Saturday, July 25, 2009

Day 10

July 24. Astoria West Basin. I went to the marine store to get cordage for the 2nd reef point on our main sail, then hiked up to the mini-mart for block ice and water. Got a call from Cindy, a yacht club was moving in to the marina for the weekend and she wanted to be out of there. Something about people who are loud, and who use their dinghies to motor over to the showers so they don't have to walk around.

Got out of there, destination Hammond. Not our favorite spot, but it's closest to the Columbia bar, and as far as we know there's no good anchorage between Mott island and the Pacific Ocean. We really feel for Captains Gray and Vancouver when they explored the river. Wind blowing from the west 5-10 kts, exactly the direction we're trying to go, so we practiced sailing to windward. In retrospect, we really weren't doing to bad when you consider we had 2-3 knots of flood tide running against us, but we were not making any headway towards our destination. There's a picture in the slide show of our GPS track, showing us zig-zagging in a net negative direction. Beautiful day though and we had a blast. Eventually we motored towards Hammond, enjoyed the aerial show of brown pelicans fishing. When they see a fish they do this half snap roll, put their wings back, and crash beak first into the water. Was hard to capture with the little camera (shutter lag), will have to try with the Nikon next time through.

Hammond basin (46 12.208N 123 57.027W) is popular with charter fishing, with lots of boats going out early (0530) in the morning on weekends. It's also not in very good repair, especially the docks. One side of our dock submerged if both of us were standing on that side, and made for a long step back in to the boat (more muscles we hadn't used in a while). The docks are also covered with sea bird poop (I got that hosed off). The Fish and Game worker saw the fishing net we carry on deck, asked if we'd been fishing. No, we actually have that net in case the cat falls overboard and we need to scoop her out. Spent the evening rigging the 2nd reef, and doing other maintenance. There are a whole lot of ropes hanging from our boom now. The depth alarm went off at low tied in the evening (less than 7 feet, we stick in the mud at 4.5).

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