In Which the Crew of La Mouette is Thrashed But Does Not Lose Hope

"I'm going to vomit into the scuppers now. My apologies. Watch your feet." Kyle found my preemptive apology funny, greeting it with laughter, but it sure didn't feel funny leaning out of the cabin companionway and heaving my guts out into the cockpit drains. I only saw the humor later that night, and I, too, chuckled as I washed Kyle's recently returned banana paste out of the cockpit with a bucket of seawater.

There is not a man aboard La Mouette who has not surrendered his stomach to the seas.

Seasickness is a spiraling malady, and once it has its claws in, one is hard pressed to escape. The best defense against it is to stay outside in the cockpit with your eyes on the horizon, for going below decks into the cabin, robbing your senses of perspective, is when you open yourself up to an attack. For day sailors, this tactic of staying above decks may be all that is needed to avoid sickness.

For us, however, staying in the cockpit is only manageable for so long. One must eat, sleep, escape the elements, or use the facilities. All things done below decks... where the sickness lurks. Even were one able to do all of those things on deck, it would matter little as night fell, stealing the horizon from your gaze and confusing your brain and inner ear, giving your stomach over to turmoil.

If you are going offshore, be prepared for seasickness. Be prepared for brain-scrambling nausea. Be prepared for paralyzing cold sweats. Be prepared for suffering and self-doubt.

We left Neah Bay on Saturday morning, intent on rounding Cape Flattery and finally beginning our south-bound course. The weather reports for Oregon sounded severe as we left port, so we planned on making a shorter hop (two or three days) to Grays Harbor, with an option to skip over it if the weather permitted. A west wind ensured that we would have to beat against it in order to round the cape, but it was a sunny day and the weather and wind were reportedly quite fair a bit off the coast. If we could claw our way out of the final western bit of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, things sounded favorable for us.

It took only a few short hours to learn that, in this part of the world this late in the season, even favorable conditions carry an aspect of menace, one infinitely more intimidating than I had ever imagined.

The day began with the three of us in the cockpit, spirits high as we finally ventured out into the big drink, the pacific ocean, violent and cold with frigid Alaskan waters riding the current down our way and ten foot swells rolling in from Japan.

Current and swells, though, are just one aspect of the water. The real devils are the wind waves. Swells are large, rolling undulations caused by far-off disturbances. They may be ten feet high, but they generally come in at a slow enough frequency that you can ride up them and surf down. They can be intimidating, but are usually manageable, which is fortunate, as they are nearly omnipresent.

Wind waves, on the other hand, are water disturbances directly caused by the wind blowing through the area. They, much like you, surf along on the swells, violently sloshing against each other and making choppy seas. Best conditions will keep the wind waves below two feet, but they can easily grow to four, stretching to ten on days from nightmare.

Imagine rolling ten-foot waves stretching into infinity with violent four-foot baby waves surfing along on them, and that is about what we had as we beat out to round the cape with Kyle at the tiller.

It was rough, but we felt confident as we beat northwest against the wind to get enough distance to clear the cape. After a bit, my father disappeared below to rest in the v-berth (front section of the boat), leaving Kyle and I in the cockpit.

As happens, I eventually began to feel the call of nature and I debated on what to do. I was bundled head to foot in heavy weather gear, smashing along against wind waves and swells that made it too violent to use the toilet, and my bladder wasn't getting any less full. I began to prepare myself to pee over the side, but it felt somewhat unsafe hanging myself off a railing in rough water, and Kyle recommended that I go below to use the pee bottle. The fool I am, I took his advice.

My reward, as you've already seen, was multiple trips to Heavesville. I had to fight to concentrate so I could finish going to the bathroom and still have time to make it to the cockpit to empty my stomach, just managing to finish before the waves of nausea became too great.

