At anchor on Oregon Coast

After leaving Neah Bay two days ago, we made excellent time down the Washington and Oregon coasts. We did two nights at sea, taking shifts of 3 hours alternating with trying with varying degrees of success to sleep.

I was surprised by how quickly I acclimated to the rolling and got my “sea legs”. We both took Gravol (a canadian seasickness medication) the first day, at full dose and I think that helped significantly with our ability to sleep during the first 24 hours. I also used my ginger candies whenever I had to go below to use the head, that was the only way I didn’t feel a lot worse!

The sloppiness of the initial night improved a lot and we had a very pleasant day yesterday. We both felt good and didn’t need to take any medication. Early this morning we passed Coos Bay, and the conditions were so good that in consultation with our weather router we felt we could scoot the rest of the way to Brookings even though there were some predicted higher winds, not anything we haven’t been in before.

But, mother nature sometimes has other ideas. We rounded Cape Blanco mid-morning and by that time the waves were getting much larger and the winds were consistently above 25 knots, higher than predicted. Conditions can often be more difficult around a Cape, but once we get south of that and came closer to shore things still weren’t getting better and the winds were climbing. We knew the boat could handle things, but we were tired and didn’t know if it would continue to get worse. And, there is a small bar to cross in Brookings.

So, we pulled in to the one anchorage that can be a port in the storm on this part of the coast, called Port Orford.

As I write this, I see wind gusts as high as 25 knots every few minutes. I know we made the right call!

After trying to sleep for a bit unsuccessfully partly because of how much we were rolling, we got to work putting out one of our flopper stoppers. We had these added in August and had practiced it at the dock but this was our first time at anchor in wind and rolling conditions. It’s a bit tricky!

Tomorrow it looks like things moderate enough that we hope to make the 48 miles to Brookings, where it sounds like we will need to hang out for a few days until our next solid weather window.

Overall we are quite pleased with how we’ve done so far!