Ship's log October 12

I was awake early this morning, and heard the wind blowing harder than expected. Then at 7:00 when I stuck my head out to see the day, it was cold, low to mid forties I guessed. We were planning to escape from Brookings today, to sail past Crescent City to the next harbor at Humboldt Bay, CA, some 80 miles away. In a vessel that runs anywhere from 3 to 6 mph, it should be easy to understand that this simple trip would take longer than the 5 or 6 hours of a warm afternoon to complete. In fact, I planned the trip for about 20 hours. Now, we all know that I can't tolerate cold, so, what in the world was I thinking?

When we sailed away from Winchester Bay, we had a third person aboard - one experienced sailor named Robert. It was this third person, who could take some of the night watches and allow me to warm up that made the trip possible for us. But alas, since we've laid over in Brookings for most of his available time, and for other personal reasons, Robert had to bail out a couple days ago. And though I've stressed and agonized over it, I just can't convince myself that we can do this without the third person. We need to be in warmer weather.

A couple days ago I heard about a sailor living here in the harbor who had recently helped another cruiser get down to San Francisco. Last night Claudia and I were invited to a BBQ where we met a man named Alan - the sailor I had heard about. Today we showed Alan our Sojourner, and he agreed to help us get down the coast. He has other committments for a couple weeks, but then we should be getting this show on down the road.

Interesting how things work out isn't it?

Emrick