Coos Bay: between Newport, Oregon and here

As is well established this is a serious coast with no natural harbors of any size between San Francisco and Seattle.  Astoria claims, I expect with truth, that the entrance into the Columbia River is the most dangerous in the world with more than two thousand ships wrecked there.  While in Astoria we visited the Columbia River Maritime Museum which exhibits videos of bar pilot boats going out to ships and the pilots climbing up rope ladders extraordinary men simply doing their jobs in survival conditions.

The trees beside HIghway 101 are all bent thirty or forty degrees east from the wind.

I have never seen Tsunami Hazard signs before.  They are frequent in Oregon, telling you when you are entering and exiting such a zone.  Oregon is like New Zealand anit-flat and so there are countless hills, mountains, and valleys.  Many homes have been built in the tsunami hazard zones.  I expect that their owners are like those of us who live in hurricane zones and hope it will not happen in their time.

Much of the coast is more dramatically beautiful than my iPhone can convey. 

However, we have learned that we are traveling the Oregon coast at the wrong time, the hieght of a very short peak season.  We had hoped to amble and stay wherever we found a pleasant spot.  It does not work that way on the Oregon coast in August.  Last night we stayed in Newport in the worst $300 a night room I have ever experienced.  In October it would be an $80 a night room, which even then might be over priced.  So we are speeding up and slowing down.  Carol has found The Inn on the Lost Coast.  We will be there in two days and stay three at the same price per night as last night’s hovel.  I am looking forward to that.  You don’t always get what you pay for.

Astoria, Oregon

 

Astoria, Oregon: on the other coast and two poems

A gas fireplace is on instead of air-conditioning.  The temperature outside our room at the Cannery Pier Hotel is 57F and it is foggy,  We stayed here nineteen years ago and liked the place so much we always planned to come back.  As you can see the hotel is right on the Columbia River.  The land on the far side of the bridge is Washington state, and the notoriously dangerous mouth of the river is not far to the left of the frame.

Ocean going ships pass close to our windows and the Astoria Marina is a neighbor.

We walked over there yesterday and found few boats of interest.  This one was for all the wrong reasons.  I don’t recall ever seeing a boat so neglected or with such growth on it.  We wondered why anyone is still paying slip rent for it.  Perhaps they aren’t.

We are staying a second night here and then Carol will start to drive us slowly south along the coast.

  

I thank my friend, Tim, for a link to a 1861 Civil War poem reminiscent of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT which it preceded by more than sixty years and several wars.

And from William Butler Yeats.

Hilton Head Island: sprited and flying

 

Yesterday I carried the painted bowsprit back down to GANNET after spraying three coats of Petit Easypoxy onto it.  I was fortunate with the weather while painting.  We had little wind and no rain except for a brief shower one afternoon which did no harm.  As you would expect paint dries quickly in this heat.

Having taught myself how to sail from books and magazine articles, for many years I called spars extending forward of a vessel’s bow bow spirits until Suzanne, who came from a New Zealand sailing family, corrected me.

I also doubled some of the dock lines, tied down the tiller, tied a line around the furled jib, and set up the running backstays, because we are leaving tomorrow on what has become since Carol’s retirement our usual August escape from the heat.

Tomorrow we fly to Portland, Oregon, where we will rent a car and Carol will drive us slowly down the coast to San Diego.  While I lived in Oakland, California, for a year, I never travelled very far north of the Bay area and so the Oregon and Northern California coast will be new to both of us.

I am looking forward to the trip.  I am not looking forward to the flights.  We are due to land at Portland at what will feel to our east coast bodies 2 A.M.

Hilton Head Island: almost ship wrecked

Captain Cook and I were both almost shipwrecked when our engineless ships were becalmed and swept toward reefs by currents.  Captain Cook had the excuse of sailing an uncharted coast.  I, having let my departure from Papeete, Tahiti, be decided by a dragging anchor had none.

Captain Cook first.

