On August 15th, we pulled up our anchor at 4:15 AM and headed out of Neah Bay towards Cape Flattery to make the big left turn south. Our plan was to get away from the coastline to avoid commercial traffic and crab pots. The sea is said to be a little kinder offshore in the deeper water anyway.
From Neah Bay, WA to Coos Bay, OR it's 322 nautical miles. Our longest to date, and 1st ever offshore on Lorien. I estimated we'd make the trip in 2.5 days, arriving before sunset on the 17th of August. We were excited, and a little nervous too. We were glad to have our friend Dawn aboard. A sailor who has already earned two swallow tattoos in her time aboard her and her husband's Tayana 42 in the Caribbean.
We got into the routine fairly quickly. The winds were even lighter than expected so we ended up motoring for a little more than half of this trip. It was shifts of 4 hours on and 8 hours off. During the off time, we were able to sleep, eat, bundle up down below to warm up, or chat with the person at the helm.
We finally started to get to know how Lorien behaves out in open water, and we were relieved to finally witness 1st hand just how good of an ol' girl she is! She was in her element and carried us safely to where we wanted to go. Throughout the passage, there was only one minor issue that came up, which was sort of self-induced. With all the motion of the boat in the open waters, our fixed GPS antenna, which feeds our onboard navigation system, was not getting a good signal. This was from Lance installing larger solar panels earlier in the year that ended up interfering with the antenna. Oops. Of course, redundancy is key when you go offshore, and we had several other methods of acquiring a GPS fix to safely continue navigating out there.
Just after sunrise, on our last morning before arriving to Coos Bay, OR we were surrounded by humpback whales! Lance woke up the sleeping crew with shouts of "Whales! Whales!" We all rushed up to check it out and we were greeted with a ton of spouts on either side of the boat, it was so amazing to see! I stayed up watching while the other two went below, when one of the whales jumped out of the water! I yelled, and while Lance was coming up (partially not believing me 😆), it jumped AGAIN! Holy cow, that was awesome to see! Following the jumps, we saw either the same, or another, whale do a bunch of pectoral fin slaps.
We thought the excitement was over, I mean, what more could top that!? But we were wrong! Shortly after the whale stopped slapping its fin around, a bunch of Dall's porpoises showed up at our bow playing and darting around with incredible speeds. Up until then, we had not seen ANY whales, only one or two Dall's porpoises, and a pod of dolphins off in the distance.
After all the marine mammal excitement, Lance saw his phone had service, so he decided to call the coast guard station in Coos Bay for a bar report. Bar crossings in the Pacific Northwest have a notorious reputation for gobbling up boats during adverse weather, and this would be our 1st time crossing one. Given the conditions, and the size of our boat, I think the coast guard station was probably laughing at us when he asked if it was ok to come in. It turned out to be a complete non-event with almost no current and flat calm waters.
The real excitement of our bar crossing though was the welcome committee on the south jetty. Lance's parents had driven down from Monmouth, OR to join Lance's sister and her family (who live in Coos Bay) to watch us come in over the bar. It was a great feeling to have familiar faces waving you in after 60 hours at sea!
We took a slip in the Charleston Marina on their guest docks and plan on staying at least a few days in Coos Bay staying with Lance's sister & her fam. We're really pumped for laundry!! We'll wait for another safe weather window to continue south. We're eyeing the golden gate for our next stop.
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