Cascadian Bar Crawl Part II: Failing to Get to San Francisco via the Yaquina Bay Bar to Coos Bay Bar
Yaquina Bay Bar to Coos Bay Bar – PR Cruise Gone Awry
“There’s something foul rolling in soon,” a silver-haired old salt told me. He gazed offshore toward central Oregon’s Yaquina Bay Bar entrance. I had asked him for directions to the Newport Marina transient dock, and we fell naturally into weather talk. “There’s a halibut derby comin’ up, and we’re all not sure how that’s gonna go. This weather is only good for trailer sailors.” He pointed me on my way and I thanked him.
I was rendezvousing with the delivery captain of a brand-new, French-made, hull number one Beneteau Swift Trawler 47. The context was what’s commonly referred to as a “PR cruise” where media—moi—are invited aboard a new boat for an adventure. The idea is a tried-and-true way for a new boat to show what it can do. Sure, the dockside boat show walkabouts and breathless press releases about new models have their places in the industry. But if you want to convince real-life, breathing, red-blooded boat customers to sign the dotted line and write the big checks, nothing quite lands in the human imagination like an at-sea trial. Words, no matter how informative or pretty, are cheap. Engine hours and nautical miles crossed are immortal.
Beneteau was hip to this human truth and greenlit an ambitious PR cruise aboard their newest model from Seattle to San Diego with numerous stops along the way dubbed Beneteau’s Swift Pacific Adventure. It was the spring of 2019, and the whole “Euro-modern trawler that can go 20 knots” schtick was new, even controversial to traditionalists. Whether or not these light French Swift Trawlers could really hang in the real deal saltchuk with beefier, often slower, peers remained to be proven by many. The finish line down south was a glorious arrival to the San Diego Boat Show with an epic adventure to boast about. Beneteau had offered available berths for specific transit legs and, wouldn’t you know it, all the pleasant one- or two-day slots in Puget Sound or south of San Francisco were snarfed up. I dubbed my slot The Hero Leg, roughly 620 Pacific coastline miles from Newport, Oregon, to San Francisco, California. There’d be no calm Puget Sound waters with mountain views or sun-drenched Channel Islands for me. The older writers knew the game far better than I did. What’s more, this leg was just me and the skipper, Captain Jackson Willett. He’d actually need me to be on my game as crew.
Southward Bound
“We’ll introduce ourselves properly later,” said Captain Willett after a quick handshake at the transient dock. Two other magazine writers hopped off in a flurry, their eyes wide as they earnestly called loved ones on cell phones. Personal belongings were hurriedly chucked out on the dock. Captain Willett was reassessing the plan in light of the dire weather report. The new strategy was to run for shelter in Coos Bay, about 100 miles south. Like all the bays on the Oregon coast, Coos Bay is a bar entrance.
“We’ll wait for a weather window [in Coos Bay] to continue,” said Willet. “Slack tide is at 1600 hours, and we’ve got to make it to cross the bar.”
“Sounds like a plan, skipper,” I saluted. “I talked to a halibut fisherman on the way over, and he said the same thing about the weather.”
“Yep, might as well get as far south as we can,” he said. “We’ll probably be waiting in Coos Bay for a few days, but we should still make the San Diego Boat Show debut.” We were off the dock in minutes. I stowed the fenders. Crossing the Yaquina Bay Bar into the Pacific was uneventful. Captain Willet opened up the twin 425-Caterpillar diesels and headed south at about 17 knots. Eight- to ten-foot following swells gave us boosts of speed up to around 21 knots. At this rate, we’d get to the Coos Bay bar entrance with time to spare. Captain Willet visibly started to relax, and we got to chatting on the flybridge.
“I run a powerboat school and charter company out of Newport Beach (California),” he said. His charter captain career included gigs on the East Coast, Hawaii, and ports in between. “I was living on my Grand Banks 36 in Newport Beach and taking people to the Channel Islands so much, I figured I might as well do it for a living.” His company, Newport Coast Maritime Academy, kept him busy and stressed out, but was also very rewarding and successful. This trip was a chance to run down the West Coast and add the notch to his belt.
There’s a special kind of gray that sometimes sets in on the Oregon coast that is so complete that running a boat in it feels like flying into a giant cosmic elephant. A gray whale broke the gray sea to puff a cloud of gray breath into the gray sky. There is a certain beauty in this condition, almost like being in a black-and-white film. Beside the engines, there was an eerie silence to the open Pacific. The term calm before the storm crept into my mind.
We diligently scanned the water for crab pots, a common scourge to boaters cruising down the coast. Wrapping a crab pot line on one of our two props would be a trip ender or worse. Becoming disabled would be a major headache in normal circumstances, but out here on the other side of the bar entrances with incoming weather, it would be a legitimately dangerous situation. We dodged a couple, and it was somewhat amusing to see these colorful bobbing floats as mortal enemies. Context always completes reality. The trip was peaceful until we approached the Umpqua River mouth. We clipped along about seven nautical miles off the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area when bits of dark floating debris started to interrupt the gray swell serenity.
