We completed our journey Aug. 3rd - 17th with five crew for Blaine to SF and four for SF to LA. We started in Blaine WA with stops in Roche Harbor WA, Port Angeles WA, Neah Bay WA,
Newport OR, San Francisco CA,
Santa Cruz CA and Marina del Rey CA, before finally settling in our new slip in Wilmington CA.
The fold up
cruising guides were a great help and served as an excellent starting place for picking waypoints.
Roche Harbor was a beautiful stopping place for a short first day, we anchored out since the guest docks were pricey and very tight for someone who is just getting used to motoring their new to them large
boat.
Anchoring turned out to be great, excellent holding with
water calmer than on the guest docks for the rest of the trip.
Port Angeles was a nice place to stop for refueling, and the guest dock ended up being gratis (hint: come in right after closing and tip the
fuel dock guy).
Neah Bay had an ok guest dock ($1 per ft), but very challenging
fuel dock to get on and off.
Newport OR was a great place to pull in after 2-3 days at sea. The entrance was super easy with no sand bar conditions to deal with. USCG was routinely reporting on almost every other port we passed by on Ch 22a. Beautiful bridge, fun little fishing town and if you stay in the South Beach marina ($28 per night for 45ft boat) you are a 5min walk to the Rogue Brewing headquarters. I would recommend this place to anyone transiting the
PNW coast.
San Francisco was pricey, since we stayed at the SF County Marina near the GG bridge ($2 per ft), but the views were spectacular and it's convenient to get around the city from there. No tidal issues getting in and out, but there is A LOT of
water moving in the
marinas by the GG Bridge.
We stopped in
Santa Cruz, since we used to live there and love the city, so that made it worthwhile for us. For others without the nostalgic connection I'd probably recommend Monterey or just skipping on down the road. We stayed on the fuel dock ($1.25 per foot), since the other spots were taken, and there was significant surge all night. We
lost three older fenders overnight due to the constant beating against the dock.
From Santa Cruz it was a quick 24hrs to Marina del Rey with lots of humpbacks,
dolphins and one orca sighting. We stayed in Marina del Rey one night since we live nearby and it was easy for crew unloading. The lady and I motored down to Wilmington the following morning to our new slip.
A few trip notes... We were locked in
fog from Neah Bay to just north of Santa Cruz. Usually it was just overcast during the day, but visibility would drop significantly at night with heavier
fog. We only encountered fishing fleets twice at night, once about 50nm south of Cape Flattery and once one day out from Newport. Other than that we saw VERY few vessels.
We stayed about 10-20nm offshore for most of the trip with a max of about 40nm. We were able to sail for 24-36hrs on each of the longer passages, but tended to
motor sail with wind usually under 7-8kts. The roughest
weather was from just south of Cape Mendocino to SF. We saw a constant 20kts of wind for most of that
passage with gusts to 30ish. Seas were fairly consistent at 6-10ft on a short period and usually semi-confused direction. We did hit 11.5 surfing and saw an avg of 8+kts. We lucked into calms during midday for both Cape Mendocino and Point Conception, with the weather picking up a couple miles south each time.
We primarily used paper
charts, a
Garmin 78sc and
Navionics as a back up for
navigation. We were testing out an updated Alpha
Marine 3000
autopilot and it held up to everything wonderfully.
Thanks for everyone's
advice here, it made me much more confident and feel pretty well informed for the voyage.