in Homer, my ties to her are weakening, to my very strong dismay. But, Jennifer is living now in her beloved Port Townsend house, building a garden and continuing to fill the house with plants and possessions.

†† The Blue Angels are the Navy’s precision flying team.