FLIGHT FROM WINTER
March 27, 2007
by Michel & Jane DeRidder

Circumnavigating has never been part of our plan, though we have been at this game for a good many decades. In fact, with the captain's weak stomach, ocean passages have always been something to be endured. Though he is seldom actively seasick Michel never feels entirely well at sea. Yet we put up with ocean passages because of a desire to escape winter, or a yen to be somewhere else, or the necessity to escape hurricanes, cyclones, or typhoons.

It all began with a soggy West Coast winter when Vancouver rains were interminable. Forty-nine days was too much for a SADS sufferer. So we sold our house, moved aboard, quit our jobs and sailed to Hawaii for the winter months in the days when you could anchor most anywhere for indefinite periods at any of the Hawaiian Islands (1965-66). It was magic. The cruising lifestyle was casting a spell upon us.

That was our first taste of sailing to escape the cold. Over the years we made several trips down the West Coast for points south as winter approached. From British Columbia, it's quickest, easiest and safest to head well offshore and let the boat sail itself to San Francisco for clearance; this is the ploy we usually adopted. However, one year (end of '84) we bucked conventional wisdom, and chose to harbor-hop.

This proved to be the most challenging and fascinating of all our trips down the coast. We had tarried on several occasions on our way north to BC, but not heading south, when we were usually in a hurry to get to warmer climes. To see small ports tucked up for the winter is to find them in their reality, rather than merely the summer facade they present to trippers. Looking back through our logs of that passage south is to relive it all again, seeing it once more as things were quarter of a century ago, before massive changes engulfed us.

That year I had hoped to persuade Michel to winter in British Columbia. We had just survived a 7000-mile slog to windward from New Zealand, and we had not arrived in home waters until July. But he had lived through his share of soggy winters and was not eager to up the tally. We enjoyed an unusually long, fine summer and did not commit to heading south until the end of October, when a reluctance to make the trip was overcome by horror of the coming cold and wet. Then a storm frontal system delayed our departure. We sheltered in Victoria's inner harbour, watched over by the parliament buildings and the Empress Hotel, as a westerly gale raged up the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Snow flurries arrived along with a slate-gray sky and a syrupy light. Tarps flapped, puddles froze. The barometer dropped over 40 millibars in two days as we waited for our chance to leave. When Bill Garden saw us poised for a late fall departure, he told us of friends of his who had hung about in Neah Bay till Christmas the year before, waiting for a break in the weather to round Cape Flattery.

As it turned out, we spent just two days in Neah Bay, the fishing port on the U.S. side of the mouth of Juan de Fuca Strait, where we cleared US customs. We tugged at the anchor, buffeted by wind and rain, gale-warning pennants pulsing crimson against moving curtains of rain. Chimney smoke coiled around clouds spilling over the hills. Floating docks, heaped ashore for the winter, left bare stick pilings for seas to crash upon. The second day we hiked about in oilskins and sea boots, observing mud puddles and wood piles and pickup trucks loaded with firewood. We saw mounds of rental boats stacked upside down and rows of empty motels - Thunderbird, Silver Salmon, Far West, Tyee. We strolled around the museum, marveling at the ways of an earlier civilization. Native carver Greg Colfax sat by an open door in a momentary patch of sunshine, whittling a red cedar mask. Wood chips burned in a barrel heater. A bicycle leaned against one of two century-old totem poles. Greg had carved and glued on a new nose for the bear and spliced on new cedar shoulders. "I've been all over," said Greg. "This is the best place to live."

As we reached gently around Cape Flattery we knew it was too good to last. We were to be either hard pressed in a squall or slatting in a slop. A gale was forecast. By the time we were off Grays Harbor, Washington, the day was bright and calm. We felt foolish to be heading for shelter, and very nearly carried on. High slack tide lured us over the bar to tie up in Westport Marina. It was Remembrance Day weekend, the opening of elk-hunting season. There was little sign of life on streets bordered with shops whose signs offered tuna fishing, salmon fishing and bottom fishing, sand dabs, whale watching, trained seals or rent-a-crab-trap, but almost all the shops were shut. A sea-bass head we bought for a dollar earned its keep. We plucked five Dungeness crabs from the end of our float. Undersize and female crabs we set free to finish off the bait. Some hours later, we were pinned by the wind against the end of a pier, our lines creaking and fenders squashed flat. Unearthing our emergency rope fenders, we admitted how glad we were to be sheltered from the severe sou'westerly gale and 22-foot seas that we had come in to avoid.

