Port Angeles, WA –> Newport OR –> Crescent City, CA –> Eureka, CA –> Drake’s Bay, CA
After rounding Cape Flattery late in the evening on September 20th and turning the bow south, we had an incredible sunrise to cap our first night at sea, and for most of the next day we motored slowly south in calm wind enjoying whales spouting around us and watching the coastline recede away to the southeast. We cheered a bit as we left La Push and then Westport on our stern – there isn’t a tractor beam holding us in the Pacific NW after all! By midday on the second day, the wind had picked up to 20-25 knots and veered southerly as we approached the Columbia River entrance with its increased shipping traffic, crab pots, and FOG. This was our first encounter with West Coast fog, and spoiler alert, we became very very familiar with this phenomenon during our trip south. When I think back to how clear and dry the northern Washington coast was, I find myself wondering if it was actually a different coast altogether.
The Columbia was nerve-wracking to navigate at night so we rotated watches every hour to keep ourselves fresh until daylight. On top of the wind waves generated from the southerly wind there was a significant west swell that made the motion of the boat pretty uncomfortable. She would crash into the face of a wind wave, burying the bow, and then yaw sideways in the trough as the swell caught her on the beam. We ate sparingly and used handholds moving about the boat because it was a challenge to stay on our feet. This went on for about 15 hours until we were all feeling a bit wrecked. We finally entered the channel for Newport, OR, 48 hours after we left Port Angeles, ready for a good meal and a good night’s sleep (or at least a little less motion than the previous night). The best part of the entire 48 hours was seeing our friends Drew and Ingrid from SV Wanderer taking photos from the fishing pier under the iconic Yaquina River Bridge as we sailed into town…we met these guys in Port Angeles during the cutlass bearing repair episode, and all of us hit it off immediately. Wanderer went on to become our buddy boat from Newport south and we are so so grateful for their friendship and company.
Newport was a great respite after our first offshore passage…even the sea lions welcomed us to town. We initially had a berth at a private marina on the north side of the Yaquina River where we took advantage of their great seafood restaurant, laundry, and pool and hot tub (Soleil was SO excited). Then after a solid night of sleep accompanied by sea lion lullabies, we relocated over to the public marina on the south side of the river where SV Wanderer was berthed, and from which about a million Dungeness crab fishermen were heading out to try their luck each morning in small open boats. The Newport marina is also an RV park, which was doing a brisker business than the marina side of things, and the mood was jolly as people celebrated crab-related victories. We did a few small boat projects, ate at the Rogue Brewery, and hiked out to the sand dunes along the south jetty, but were pretty quickly ready to move on. It’s hard to fish for crab from a sailboat.
On the morning of September 25th we headed back out under the Newport bridge following Wanderer’s wake. The fog offshore was thick and the millions of crab fishermen were scattered about in it, so we huddled in the cockpit keeping multiple eyes on things. The weather was again somewhat unsettled, with a northwest wind and swell from both the west and southwest…it seemed like there were waves coming from every direction and at all times. We motored a lot and sailed a bit and were happy to see the Saint George Reef Lighthouse after about 30 hours underway, located 6 miles offshore and north of the entrance channel to Crescent City, CA. This lighthouse has quite a story if you care to read about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._George_Reef_Light.
Crescent City ended up being a longer stop than we intended due to high winds that brought even the intrepid offshore fishing fleet steaming into the harbor for a break from the weather. There were a number of other cruising sailboats that washed in as well, confirming our choice to wait out the storm that was apparently raging offshore despite the fact that the days inshore were sunny and warm. We took a local bus up to Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park for a hike in the giant trees (and banana slugs), played on the enormous sandy beach stretching south from town, and explored the privately operated Battery Point Lighthouse just outside the harbor breakwater. Soleil rescued a sea lemon nudibranch from a gull attack and we had an impromptu science lesson about sea slugs and their habits… so cool to be immersed in marine biology each and every day. Be still my biologist heart!
Finally the weather stabilized and we were ready to head out to Eureka, only 60 miles and 10 hours’ sail south. We intended to stage here before rounding Cape Mendocino, which is known for being a difficult passage, and also to help the Wanderer crew change out the seals on their sail drive which were leaking (no bueno if you want to use your engine). We pulled into Eureka just before dinner on October 1 and tied up in the somewhat decrepit marina, then walked downtown to get some groceries and check out the scene in town. Have to say, it was a bit rough and we weren’t excited about spending the next week of forecasted bad weather there. Over beers later we confessed to Drew and Ingrid that we really wanted to continue south with the last of this lull in weather and would meet up with them after their haul-out. They agreed and we ghosted out of the quiet harbor early the next morning, thankful to not have gotten stuck in Eureka for longer than necessary. Later we heard from some Californian friends that Eureka has sky-high rates of meth and heroine use that are exacerbated by a lack of affordable housing and a tourism-reliant economy, all of which has led to a significant homelessness crisis. I wondered what people in that difficult situation thought about visiting yachties – if we were seen as part of the overall problem or if we even registered through the fog of hopelessness and despair. Travel is great for seeing different perspectives but hard from the vantage point of being part of local solutions to societal inequity. On the plus side for Eureka, we did get a gift of fresh halibut from a fisherman on the docks who was shipping out for another trip and couldn’t eat it…oh yes, FISH TACOS!
We had an uneventful rounding of Cape Mendocino, motoring in calm wind during the day and then sailing at night in 15 knots of wind on the stern. Unbelievable is much more stable and comfortable with sails up and it’s such a rush to hear the rippling of water along the bow without the engine thrumming. It was foggy, of course, and there were a number of commercial fishing boats out that weren’t on AIS (our electronic system for detecting nearby marine traffic), but otherwise the overnight run was uneventful and we rounded the corner at Point Reyes before dark to anchor in spectacular Drake’s Bay.
We stayed in Drake’s Bay for 2 nights, mostly wrapped in fog but sprinkled with a few hours of brilliant sunshine to warm our souls. Have I mentioned that there was a lot of fog on this trip?? We still managed to take the dinghy ashore and hike each day – Drake’s Bay is part of Point Reyes National Seashore and is administered by the National Park Service, so there are maintained trails and interpretive sites that were fun to visit. We hiked way up on the cliffs overlooking the (very foggy) wide-open entrance to San Francisco Bay and watched seabirds wheeling their way over the crashing waves below, backlit by sunbeams throwing rainbows through the misty air. We also saw elephant seals hauled out on a beach along the bay side of the peninsula – these guys undertake some amazing feats of animal biology, migrating annually 13,000 miles to and from Alaska, diving to 2500 feet down, and losing up to 36% of their body mass while fasting during the breeding season. The male’s proboscis functions as an attractant for females while breeding but also as a mechanism to conserve moisture in exhalations, because the males are fasting while hauled out throughout the breeding season and therefore not taking in water.
Drake’s Bay is also famously believed to be the location where Sir Francis Drake came ashore on his voyage along the US West Coast…both to claim the land for England and to caulk the leaking Golden Hind. The National Park Service even has a plaque in the park rangers’ residential area at the national seashore stating that “on June 17, 1579, Sir Francis Drake landed on these shores and took possession of the country, calling it Nova Albion…” This claim has been disputed in more recent times (see https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/did-francis-drake-really-land-california-180973219/) as either part of a hoax by a Californian historian or as the product of liberties taken by English cartographers translating Spanish maps of the area around San Francisco Bay. The long and the short of it is, Drake likely landed far to the north of his namesake bay, and probably never set foot in California during his famous voyage up the west coast. Ah well, it never hurts to claim fame by association, even for the National Park Service!
