Some people like to celebrate a milestone birthday by relaxing on the beach or wining and dining around Europe.
My husband is not like those people. We’ll be celebrating his big (not gonna say-0) by sailing Scotland.
No, we aren’t taking Polaris there. Instead, we have signed up for a 10-day sailing expedition of the Scottish Isles with Mahina Offshore Services, lead by the very experienced and well-regarded sailing instructor John Neal.
The timing is serendipitous. Our kiddos will be with their bio dad, and C’s birthday is in April. We have been looking for opportunities to get more experience with off-shore (bluewater) and heavy weather sailing, especially because we are interested in cruising the higher latitudes someday. When we saw that Mahina had a few berths open for the first leg of their Scotland tour, we jumped.
According to our itinerary, we will stop by Barra and Iona in the Inner Hebrides, then head to St. Kilda, an isolated archipelago that is part of the Outer Hebrides. Chances are good we will be sailing in cool temps, high wind, rainy weather and some swell and waves.
A chart for part of the area we will be sailing.
So, no, it won’t be the most relaxing vacation we’ve ever taken, but it may be one of the most memorable.
Many of these islands are home to some of the largest bird colonies in the world, including puffins. The sea around the Hebrides gets whales, dolphins and basking sharks. Our plans are to hike to a few castles, explore some tiny villages and learn more about this unique ecosystem. I have a sneaking suspicion that we will fall in love with this area and want to come back and cruise it on our own boat.
Since we booked the trip, we’ve been gathering up gear to keep us warm and dry. We already have a lot of cold, rainy weather gear that we use all the time while sailing the Salish Sea, but my cold tolerance is not getting any better as I get older. So I also purchased a few new things—including a new set of heated socks and some heated mittens. I expect to have some updates to my article about sailing in the cold.
I will try to post pictures from our trip on Instagram if I can.
Learning to sail in mid-life has changed me for the better.
I’ve tinkered with the idea of writing an article titled “All I’ve ever wanted to know, I learned from sailing.”
Tongue-in-cheek, partly, but also for reals. Learning to sail has changed my life, and not just in the obvious ways. The lessons I have learned since I started to sail have taught me how to live better in all aspects of my life.
When I started this blog, I simply wanted a place to capture all I was learning about sailing. I’ve learned how to sail, yes, but I’ve also learned a lot about:
What I didn’t expect, though, was that my experiences on S/V Polaris would inform all parts of my life.
The first time I step foot on a sailboat was when I was 38 years old, newly divorced with two kids, and fairly certain about what I was good at and what I wasn’t. Learning to sail in mid-life definitely took me out of my comfort zone and I am so glad for it.
Sailing continues to teach me how to screw up and get back up again. How to be patient. How to be a better teacher and parent to my kids. How to cope when my plans go to shit. How important nature is to me and all living beings (and how, I firmly believe, we would all be better if we spent more time outside). How to dig deep and get a really tears-inducing frustrating job done. How to keep going when I’m tired. How to really, truly rest.
In short, sailing has taught me how to learn and to be OK with always learning, with not knowing the answer and being totally OK with that, too.
All those other things belong on this blog, too.
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here. That’s OK. Life has been crazy for us for the last two years. We bought a house, put our kids back in school, resumed splitting time between boat and land and have had to endure a lot of ups and downs along the way. But I’m ready to share what I’m learning again, and I hope that maybe, you’ll learn something, too.
Here’s a question for you: How do you get a sailboat with a hull speed (maximum speed) of 6.5 knots to sail 35 miles in about four hours?
This isn’t a hypothetical question. Just the other day, we sailed our 39-foot sailboat, Polaris, to Port Townsend from Seattle in about four hours.
The answer is in the stars. Specifically, the sun and the moon, how close Earth is to either, and to a certain extent, the weather. These all have an impact on how deep the water is, how fast it is moving and in which direction it is heading. In short, tides and currents.
