S/V Acacia

Getting close!

Bob

We arrived in Port Townsed around 9:30pm last night. It was a very long day. We got up at 5am and left Neah Bay. Little wind, we motored all the way. The weather was clear, we could see Mt. Baker and a little of Mt. Ranier. The clear weather should continue today.

We are leaving for Seattle shortly. Hope to arrive late afternoon

We have how gone 3003 miles.

Current position is:

48 06.4 N
122 46.4 W

Bob

Acacia arrived last night in Port Townsend. They plan to leave early this morning to sail to Seattle, where they will dock at the elliott bay marina.

We docked at Neah Bay marina at 4pm. Now off to hot showers and a nice dinner.

My cell phone (AT&T) doesn’t work here, but they have wireless Internet.

Bob

This may be our last night on the Pacific Ocean. If we can maintain our current speed and course, we should reach the strait of Juan de Fuca in the late morning. Our current plan is to not stop at Neah Bay and continue down the strait to Port Angeles. This should allow us to reach Seattle the following evening.

This is, of course, very dependent on our arrival time into the strait to make the flood current. If we get there too late, we will stop in Neah Bay. Wish us all good wind in the right direction!

We are starting to see some signs of land, pieces of kelp floating in the water, a fishing boat, and different kinds of birds (Tern’s I think). Other than that we live in a small grey world. It’s been complete cloud cover for the past few days, with occasional light showers. More rain is likely tonight.

Our current position is

Lat: 47 19.0 N
Lon: 126 48.6

We are all very excited about reaching landfall.

Bob

We are making good progress. The wind came up yesterday evening and has been good since. We even had to reduce sail somewhat. We are currently headed toward Juan de Fuca at about 6.5 knots.

Our current position is:

LATITUDE: 45-41.95N
LONGITUDE: 129-48.19W

We have about 260 miles to go. If this continues we think we should make landfall on Saturday. Still somewhat variable given the weather.

Today we had grey skies and light rain most of the morning and early afternoon. I had rain on my watch in the morning and now that Steve is one watch it stopped raining and it looks like the sun is trying to come out. The irony, is that Steve likes the rain and I don’t….

We are all looking forward to making landfall and seeing everyone. We realized yesterday that the three of us, Steve, Chris, and myself, have been living on the boat for about a month, given the time we spent in Hawaii getting ready.

Bob

We had over 24 hours of nice weather. Wonderful clear skies last night. Very dark and more stars than one can imagine. We are still going wing and wing toward our destination. It’s nice to see the miles count down.

Our current position is:

LAT 44 08 N
LONG 132 32 W

We just got a new weather forecast and things may not be a simple as we had hoped. We will take a closer look and decide what course of action to take.

Chris made bread for the second time and it was better than the first. It’s nice to have a baker on board. I made pieapple pancakes for breakfast. We were out of blueberries and had some cans of pineapple. It was very good.

Bob

We have now been at sea for three weeks. This is about how long we expected the trip to take, but we obviously aren’t there yet. We are now about 530 miles to go. It’s nice to see the number get smaller.

Last night we had some sort of front go through with winds in the 45 knot range with gusts in the low 50 knots. This is more wind that I have ever been in before and have no desire to see again. It’s best described as a “roar”. While it was a lot of fun taking and furling the main during this, it went well and we slowed down. Acacia handled it very well. We never felt there was a problem with the boat or our safety. Acacia is really designed to cross oceans. That said, it was quite an experience.

The weather today has been very nice. Steady wind from the right direction and sunshine. It’s not as warm as Hawaii, but it was nice let our foul weather gear dry out. The experience of having put put on damp have foul weather gear to out outside in the rain can’t quite be described.

Our current position is 42 42.2 N, 134 20.9 W.

A change of plans to announce. We had originally intended to head to Vancouver where Acacia would stay for the winter. Unfortunately, we were not able to find a slip for her. Instead she will be spending the winter in Seattle. We currently plan to head to Seattle once we get out of the Pacific ocean into the strait of Juan de Fucca. We will first stop at Neah Bay just inside the strait and refuel and get some fresh food.

Bob

It’s been a very “interesting” day. Our weather router put us on a more direct course and had us slow down to let the worst of the weather go by. That good because what we get was bad enough. At the peak we saw gusts of over 40 knots and sustained winds in the middle thirties. It has now slowed to a nice low 20 knot range. Crew and boat came through fine. It amazes us how fast Acacia can go with so little sail up. We have been sailing with only part of the staysail up.

One very nice byproduct of the more direct route is that our current miles to go figure is 678.

Our current position is:

41 01 N
135 59 W

As you can see we have now passed 41 N and 135 W.

Bob