Some Photos from the crew of Hoku Pa'a

Sept 20,2015

Current location: Pier 39, San Francisco. 100m east of the sea lions and just north of the sourdough

Bamfield's Coast Guard Station was beautifully lit in the morning sunshine as we motored out of the harbour into Barkley Sound.

A fog bank greeted us at Cape Beale and tagged along for the next few hours, wrapping a cool invisibility cloak around us while the sun shone overhead.

Once in the open Pacific, we enjoyed good Northwest winds and moderate seas for the first couple days. Despite the settled conditions we were not used to the motion and were off our feed for a couple of days.

Here's a short video showing what 60 seconds at sea is like.

Higher winds the 4th day prompted us to change to a smaller head sail, but our speed remained between 5 and 7 knots.

Nights can be quite dark at sea if there are clouds, so the lights of this ship stood out from many miles away. You can see the two red lights in a vertical line, indicating that this ship is not under command and we are obliged to avoid it.

The heavy winds took a toll on some of our gear, including this control line for Hellena (our windvane self-steering system). Admittedly, we should have changed this line out a few thousand miles ago. Happily, Barb discovered the problem not during the night, which is when inconvenient truths usually manifest.

Nearing the coast again (we had been ~130 miles offshore) we were pleased to see about 20 dolphins come alongside and play around our ship. They (or others) returned several times during the day.

Another consequence of nearing the coast was that we had to hoist our courtesy flag for entering USA waters, and the yellow Q-flag to indicate we had not yet cleared customs.

At dawn, we spotted the silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge and joined the line of vessels (OK, there were just two freighters and us – nowhere near as busy as the Strait of Juan de Fuca) steaming for the entrance to San Francisco Bay.

Here's our current berth, at Pier 39.