Puget Sound and Salish Sea have amazing tides and currents that have the power to affect how quickly you can get to a destination—or if you can get to that destination at all. That’s why it’s important to understand how tides and currents work in this area, and to always incorporate them into your trip planning.
What goes up must go down
It’s always important to keep an eye on the tidal cycle when exploring beaches along the Salish Sea.
The Salish Sea, of which Puget Sound is a part, gets its water from the Pacific Ocean thanks to the watery highway that connects the two: the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When the water rises for the Pacific, it brings gallons and gallons of seawater down the Strait and into the Salish. We call this the flood tide because that is when the water level increases in Puget Sound and around the San Juan Islands, so much so that it can completely cover things you don’t want to sail into, like big rocks.
When the water level drops in the Pacific, those millions of gallons of seawater go shooting back out the Strait. The water level drops for the Salish as well. We call this the ebb tide. The shore line can get a whole lot wider, often leaving places that were completely under water completely dry and visible, like those rocks you were trying to avoid.
Puget Sound’s big tides
In many places around the world the difference between the flood and the ebb is large. The Bay of Fundy in Canada has the biggest tide, with an average difference of 38 feet. In Puget Sound, the tide ranges from about 8 feet to 14 feet, depending on where you are, what time of day and when in the year. The Salish Sea has what are called mixed diurnal tides. That means that in a typical 24-hour period, there will be two low tides, with one much lower water than the other, and two high tides, with one much higher water than the other.
A NOAA map of the maximum current during the ebb tide in North Puget Sound.
During the flood, water coming down the Strait pushes south into Puget Sound and north into the San Juan Islands. When the tide begins to drop, the current runs north out of Puget Sound and south out of the San Juan Islands. These tidal exchanges create currents of varying speeds and directions.
The local topography also contributes to the speed of these currents. Water flowing through narrow passages functions just like water coming out of a hose that was been partially blocked at the end: it flows faster.
I took this video of the current in Kilsut Harbor from the northern beach of Marrowstone Island. We estimated the current was running about 2 knots. Just 2 knots, but it almost took me and the kids out to the Strait of Juan de Fuca when we were trying to row our dinghy back to the boat.
In general, it’s best to ride the current when it is going the same direction you are going. Going with the current speeds you up; going against it slows you down. However, in some places the current speed can get so fast it would be dangerous for your average sailboat to go during the max current, regardless of which direction it is going.
Where the currents are fast
Examples of places in our local waters where the flow gets “squeezed” into going faster include the Tacoma Narrows and Deception Pass, where the current often gets above 6 knots going either direction. British Columbia has some incredibly fast currents that require careful planning. The current going through Seymour Narrows, for example, can reach speeds of over 15 knots.
In those cases, it’s best to wait for a time when the water level is neither falling nor raising, creating little current at all. This is called slack.
Using tides and currents to plan your journey
The key to navigating around these variables is to always check tide and current predictions, and time your voyage accordingly.
In the example I gave at the beginning of this article, we chose to time our departure around 11:30 a.m. so that we would ride the ebb (drop in water) north out of Seattle to Port Townsend. With the current flowing north and the wind coming out of the south, we enjoyed a speedy, relatively smooth downwind sail to Port Townsend. At times, our speed over ground reached 10 knots, which is why we were able to get our destination more quickly than our hull speed would indicate.
For another trip north, we opted to leave during the tail-end of the flood. Why? Because the current in the central part of Puget Sound is relatively weak and wouldn’t affect our boat speed much. Plus, we were aiming to get to Mystery Bay before low tide. The charted depths near the entrance to Kilsut Harbor get quite shallow, barely over a fathom (6 feet) in spots. We draw 6.5 feet and didn’t want to risk running aground.
The charted depths are recorded in fathoms. As you can see, there are some pretty shallow spots during low tide. Luckily, the entrance is well-marked and for that very reason.
