A (Mostly) Gentle Delivery Over a Graveyard of Ships
It is not uncommon for people to tell me what a terrific lifestyle I have: Getting paid to drive boats must be the best deal on Earth. Some days it is, many days it isn’t; there are days when you earn your wages. Here on the US West Coast, many of the days when you earn your pay fall between October and March. The question is when to pull the trigger and go. And it is not so much the time of year as the predicted wind and sea state. Some vessels stayed out cruising longer than planned, or perhaps the yard project took longer than estimated and now the winter holidays have arrived and the owners are calling and emailing delivery skippers for a winter foray up or down the coast.
Estimates of shipwrecks for the area from San Diego to the Strait of San Juan de Fuca range as high as 7,000 unfortunate vessels. Interestingly, as many as 70 are likely buried beneath the streets of San Francisco, abandoned during the 1849 gold rush and left to founder and eventually be built right over. The majority of these vessels came to grief at the harbor entrances guarded by river bars. The Columbia River Bar is the most notorious, likely due to the fact that it has more traffic, and to the size and power of the seas that can develop. Other vessels like the USS Shark, whose cannon came to rest on a beach in Oregon, were simply lost along a lee shore now more renowned for weddings and The Goonies.
Deciding a departure used to rely on a combination of watching the barometer, the 11 o’clock news, NOAA weather forecasts, SSB broadcasts out of Point Reyes that allowed you to draw your own map, discussions with local fishermen, and whether the bar crossing was open, or closed by the US Coast Guard. Now the modern mariner has myriad free websites and professional weather routers at their disposal. Even so, most pleasure boats simply just stay comfortably in their slips. Though certainly not all. I can tell you, this year there was some fine weather in January and owners who just couldn’t wait for the spring flowers to appear before moving their vessels.