In Or Off

By Aaron

Alert: no pretty pictures for this post and likely not interesting to non sailors, but the choice between sailing straight to San Francisco or harbor hopping down the coast is a tough one, so I thought I’d share our thoughts in response to a question from SV Aria:

Chuck and Jackie on Aria said...

Congrats on on a major milestone. More than 1 circumnavigator has told me that the scariest part of the trip was the initial Seattle to SF passage. They saw higher winds and bigger waves but not as short coupled and/or as generally cold and miserable. So for us that will follow in your wake, and want a positive fun/suck ratio would you recommend the the multiple stop in shore route or the faster no stop trip? From the blogs listed by Livia, I would say you had one of the highest f/s ratios in the list.
chuck 

Taking the offshore or inshore route is a difficult decision and anybody who’s made the trip (and plenty of people that haven’t) will give you an opinion on the best way to get to San Francisco.  Yes, it can be a scary patch of ocean.  We’ve met up with several boats that had heavy weather during their passage.  SV Cool Breez’n had gale conditions for several days with boarding seas.  SV Eagle had huge seas in severe gale conditions and had to tow warps to slow down.  SV Gypsy Soul was taking boarding seas and, fearing for their lives, were rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter off Cape Mendocino.  And these are just a few that we’ve personally talked to that made the trip in the last month or so.  Others we know, like Estrellita, had a pretty good run down.  And we’ve heard plenty more positive experiences from people that have taken the offshore route in previous years.  I think a lot of it is simply going to depend on what kind of weather pattern is set in on the date you’d like to leave.  If you can wait, great.  It was nice for us not to have a schedule influencing our departure decisions. 

When we were getting ready to head to San Francisco we were always planning on doing it in one leg, approximately a 5-7 day passage.  After waiting a few days in Neah Bay the weather off northern California was still looking crappy.  There were NOAA forecasters stating that the lows they were seeing would be impressive for January, let alone August.  So (feeling ready to leave Neah Bay) we changed our plans and made a two day passage to Newport, OR.  We figured this would shave two days off the passage to San Fran and allow us to use a shorter term forecast for getting into northern California waters.  The weather continued to be unsettled so we opted for shorter overnight and day-long hops from there whenever a weather window presented itself.  The route was Neah Bay > Newport > Crescent City > Eureka > Drakes Bay > San Francisco.

From Neah Bay to San Francisco we were in fog while offshore pretty much the whole way.  Fog so thick that everything was soaked and dripping wet.  It really sucked.  Radar is a must, and we’re huge fans of AIS. 

Personally I would not take the offshore route without an SSB and Pactor modem (or satellite phone).  We have access to  GRIB files, NOAA forecasts, buoy reports, and much of the other weather information we use when we have an internet connection – it’s certainly going to give you an advantage if you want to avoid heavy weather.  What was forecasted 5 days out tended to be quite different than what actually happened.  The 48 hour forecast was pretty good in our experience so if you take the offshore route that gives you a good amount of time to head in if you need to.

You’ll hear a lot of people lamenting that there’s nowhere to pull in on the west coast, or they don’t want to deal with crossing bars and timing bar crossings.  We found this to be a non issue.  If you’re harbor hopping you’ll be able to time your departures and speed to easily cross the bar during a flood tide.  The only bars we didn’t like on our run down the coast were the ones that didn’t have happy hour specials.  You’ll also hear people complain that there’s not as much wind on the inshore route, and I’d agree since that was our experience.

So as to my recommendation, well, it depends on what you’re looking for.  I can certainly say we don’t regret harbor hopping and we’ve had a lot of fun.  We’ve enjoyed 4 brew pubs, stood in front of 17 of the world’s 100 tallest trees, visited interesting towns we’ve never been to, and met lots of great people.  If we’d done the offshore route we would have gotten to San Francisco much sooner, and probably spent a lot more time there than just 3 days.  I bet that would have been fun too!  Regardless of which route you take, hopefully you’ll get better weather than we did.  If you make the trip on Aria, you’ll sure be loving your pilothouse!