The ENDEAVOUR went onto the Great Barrier Reef on the night of June 11, 1770, about one hundred miles north of present day Cairns, Australia.  She was stuck there for twenty-seven hours, before the Captain and crew managed to get her off and into what is now the Endeavour River twenty-six miles north where the ship was careened and repaired as shown in the above painting by Sydney Parkinson.

Like any good seaman, the captain wanted to get to the open ocean.  He found a pass through the reef near Lizard Island fifty miles farther north.  His great relief at being beyond the coral lasted only two days.

Here are his words from his Journal.

And here are my words from STORM PASSAGE.  The date is December 24, 1974.

I had sailed from San Diego on my 37’ engineless cutter, EGREGIOUS, on November 2 for Cape Horn.  Near the Equator the boat developed rigging failure, so I turned downwind for Papeete, Tahiti, where repairs were made.  On December 24 I was ready to try again.  I cleared with the officials that afternoon.  At that time you anchored in Papeete Harbor with long stern lines ashore.  Returning to EGREGIOUS I took in the stern lines and pulled the boat out over her anchor, but there was no wind until just after sunset when a land breeze coming down from 7,000’ high Mount Orohena inland caused the anchor to drag.  Rather than reset it, I decided to leave.

Hilton Head Island: Captain Cook’s Journals

 

I am rereading Captain Cook’s Journals for the first time in more than forty years.  That can happen when you get old.

I am reading an abridged edition which covers all three of his voyages and still runs to 615 pages including a final chapter about his death.

Cook was a few months short of his fortieth birthday when the ENDEAVOUR departed England on what would become his first circumnavigation on August 25, 1768 and he was fifty when he was killed in Hawaii on February 14, 1779.  He explored and charted much of the world  in those ten years.

I am greatly enjoying his journals, in part because I have now sailed most of the places he did.  I am still on his first circumnavigation during which among many other places he stopped and named New Zealand’s Bay of Islands.  I am at the point where he has just left Botany Bay, which he also named, and has passed the much better harbor at what would become Sydney on his way several hundred miles north to put the ENDEAVOUR on the Great Barrier Reef which he does not yet know exists.  If you have sailed off Sydney Harbor you will not be surprised that he bypassed it.  Three headlands overlap and from the seaward there seems to be only a shallow cove, not one of the greatest natural harbors in the world.

I first read the captain’s journals at the end of 1980 or the beginning of 1981 at Carins, Australia, after sailing there following CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE’s pitchpoling and my drifting for two weeks until I reached what is now Vanuatu.  Suzanne had joined me in Carins, which being only seventeen degrees south of the Equator is hot,  We were living on CT at anchor just off the heart of the town and to escape the heat spent many of the days at the air-conditioned Carins Public Library, which had copies of the Journals, which were edited by the great Cook authority, the delightfully named Professor Beaglehole.

I am presently reading a Kindle edition on my iPad Pro and my iPhone.  During the day I read on the iPad.  When I wake at night, as I often do, I read on my iPhone which casts less light so as not to disturb Carol.

Captain Cook has become controversial—isn’t everyone now?—because his explorations were followed by colonialism.  I admire him as a great leader and a consummate sailor who did not come from a seafaring family.

Hilton Head Island: a new sail cover; Warwick Tompkins, Jr.

 

Above is my new mainsail cover.  Doug, whose boat is next to GANNET on the dock, says he prefers the old one.  So do I, but this one does have the advantage of cost.  $19 from that great sailmaker, Amazon.

You have no doubt already correctly concluded that the old mainsail cover was showing its age and I took it to what is as far as I can tell the nearest canvas shop which is on St. Helena Island on the other side of Port Royal Sound.  There used to be a canvas shop on Hilton Head, but it has closed.  A remaining one does repairs, but would not make a new cover from scratch.  The straight line distance to the shop on St. Helena is about ten miles.  However much of that is across water and Carol had to drive 55 miles and more than an hour to reach it.  I left the old cover as a pattern.  The new one will not be delivered for six or eight weeks, so the tarp will keep the sun off the main until then.

