Untie the Lines
In which five seemingly intelligent individuals set off into the whirling North Pacific
In the days leading up to our departure, Sheena bought every single snack item available from Trader Joe’s. She rolled and froze enough burritos to survive the sail from Seattle to San Francisco, plus several more should we become lost at sea. We added 400 gallons of fresh water to the tanks, stashed the remnants of unfinished projects, double checked the ditch bags, and quietly wept as we paid the diesel man more than $3,000 to top up the fuel tanks. On the afternoon of our departure the boat was crawling with well-wishers and friends, but all I could do was lie in a crumpled heap in a beanbag on deck.
Driving from Seattle to San Francisco may be decided upon, set in motion, and executed between breakfast and dinner, but sailing from Seattle to San Francisco is often planned a year in advance and may be looked back upon as one of life’s major triumphs (or failures)—a real bucket-list item. We had spent years planning and the entirety of our summer preparing the boat for this moment, foregoing all weekend trips and vacations. Every detail of the endeavor requires thoughtful planning. Determining our time of departure, for example, turned into a day-long project. The first 20 hours would be through the inland waters of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, waters afflicted by strong tidal currents that would be alternating with us or against us twice daily. A mistimed departure could add several hours of demoralizingly slow motoring against strong currents. To avoid such a fate, I plotted many things on graphs using different colors and then selected the scientifically proven departure time of 4:30 PM.
Someone with experience in the matter once told us that if I wanted to draw the ire of my wife and risk that our five- and eight-year-old kids would hate sailing before the trip even began, let their first open-ocean sailing experience be the 600-mile stretch from Seattle to San Francisco. Sheena thought back on the Juan de Fuca debacle and heartily agreed, so I selected four innocent victims to join me on this first leg as crew: Chuck, a friend of the former owner; Rick, an old friend from the Nacho days; and Matt (the proud new owner of Nacho) and Noah from our Taco Tuesday group. I enlisted our dedicated assistant (ChatGPT) to help me draw up a watch schedule and stuck it to the wall inside the pilothouse. Singlehanded watches in the day and doubles at night, powered by burritos, pies, curry, fresh bread, Trader Joe’s snacks, and meclizine.
A savvy observer would point out that timing the currents was the least of our worries. The forecast in the North Pacific was a freakish brigade of swirling red storms marching in single file, each one on the heels of the last, smashing headlong into the Washington and Oregon coast like drunken whirling dervishes. In the weeks and days leading up to our departure I stared at the growing storms on PredictWind and imagined some narrow sliver of calm between the swirling red that could permit our passage. Eventually the crew and I all agreed: rather than wait indefinitely at the dock, we would sail to where Juan de Fuca meets the open ocean and wait for a weather window there. At 4:30 on the dot I pulled my spent carcass out of my beanbag, gave a final squeeze to Sheena and the boys, thanked our friends for coming, and we cast off the lines.
I checked and re-checked the wind forecast throughout the overnight passage to Neah Bay as if suddenly a string of minor typhoons could suddenly disappear, but the closer we got the more likely it seemed we would exercise our fallback option of waiting in the small tribal village at the lonely upper left corner of our map for as long as it took for the weather to clear—likely five to ten days.
“It’s not so bad!” I reassured the crew. “We can do man overboard drills, eat spicy foods. Maybe do some spearfishing by the jetty?”
When we arrived at the tiny outpost of Neah Bay (pop. 1,102), we found the cramped marina at the edge of the world full to the gills with fishing boats, so we dropped the anchor in the black, sticky muck in the middle of the bay. As the boat came to rest and the sound of the rumbling engine gave way to eerie silence, we all began our mental preparations for the long, boring days ahead. Noah yawned and scratched his jaw. Matt applied sunscreen to his head and face and then sighed deeply. Chuck took a bite of an apple, chewed once, and then stopped chewing altogether. Rick just stared off into space with a paralyzed smile on half his face.
I retired to my room to run yet another departure forecast analysis over the Starlink. As the screen filled with spinning blue, yellow, and red streaks I suddenly felt a strange and unfamiliar feeling of…hope? This time, somehow, in spite of there being no chance in hell of us getting out of Neah Bay safely up to that point, all six forecast models suddenly updated to show a break in the weather. If we waited a day, we would be stuck here indefinitely, but if we left now—right now—we would slip past the next whirling dervish and be doing belly button shots on easy street in no time. I blinked twice to be sure and then stumbled all over myself like Charlie Bucket with his golden ticket to the cockpit.
“It’s time to go!” Confusion and delirium have overtaken our sad captain. “Do I look like a guy that would lie to you right now? Let’s go!”
And just as quickly as we had arrived, we were gone, motoring over ribbons of swell, directly into the field of rakes.
I am so excited to have you back out exploring, writing all about it, and publishing it for the world. Following Nacho around the world and then reliving it through your book later were fantastic experiences and very inspiring for me and my family and our travels as well. I just signed up for my annual subscription and can't wait to consume as much content as you can create! Thanks for everything Brad!
-Wayne