-Admiral Marian
As Marian mentioned, we prepared the boats for departure at 6:00am. Sunrise was about 6:15, so we actually had to wait for some time for enough light to make us feel leaving the dock was safe. When your in a new location, and there are adverse conditions, be it fog or sea state, you have to make a series of go/no decisions. Generally if there was no fog and a calm sea state I’d consider leaving in the dark. With fog and dark I wasn’t willing to risk crossing a bar for the first time until there was enough light to see. So after about 20 or 30 minutes we had just the beginnings of light, a large crab boat went by. They were shining a very large, bright work light on the back deck and it seemed to be calling to me “follow us!”. So, we pulled in the lines and Alanui and Paloma entered the narrow, shallow channel to head for the ocean. Patrick and I had radar and lights on, he was following me and I was following the crab boat. I am a bit of a talker (duh!), so every 30 seconds to a minute I would tell Patrick over the VHF (we were on ch72 at low power) I’m at this speed, visibility is this, depth is that…”. I believe when docking and navigating in close quarters in limited visibility you can’t over-communicate. So, as we make the turn out into the major river channel we are each about 100 yards apart. I can just barely see the crab boat, and I can just make out Paloma’s running lights. We travel the next quarter to half a mile and navigate our way out the river entrance and I turn south once clear of the buoy. About 5 minutes later I noticed two radar returns heading off to the west. I called to Patrick and said, “my heading is 185”. Patrick responded that his was about 285. A hundred degrees of difference in the two headings was way, way too much. I asked him if he saw me and he said up until a few minutes ago when I turned off my deck lights. I told him I never had my deck lights on, so we quickly figured out he had caught sight of the crab boat and was following him rather than me. A quick adjustment in the autopilot and in a few minutes we were off and running to Brookings.
The rest of the journey to Brookings was uneventful and we arrived late in the day. As we entered the harbor I called the Coast Guard and asked them how the bar was. They said it was open with no cautions. I probed them a bit further to see if we needed an escort, but it seemed as if it was as calm a day as they had ever seen, so we entered the range marker section and headed into what looked like a very narrow entrance! The closer I got to the entrance the more I realized the range markers would have put us on the north jetty, if we had followed them. For the life of me I can’t figure out why they would have them set up that way, but both Patrick and I felt the same way. Anyway, we had been warned that if we landed at Brookings we would be boarded by the Coast Guard, and in fact we were. Within 10 minutes of tying up two of the nicest young men you’ve ever met boarded the boat for an official Coast Guard Inspection. I had been boarded in my Camano earlier in the year, so I knew what to expect. I had my PFD’s, my EPIRB’s, documentations, Navigation Rules of the Road, Trash Plan, Fuel spill plan and all other necessary items ready for them to review. When complete, there were NO deficiencies found. We got a clean bill of health from the Coast Guard. On Paloma the only thing they had to do was update the flares in their ditch bag. Something easy to do and quick to implement.
The only down side to our arrival at Brookings was the presence of Miss Sara. Miss Sara is a 90’ commercial net boat. And boy did Sara stink. And boy did the seagulls and every other flying, pooping creature like Sara. The smell coming from that boat was terrible, but we were too tired to move. So we went to dinner and then went to bed. -Skipper
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