Sailing from Bandon Oregon to Crescent City California (ep. 5)

We spent six nights in Bandon, waiting for calmer weather. Shawn was determined to catch a crab in a rented trap, but despite hours of patience, she only caught undersized or female crabs that had to be turned loose.

We left Bandon with the expectation that the formerly raging northerly winds calmed to better speeds in the past day, however, when we rounded Cape Blanco, we found growing winds and seas. At the worst of it, we saw the wind gauge spike up to 44 knots.

A bit later, overtaking waves from astern washed into the cockpit twice, and another wave turned us nearly 45 degrees off course. When that happened, the wind changed to the other side of the boat, the preventer holding the main boom failed, and we had such a strong accidental jibe that the traveler track cracked and came partially off the companionway hatch cover, bolts shearing through fiberglass, and the aluminum track cracked part way through.

I quickly started the engine and pointed us into the wind so Shawn could drop the sails. We pounded into the coming waves for a few minutes, sea spraying all over the boat. Eight hours of motoring, hand-steering and surfing the boat down overtaking waves, ever into slowly calming conditions brought us to Crescent City, where we found our reserved slip around 9pm and were checked-in by a security guard.

We've repaired the fiberglass, and are waiting for the Harken factory to bend a new traveler track for us, no small expense, to be shipped to the harbor office for us.

There's not much here. We're in an off-season commercial fishing town. There are two hardware stores about a half-hour's walk to the north, and one marine supply store, that is squarely focused on fishing, not sailing. We took advantage of a calm day to send Shawn up the mast to lubricate sheaves and blocks at the masthead, and to retrieve the end of the whisker pole halyard which had come loose in the mayhem of our last passage.

We've only seen the sun a few times, it's so often foggy or overcast that it can feel like living in a black-and-white movie.