As a native Oregonian, I was familiar with the Umpqua River. For my money, stretches of that river are among the most beautiful places in the world, a magnet for fly fishermen and nature lovers. Author Zane Gray’s cabin is still back there, and Dune science fiction legend Frank Herbert famously was inspired by the surreal sand works of the aforementioned Oregon Dunes. There’s a magical quality about that river, but more relevant to us blasting south on a boat was the spring flooding. Locals could’ve probably warned us that the spring rains and snowmelt flush logs out the Umpqua that time of year, and we should’ve probably been offshore an additional ten nautical miles to be safe. Sometimes you’ve got to learn lessons the hard way. The right way.
Clunk! Va-ROOM-ROOM-ROOM!
We both looked into our wake. What remained of a mid-sized log floated in pieces behind us. The skipper brought us to idle.
“Take the helm! I gotta check that out,” he said and dashed below. I flipped off the autopilot and tried to keep our southerly bearing, but more half-sunk logs floated into view. I dodged a big one. I didn’t know that the Umpqua River spring-flushes out whole trees. Captain Willett returned. “The port engine is out. It’s impossible to say how bad the damage is, but it’s looking pretty bad.” We exchanged some very naughty words.
“The starboard engine is smoking for some reason,” I pointed.
“Yeah, we’ve had a slow diesel leak from that one, and I’m planning to check it out in Coos Bay. I’m not too worried, typical new boat kind of problem.”
“Right,” I nodded. “What’s the plan? If we miss that slack tide for the bar crossing, we’ll be a lame duck in the open when that bad weather rolls in.” Captain Willett took a few thoughtful moments, then acted. He showed me where the life raft was, always reassuring, and started triaging the situation. Whenever we pushed the port engine over 500 RPM, it shook violently, so we kept it working below that. The smoking starboard engine was to be our salvation—never mind that it smoked more the harder we pushed it.
The good captain kept the helm and issued a securité to the US Coast Guard. I was on engine monitoring duty below, where I wrote down the fluid levels, temperature, RPM, and other engine vitals every five minutes for the log. If one of the vitals were to spike or drop suddenly, I was the alarm. I felt like a paramedic in an ambulance monitoring a patient. Fortunately, we could still make about 10 knots in our condition, leaving us about half an hour of wiggle room for the Coos Bay Bar crossing slack tide window. The securité was answered, and it was a relief that the coasties were at least keeping an eye on us. If we missed this tide window, we’d be limping out in the incoming storm, waiting for the next one. At night.
Crossing into Coos
The transit to the Coos Bay entrance was tense with Captain Willet at the helm and I playing engine nurse. Calm following seas became confused and flattened as the wind picked up. I always heard that whitecaps meant 13 knots of wind, howling 23. We were getting both. Gray rain fell in our gray world. But at last, with minutes of slack tide to spare, we lined up to shoot the Coos Bay Bar. I joined the skipper on the flybridge. He handed me binoculars.
“Keep an eye for the markers, we’re going to want to line them up and get in there,” he said. He was referring to range markers that are common on these Oregon rivers. They were a little hard to find in the increasingly heavy rain, but we got them lined up just right. We checked in with the coasties. They were watching. Maybe laughing, maybe wringing hands. “Let’s do this.”
The seas were getting nasty, and now they were the worst of all—following and quartering. Captain Willet made constant corrections to maintain course, the jetties to either side of us booming with white surf. His shot was true. We made it through the narrow entrance, and our limping boat was safely in the Charleston Marina in short order. We moored into a transient slip among all-wood commercial vessels. One proudly touted the year 1917 on its transom and flew a Norwegian flag. Locals sidled up to chat with us. There aren’t too many luxury euro-styled motoryachts in Charleston, Oregon.
We lucked out with a local haul out a few days later. A simple prop replacement was in order. Three of the four-port propeller blades were curled, not conspicuously to a lay observer but clear upon professional inspection. The log had wedged itself in there before getting woodchippered by our metal blades.
Alas, my trip with Captain Willet and the Swift Trawler 47 across two Oregon bar entrances ended. I didn’t have the spare days to linger for the new prop to arrive, so Coos Bay was my final stop on the PR cruise. But sometimes failing to sail to San Francisco can be its own kind of adventure. I concluded my original article about the experience thus:
“When Captain Willett and I finally left hull number one at the boatyard, I couldn’t deny the emotions I felt while bidding her au revoir from the rental car: appreciation, respect, and affection. She had done everything asked of her, even in trying conditions. Now here she was, seemingly eager to get back on the saltchuk for round two.
I was unable to join him, but Captain Willett finished the delivery in time for the San Diego Boat Show debut, now a plucky underdog success story.
As we left the yacht behind on stands among the commercial boats—some rusting away and others nearly ready to chase seafood again—I thought of her as a young French model, stranded in small-town America after car trouble. Disoriented but glad to be safe, she wanders into a bar full of surly fishermen and millworkers fresh off the clock. Rather than shy away or remain aloof in the corner, she sits with them, orders a round of whiskey, and drinks them under the table, somehow one of the guys despite her upbringing and the circumstances that brought her there. As the Cajun French saying goes: laissez les bons temps rouler!”
Cascadian Bar Crawl Part III – Bound Again for San Francisco, Coos Bay and Umpqua River Combo
Cascadian Bar Crawl Part I: Grays Harbor and Columbia River