A few days later, down the coast apiece, as we sheltered with fishing boats behind Crescent City's tetrapod jetty, locals told us of the 120-knot winds which, a year before to the very day, had lifted roofs, flooded houses and flattened buildings. We were more than ever aware of our incredible good luck. We hiked to a Laundromat with washing in backpacks. We found Crescent City, California to be a saltwater-taffy, cranberry-candy city of redwood burls and carvings chained in front of shops. An eagle devouring a fawn. A stag with a dog at its throat. A plaster Madonna. A poster told us how to butcher venison. Tourist pamphlets advertised "storm watching" as a winter attraction. When the Crescent City Pilot Advisory Service said that previously forecast gale force sou'westerlies were now downgraded, forecast to be from the southeast at only 15 to 20 knots we decided we might as well leave that afternoon.

When we poked our bow around Cape Mendocino at dawn and felt the growing force of the southerly wind, we began to reconsider our options. Seems the gale might hit after all. We were loath to enter Humboldt Bay to shelter in Eureka, a bar harbour notorious on the California coast for its treachery. However, current at the bar would be slack in two hours. There was just time to retreat thirteen miles and be there in time to get in. We turned back. Battling gale force headwinds is not our idea of fun. A swell from the west became more pronounced as we picked up soundings. Breaking seas off the jetty looked ominous, but nevertheless a channel close to the south jetty was clear. We headed in on the range marks. Fishermen and vehicles on the breakwater made us feel not quite so alone. We breathed deeply. We were in! We were snug at the Woodley Island Marina when the gale hit, ever so glad to be there rather than beating our hearts out off Blunts Reef, or hove to, getting nowhere. Shades of grey were splotched with orange from mountains of sawdust, heaps of logs, stacks of lumber. Pulp mills spewed smoke - its angle from mill chimneys is used to indicate wind strength we were told. At 50 knots the smoke is blown below the red and white bands on the stacks.

The favorable winds which followed the blow were perfect for heading south, but swells generated by some distant storm were breaking fifteen feet across the bar. Last year hazardous breaking seas kept the harbor closed for a full month. How long would we be sealed into the port of Eureka? We powered over to anchor off the coast guard station for a few hours, in order to hike across dune salthorn and sedge grass and get a closer look at the "widow maker". The northern beach at the harbor entrance was littered with remains of wrecked boats, almost buried by sand - the keelson of a broken vessel, the stem of another, the transom of yet another. Mistaken bearings? Swept on at night by current? Confused by fog? Asleep at the wheel? Probably most were caught by breaking seas. Technicians were repairing video cameras that keep constant watch on the bar. We learned that the Coast Guard would no longer advise if the bar was safe or not (they had been sued) but they will tell you bar conditions as viewed by video cameras on the unmanned lookout perch. We learned too that in California, no longer were gale-warning pennants displayed. Radio had taken over. A day or two later, when the video cameras spied "five to six foot swells on the middle ground, channel clear," we crossed the bar and headed straight offshore where swells were less pronounced.

What followed was a starry night and a scary one, with far more than the forecast 20 knots from the nor'west. As I sat in my multiple layers of clothing, swaying with the motion, "Securite, Securite," was announced on the radio, "Gale warning."

"We could have told them hours ago," said Michel. We surfed down a particularly big sea and our auxiliary wind vane rudder shaft buckled. Rolling in sail to slow us enough to maintain steerage, we made for Drakes Bay. Here we dropped the rudder and hoisted it aboard with a halyard. A good excuse to put in to San Francisco. With bent wind vane rudder lashed to the big dinghy and Tiller Master at the helm, we passed under Golden Gate Bridge, amazed at the roar of traffic, wondering as we always do, "Why does the bridge never look as if it will be high enough?"

The next big blow hit so hard that the Golden Gate swayed and rigging moaned. We were snugged down in Sausalito at the funky, friendly Napa Street Pier. There we spent a couple of happy weeks. Lighted portholes. Sounds of laughter. Tethered bicycles. Clusters of dinghies from anchored outriders. And on the beach, the bones of the old mail packet Galilee from the Tahiti run.

With heavier pipe on our beefed-up wind vane rudder shaft, we continued south past Monterey Peninsula and Point Sur, past Piedras Blancas frosted with guano. There was Hearst Castle perched in apparent solitude. Palm trees on the skyline lent the scene a southern flavor. A sea otter off San Simeon rolled to show red belly fur.

We ghosted into Newport Beach Harbor just before daylight. Scoters and grebes skittered in all directions. Their feet smacked the water, and they made small-bird sounds as they radiated outward from our bow. What a lovely wildlife welcome to that jam-packed, man-made harbor with its megabuck forest of money-tree yachts. Here, with friends, we watched the boat parade of Christmas lights, thinking to ourselves once again how fortunate we were.

Later we carried on into Mexico and the South Pacific islands, to revisit old haunts and explore new. Gremlins had teased and tested us. Magic Dragon had once again kept us safe.