Between mouth-clearing spits, I warned Kyle off of even attempting to go below. Pee in the scuppers if you must, just don't go down there. He took my advice and proceeded on an iron man twelve-hour shift on the tiller while I retreated below to try and sleep, knowing I would be on night watch and needed rest. I can't say I slept so much as lay in a near-death state, but I did rouse myself every two hours or so to get sick into the scuppers, though by this time I was only dry heaving. Apart from the teeth-chattering shivers that came after each heave session, I had only self-doubt to keep me warm. Here I was, nearly paralyzed with sickness... in the BEST weather conditions we could expect. Can I even make it down the coast? How much misery does one deliberately put himself through? Can I feel like this one more month? One more day?!

At about 10:00 pm Kyle called out, asking me to wake up, which was following by a hacking and sploosh sound. The disappearance of the horizon had taken its toll.

I, still in my foul weather gear, grabbed my head lamp and watchman's cap and stumbled into the cockpit to relieve him of watch. My stomach still churned and I felt drunk-stupid, but he wasn't in any better condition than myself, so I settled in next to the tiller. It was a clear night, but moonless, so only the light of Jupiter cast a slight glow on the water, sloshy and churning as ever.

I hadn't eaten any food all day, so I tried choking down a banana (a food I hate... but strangely eat daily). After just half of it I was hanging my head over the rails, sending the banana into the sea, reeling in shock and losing control of the tiller, sending the boat spinning into the waves.

As the last heave began to subside, a feeling of relief and calm swept over me. I looked up into the sky, felt the wind on my face, put the boat back on a bearing of 180 degrees, and laughed at myself.

Damn me if this isn't fun.

Chuckling, I washed the cockpit out with a bucket of seawater, trimmed the sails, and blew through the night, due south.

A glutton for punishment, I nibbled down half of a chocolate chip peanut crunch nutrition bar. It stayed down. How about the other half? Hmm... Perhaps my senses had finally acclimated. I still felt the "hangover" aspect of the sickness-a tender stomach and a weakness of body-but my inner ear was no longer tumbling down a flight of stairs, and I could take in the beauty of Jupiter and the Milky Way, shining brilliantly 50 miles west of the nearest source of light pollution.

As the eastern sky began to fill with light, the combination of little sleep, little food, and much vomiting finally began to overwhelm my ability to remain alert.

I had been tracking the light of another sailboat throughout the night, and I knew he couldn't be too far away. The light patterns he was giving off had him moving on a mostly parallel course, but occasionally he would veer onto an intercept course before veering back, constantly bringing his line towards convergence with ours.

I kept the binoculars around my neck so I could keep tabs on him, but as my energy began to fade, it became harder and harder to keep track of him amongst the swells. My eyelids began to droop, and those same binoculars that were so handy to track him with began dragging my head down towards the deck, impossibly heavy.

I checked on the other boat, saw the white of his stern light and knew he was moving away. Safe for a bit.

I leaned back and stared at Jupiter, amazed at how much light it casts. It slowly split into two bodies as my eyes lost focus and my head fell to the side. Seeing the two points of light flash across my vision snapped my attention back from the near-sleep trance I had almost succumbed to. I swung my gaze around in a panic, looking for the other boat. How long had I lost focus for? His red port bow light showed him heading back towards us, on intercept again.

I could either fight off sleep (and probably fail) while watching to see how close he could get, or I could change course a bit myself, hopefully waking myself up in the process.

So I pushed the tiller over and fell off the wind a bit, bringing it to blow more on our starboard stern (back) than beam (side). Trimming the sails brought our speed up slightly, but we began to move as quickly as the wind when pushed along on the swells, and the sails began to repeatedly luff (flap loosely) and snap back full with an annoying pop.

My wits began to fail me as I ran through some solutions to get the sails to sleep (run quietly), but we were still moving well enough, so I let the sails move about as they would and watched the sun crest the eastern horizon and bring our first night on the Pacific to a close.

The light revealed that our new course had put us ahead of the other sailboat and showed him to be some miles off. No need to pay him much mind in the light, but even with the sun up, I still had to struggle to fight off sleep, so I was thankful as Kyle clamored into the cockpit a bit after 8:00 am. I gave the tiller over to him and crawled below, stripping off my gear and surrendering myself to my blankets, fast asleep.

