Coqui is safe in Portland, requiring only a few acts of derring-do

At the end of May, we successfully delivered Coqui from Everett, WA to Portland with only three mishaps. Our route was 360 nautical miles and took us through Puget Sound to the Strait of Juan de Fuca then down the Washington coast to the Columbia River.

Our crew consisted of my dad (Bob), Anna, Heather and Chris, our captain for the delivery and the most experienced among us. The latter two were in fact required by the insurance company since Anna and I have little sailing experience. They also required us to rent an EPIRB (emergency beacon) and have onboard a life raft and GPS. Whatever happened to old-fashioned trust?

We started the trip by packing five adults and tons of gear into a rental car and driving to Everett. We arrived at the boat in the middle of the night and surely annoyed our liveaboard neighbors with our preparations which included loading 20 days worth of food onto the boat for the four-day trip.

The next morning we started out with Tom, the former owner, taking video of our departure and making us feel special. We had decent wind for a while but winds are fickle in the Sound and we soon had to motor to maintain our desired minimum speed of six knots. Nobody threw up, but the rough chop the first day made most of us feel at least a little nauseous. No matter, the scenery was gorgeous. We motored through the night taking shifts in pairs and when Anna and I woke up it was morning on the second day and we were 12 miles out into the ocean, which was glassy smooth without even a slight breeze. The calm was interrupted once by a small pod of what we think were humpback whales, with calf. At one point they surfaced 30ft from us before diving under the boat, making me ponder the article I had just read about a male whale ramming and sinking a sailboat off of Hawaii. Being able to tell a story like that would almost be worth it I thought, proving that I have no business sailing.

Since leaving the Strait of Juan de Fuca we had been continuously recalculating our fuel range because of the amount we had to motor. We wanted to avoid a stop in Westport since it would put us off-schedule and weren’t able to determine their fuel dock hours since they never answered the phone. So we sailed part of the day under spinnaker and made as much progress that night as we could in the very light winds. By morning we calculated that we were just inside of our fuel window to reach Astoria if we used our 5 gallon reserve.

At around noon on the third day we began our crossing of the Columbia River Bar. The bar is so dangerous because it’s a huge area of shallow water where the powerful flow of the Columbia slams into the incoming tides, or creates very fast currents if the tide is ebbing. Add to that lots of commercial traffic and light winds and it’s not difficult to imagine how bad it would be to lose our engine from running out of fuel.

The waves weren’t high during our crossing but we had to motor hard to make progress against the ebbing tide and we were burning fuel at an alarming rate while carefully navigating near the channel. Our gauge was reading zero when we approached the charted marina entrance, only to find that what we thought was the entrance was just a bank. We had to motor around to find the actual entrance cut into a massive steel floodwall, nearly invisible from our direction. I’ll forever hate the Port of Astoria for thinking it’s a good idea to leave a marina entrance entirely unmarked. When we filled up we found we had something like 45 minutes worth of fuel left after motoring for the better part of three days. Yikes.

From Astoria on, river navigation supplanted open water navigation, requiring far more concentration. We had to share the river with giant commercial ships while fighting a very strong current and watching for debris. Our first impact occurred during the night in a shallow channel with a large, submerged log. With no moon it was quite impossible to see, even with a bow watch. Since it was flowing with the current we hit it at 5 or 6 knots and jammed it into the bottom since the water was so shallow. We reversed off of it while checking for damage and found none but it’s nerve-wracking to hear the sound of an impact on the hull, which your irrational brain wants to imagine is about as strong as an egg shell. We anchored for the remainder of the night so that we could see objects in daylight.

The next day, during my navigation shift, we hit a submerged wingdam. The mistake I made was to follow a depth contour without accounting for the actual depth of the river, which was much higher than charted. Oops. Again, no apparent damage done but it’s hard to tell without hauling the boat out of the water. We had a smooth motor the remainder of the trip, finally arriving in Portland at 6pm on day four. If you happened to be driving over the I-5 interstate bridge that Sunday evening, you might have been one of the hundreds of cars cursing the sailboat that glided underneath and made you 10 minutes late.

Super-special thanks to Chris, Heather and my dad for helping us out on this mini-adventure! Complete pictures are here, except that there are none of my dad since all of them with him turned out blurry. He's part Sasquatch.