September 29th: Port Orford, OR to Crescent City, CA
Author: Adam
Self Steering has been a big problem for us since Newport. We have a Cape Horn servo pendulum windvane and a tillerpilot that I can attach to the vane to steer the boat under power. When we first tried to use it upon our departure from Newport we discovered that the prop wash was causing the weak link to trip on the steering oar. At one glorious point during our trip from Newport to Port Orford I was able to re-attach the oar and the autopilot steered through most of my watch. Unfortunately, one hour into Kristina’s 12am watch the oar popped off again and she had to hand steer.
Before the oar popped off however, she had a strange encounter with nature. She was hunkered down in the cockpit near the companion way, monitoring the radar and enjoying her first watch without steering, when she was suddenly struck by a flying object on her left shoulder. It was a small object but large enough to give her a real start and she scrambled for the headlamp. She turned on the red light and scanned the cockpit to discover not one, but two dove-sized birds taking refuge on the cockpit floor. She and the birds regarded each other briefly before Kris turned off the light and resumed her watch. We have read that migrating birds will occasionally take a rest on ocean-going vessels and Kris, a bit of a birder, was pleased that we had our first stowaways. When the oar popped off an hour into her watch she looked for the birds but they had gone.
When I resumed the watch at 4am I reattached the oar and it worked for a couple more hours before it popped off again. Sigh. The passage to Crescent city was uneventful save our battle with the self-steering system. When the system worked it was glorious. It steered better than we did. Sadly this seemed to be less than 25% of the time and required that I hang over the stern while turning the self steering quadrant with my foot and grabbing the oar. I would have to stop the boat to gently lower the oar back in the water, once reattached. I would throttle back up and we would have self steering for between 15 minutes and 2 hours before the oar would pop off again. This has become very tiresome and probably contributes to our pattern of making longish coastal hops and then hunkering down in harbor for a couple days, exhausted.
The highlight of these passages for me has been daily visits by either Dahl’s porpoises or Pacific white sided dolphins. When I’m most tired, those visits kept me going for a good couple hours longer.
We had been looking forward to Crescent City since we left Portland. I saw from the chart that the anchorage there is well protected for 360 degrees and shallow enough for good anchoring. We were all set to make another fog bound entry when the visibility cleared to about half a mile. The entry to Crescent City was every bit as easy as the chart made it appear and once inside the inner basin we dropped the hook in 2 fathoms just inside the number 9 day mark. The depth here never dropped below 8’ and our holding was excellent. This time with about 60’ of chain out in 12’ of water.
A friend of ours (www.sailmadeline.com) had a data CD that I needed and the data was too large to upload so I suggested he leave us a geocache in Crescent City. The first order of business was to pick it up. I plugged the co-ordinates he text messaged to my cell phone into the handheld GPS and we rowed ashore. We followed the GPS to a weird little junk park that faces the anchorage and found our 2 week old geocache taped securely under the bench. Pretty damn geeky the sneaker net. Or is it the pram net? Anyway with that bit of business taken care of we made our way into town.
We had read in another cruiser log www.sailsarana.com about library bicycles that could be checked out in Crescent City and were eager to go check them out and go see the Redwood Forest. We found the library and inquired about the bicycles. The attendant seemed irritated and said that that program had been discontinued over a year ago and asked me if there was an old flier or something that drew us to him. I told him our information was over a year old and we had hoped the program still existed. Thwarted at the library, we found a coffee shop and checked our email and upload some pictures to the gallery. We spent a few hours there getting business attended to, and lacking enough time to do a proper website update, we decided to head back to the boat.
We so enjoyed Crescent City that we decided to spend a little while there and would ultimately spend the weekend in town. The harbor office is closed on the weekend but Kristina found the facilities at the nearby RV Park to be excellent and would recommend them to others passing through.
I was delighted to see that the Seahawks would be playing my Chicago Bears for Sunday Night Football and we set out to find a place to watch the game. Ordinarily I am robbed off the chance to see my Bears play due to a Seahawks game so to get to see what I knew would be an annihilation of the Seahawks was a big bonus for me. We found another empty pub this time attached to the Pizza King restaurant and settled in with an order of breadsticks and several TVs to ourselves. Eventually we were joined by a Seahawks fan and turned out the bartender lady had grown up in Tacoma and was also a fan. They had to suffer my cheers of joy as the Seahawks were invited to tour the visitor’s bench at Soldier Field. The trouncing was glorious and I will do my best to see every Bears game I can this season while we cruise the US and Mexico. I know this makes me a philistine in the eyes of many but it is who I am, a Chicago boy who loves Da’ Bears.
The morning of our departure I happened to poke my head out of the companionway around 8AM so see a large runabout approaching. The fellow driving asked me if the harbor office had gotten a hold of us. I said no and apologized for sleeping with the radio off. He told me that he needed to stretch a dredge hose across our anchorage and would need us to move for just a bit. We pulled up the anchor and went to the harbor office dock. While there, I apologized to the harbormaster and to tried to leverage some free dockage for a few hours. She thanked me for moving and said that as long as it wasn’t overnight I could tie up at the working dock next to the dredge. So we got a dock for the day, took showers, fixed the steering oar on the vane and prepared to depart for either Fort Bragg or Sausalito.
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