Kyle, from his accounts, sailed through a sunny day. The swells were still high, but it was a beautiful day and he steered us back in the direction of the coast, towards Grays Harbor.

We were still about 30 nautical miles out when I woke up in the dark. I slipped back into my second skin, once again grabbed a meal bar and my water bottle and dragged myself back into the cockpit, ready for another night shift, this time sailing towards the lights of the mainland and Grays Harbor.

One of the trickier aspects of sailing this coast is that safe harbors can become scarce in bad weather. Grays Harbor, for example, is a river outlet with a big sandbar that the big swells ride out of the deep water and slam into, creating large waves and breakers, which can be impassible, especially for a sailboat with a meager engine.

To get in aboard La Mouette, we would have to time the currents right and ride them into the harbor. A stiff northeast wind was blowing us there at five knots, and I thought we would easily get into the harbor before 3:30 am, when the tide was set to switch against us. If we couldn't clear the bar by then, we'd have to wait until 9:30 am, which by this point seemed like eons away.

Around 2:00 am we were five miles out, so I roused Kyle to have two people awake in case we needed to work some magic with the sails. I had navigated us to the buoys that mark the entrance, but soon realized that I should have considered the wind blowing dead down that channel and tried to take a short cut, as our engine didn't have the chops to make a dead sprint against the wind.

As it was, we would never beat into the bay in time to catch the tide, and we had to abandon our approach about two miles out, turning back to wait for the light and the tide. Ultimately, our experience in the morning made me glad I hadn't gotten us there in time during the night.

When we'd given up, Kyle had gone back to sleep, so I sailed back and forth a bit north of the harbor. The wind changed to dead east and picked up in intensity. Large wind waves began to slam against us from the east, getting nasty as they clashed with the swells rolling in from the west.

We lost ground over the next couple of hours, ending up five miles out again thanks to the rising wind. I knew the wind was going to be tough to overcome and I didn't want to miss the current a second time, so at about 6:30 or 7:00 am, I began to beat back and forth into Grays Harbor.

The seas slammed into La Mouette, soaking me (but luckily washing all the puke from the rails) with blast after blast of icy saltwater. Kyle came back topside sometime after 8:00, and we continued our beat, back and forth into the wind.

It took me five hours to get those five miles, and I've never fought harder for a shorter span.

A large cargo ship hulked in the bay at anchor, and we surely would have struck her in the dark. We nearly had to rub rails with her as it was, given the zig-zag pattern we needed to follow to gain against the wind.

After finally gaining an angle that would allow us to clear Point Chehalis and head into the Westport Marina, we came up, dropped the main sail, and staggered into the marina, whipped.

After securing our dock lines on float six, the three of us sat at a picnic table along the marina boardwalk. It was about 1:00 pm, and I'd been at the helm for well over twelve hours. All I could do was sit with a wide-eyed, shell-shocked stare. Now that I was in safe harbor... could I really just so cavalierly venture back out again in a day or two (when the next weather window was set to open)?

On Saturday, as I lay incapacitated by paralyzing sickness, I had wondered at my ability to withstand such conditions. How long can you willingly suffer? How many times can you leave a calm harbor to fight against sickening seas?

If the sea intimidates and incapacitates you when the weather is as good as it will be, given the season, do you really chance going back out into it, asking for more?

Sometimes a sailor needs a short memory.

It's late in the season, and the weather is turning. We set sail again on Monday, headed south, thoughts of the Baja dancing in our heads.

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Those of you watching the SPoT may have noticed that I made a trip to Tacoma...twice. My father has purchased a motorbike, and I used it to take our diesel fuel injectors in to be serviced. The entire west coast is awash with hazardous sea warnings, so we're stuck in Westport for a few days. Hopefully this injector servicing will take care of some of the problems that have arisen of late with La Mouette's diesel horse. It was a butt-numbing 800 kilometers, but Mt. Rainier is quite beautiful from US-12 and WA-507.