I thank William for a link to a video about Warwick Tompkins, Jr., one of the world’s most experienced sailors.  He planned his birth better than I and was born into a sailing family.  He rounded Cape Horn on his father’s boat at age four, a bit younger than I, who at age four had never even seen the ocean much less been on a sailboat.

I met Warwick Tompkins, Jr,. generally known as the Commodore, in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands.  He invited me on board FLASHGIRL and was friendly and courteous even though as you will learn if you watch the video by his definition I am not a gentleman.  So it goes.  I enjoyed the video and highly recommend it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wTnYwMTahoY&t=1s&pp=2AEBkAIB&ra=m

Hilton Head Island: ”feels like’ and ‘heat index; The Final Set; and two poems

I continue not to be doing much of interest these days.  

The can of spray paint for the bow sprit is now not due until Monday and the heat is serious.   I read.  Presently a book, WICKED RIVER, about the Mississippi River before it was tamed by the Corp of Engineers.  I was born and lived and went to college beside the Mississippi and am from the quite well written book learning much that I did not know.  I listen to music.  I workout.  But this is a pause.  Odd that I who have always had enough time, still have enough to pause when my remaining time is short.  Perhaps that is because I have lived so that I do not regret in my old age what I did not dare to do when I was younger.  Before the paint comes.  Before Carol and I make our now customary escape from the heat in August.  This year we fly to Oregon on August 4 where we will rent a car and Carol will drive us slowly down the coast to San Diego.  While I lived in Oakland, California, for a year, bought my first boat and taught myself to sail there, I never travelled much north of the Bay area, so the Oregon and Northern California coast will be new to both of us.  And it might well be my last visit to San Diego where much of importance in my adult life took place.  I am looking forward to the trip.

I look at several weather apps each day, among them Apple Weather.  This shows among other things the forecast temperature by the hour and the ‘feels like’ temperature.  I thought ‘feels like’ and ‘heat index’ are the same, but our local TV news often gives ‘heat index’ figures ten or more degrees higher than the ‘feels like’ in the Apple app.  So I goggled and found that in summer the two should be the same.  In winter ‘feels like’ includes wind chill and so may be different.  However right now at nearly 8 PM, the Apple app shows a ‘feels like’ of 87F and the National Weather Service station at the Hilton Head Airport shows a heat index of 102F.  A dramatic and serious difference which I do not understand.  So be advised to be skeptical of the Apple app ‘feels like’.

Carol and I just watched CHRIS AND MARTINA:  THE FINAL SET on Netflix and it exceeded our expectations.  Great rivals on the court who gave up a budding friendship in the effort of each to become the number one women’s tennis player and regained it years later when both had cancer.  A very human and touching story about far more than tennis told without sentimentality.  I highly recommend it.

Hilton Head Island: a man of leisure

I woke this morning at 5:15, glanced at the time, rolled over and went back to sleep, waking again at 6:30 when I got up, made coffee, poured a half glass of grapefruit juice, and returned to bed to read what poses as the news and some poetry.  Rather pleasant being a man of leisure for a while.

Two mornings ago I woke at 5:30 and was at GANNET before 7:00 intending to wax and polish the port side of the hull.  I only did a small portion of the hull near the bow before it became obvious that this wasn’t going to work.  I painted the hull almost fourteen years ago and the paint is too old and dead to be revived.  So I stopped and biked home.  

I was surprised that the heat bothered me so early in the day, until back in the air conditioned condo I checked the National Weather Service at the Hilton Head Airport, three miles from our condo, and found that at 8:51 the heat index there was 103.  It remained over 100 until 6 PM, topping out at 105.

I have not decided if I will pay to have the hull painted or sail down to the boat yard at St. Marys and do it myself.  If I do, it won’t be until after the summer heat has abated.

The next item on my GANNET to do list is to paint the carbon fiber bow sprit.  I am waiting for a can of spay paint to be delivered before I can do that.  Perhaps late this week.  In the meantime I will be sleeping in.

Hilton Head Island: painted and oiled