I was on watch around five a.m. when I saw a small light in the distance ahead. I thought it was a small boat two or three miles away. Tried to find it on radar. Finally located it on the 12-mile range. It was a huge freighter 11 miles away! And it was headed directly for us, going 90 to nothing. I immediately altered our course to avoid it, but it still seemed to be coming at us. In no time, it was on the 8-mile range, then the 4, and then the 2. Its lights were glaring right at me. I turned off the auto-pilot, grabbed the wheel, and swung hard to starboard, but the monster seemed to be coming right towards us no matter what I did. There's no feeling quite like being on a sailboat in pitch darkness, going as fast as you can, watching a humungous freighter bearing down on you. But after a few tense minutes, the freighter glided silently by, 3/4 of a mile away. It was going so fast, it had no sooner gone by than it disappeared. And I started breathing again.
The day was sunny, with a northeast breeze. We put out the headsail but used the engine, too. The wind was almost directly in back of us, which made the sail flop around. In the afternoon, the wind kicked up to twenty or more knots, and the waves started getting bigger and topped with whitecaps. We had hoped to make Coos Bay, but it would have been getting dark by the time we got there, so we decided to go into the mouth of the Umpqua River. Ha ha ha. That's like deciding to climb the face of a cliff instead of taking the road around the base. We'd thought the entrance to Gray's Harbor was wild, but it was a picnic compared with the entrance to the Umpqua River. Usually, as soon as you're inside the breakwater, the water flattens out, but here huge waves were breaking inside the breakwater! The wind was up to 30 knots, and 15-foot waves were tossing the Jofian this way and that, up and down, back and forth, side to side. A couple of times we heeled 50 degrees, first one side, then the other. We were very thankful for the solid lead keel; many boats would have flipped completely over. Roy was hanging onto the wheel for dear life, trying to avoid the breakers on our left and the rocks on the right. There wasn't much distance between them. We had range finders to guide us, but it was a real feat of seamanship to keep on course when the boat was sliding this way and that off the tops of the waves. If anything at all had gone wrong -- if the engine had quit or the steering mechanism had failed -- we'd have been smashed helplessly against the rocks. But everything worked perfectly. Jofian took it all in stride; it was all in the day's work for her. After an eternity, we passed the ends of the breakwaters and entered the river. The wind was still howling, but there were no waves to speak of. What a relief! Our mouths were so dry, we both had to drink a glass of water.
There are two marinas here: Winchester Bay and Salmon Harbor. The information we had said sailboats should use Salmon Harbor, so that's where we went. We soon realized we should have gone to Winchester Bay, but at the moment we didn't care. There was plenty of available dock space, so Roy put the engine in neutral and we blew over to the first dock. Boy, did it feel good to walk on solid ground again! We're glad we had the experience of crossing the Umpqua River bar in 30-knot winds, but we wouldn't want to do it again!
We walked around a while and bought a few groceries. As we were passing a small shopping center, a woman hailed us and asked if we knew anything about fixing cars. Her solenoid had hung up and was cranking away. She had phoned her mechanic, and he had advised her to cut the battery cable, so she was out there trying to cut it with a pair of plastic scissors that would have a hard time cutting paper. Roy pulled the cable off with a pair of pliers. The woman was very grateful.
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