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…..