You can find tide and current predictions on NOAA Tides & Currents or DeepZoom with a quick search on your phone, but we still keep a current copy of the printed Ports and Passes on our boat. The beauty of a paper resource is we never need a cell signal to read it. The book also kindly explains how to read the predictions, how best to use them and includes local knowledge about particularly tricky or turbulent passes in the Salish Sea.
Tide predictions give the vertical height of the tide above or below the charted depth of a particular area. For example, if Ports and Passes predicts the high water for a specific area on the day you arrive will be 13 feet, the total predicted depth would be the charted depth plus 13 feet. Similarly, if the predicted low water is 1.3 feet, it would be the charted depth plus 1.3 feet. (And yes, in the case of a minus tide, such as -1.3 feet, you would subtract that from the charted depth.)
Why is it important to know this? It can affect how much anchor chain you need to put out and whether you will risk running aground in shallow spot. I’ve heard of more than a few sailors who have hit bottom even while tied up to a Washington State Marine Park mooring ball.
Understanding current predictions
Current predictions give the max speed of the current during flood or ebb (represented as +/-) as well as when to expect slack.
It’s important to consider which direction you want to go and which direction the water is flowing when evaluating these current predictions. Here’s our local example: In Puget Sound, you generally want to ride to the flood south and the ebb north. On the other side of the Strait, in the San Juans, you generally want to ride the ebb south and the flood north.
And don’t forget the weather!
In addition to minding tides and currents, note where the wind is coming from and where there are known tide rips along your journey. Wind against current can result in large, short and steep waves that aren’t much fun to sail through.
This recently happened when we departed Port Townsend in time to ride the flood south to Seattle and were greeted with 25+ knots of southerly wind right on the nose. With wind opposing current, we slogged our way through confused seas and at times saw our speed over ground drop to 3.5 knots. Our trip was slower than we were expecting and rather uncomfortable.
That’s the thing about sailing, though; you can’t control everything. But timing your voyage with tides and currents in mind certainly helps.
Blake Island State Marine Park is a tiny island in the middle of the busiest part of Puget Sound. Just an hour by sailboat from Seattle, and with Bremerton to the west, it feels both primitive and developed. Which makes sense, if you consider its history.
I rarely miss living in a house. Not even when washing the dishes by hand, not even when lugging our laundry to a laundromat and not even when trying to cram my jacket in a hanging locker filled with spare line and two toolboxes.
Now is the time—the holidays—I miss living in a house. Christmas has always been a big deal in my family, and I carried on that tradition when I had kids. We always had cookies (so many), gifts (too much) and gobs of decor.
This is the first year we are spending Christmas on our sailboat. Living in such a small space that rocks and rolls with the waves means we need to forgo some of those longtime traditions and create some new ones.
We’ve been sailing as a family for three years, but until this last year, my son showed very little interest in being anything more than a passenger.
During passages (in our case, a day or two of sailing in Puget Sound to get from one gunkhole to the next), we had to demand he leave the cabin and come topside. We gave him “jobs,” like searching the water for sea life, or rules, like any eating had to happen in the cockpit while we were underway. He complied, but usually would cry boredom at some point and beg to go back into the cabin with a book.
Like many families in the U.S., our school year looks a lot different than it has in years past.
Gone are the days of getting up at 6:30 a.m. and rushing to eat, get dressed and in the car in time for school.
Instead, the kids get up when they get up. After breakfast, they usually head outside for some vitamin D and fresh air.
Once back inside, they don’t head to desks or any sort of designated learning space. Instead, we compare their schedules with my husband’s calls for work and figure out who needs to use the one table we have first. Some days, the kids don’t even crack the computer and we spend most of our time outside.
Wouldn’t it be great if anchoring always was as serene as it looks in the pictures?
Alas, anyone sailboat cruising for awhile eventually will find themselves anchored in a storm. Wicked weather is part of the cruising life; some storms are predicted well in advance, allowing sailors to change their voyaging plans or seek shelter in a well-protected marina. Other times, storms are a surprise.
That’s what happened to us recently. We first got word that weather was coming from a sweet couple paddling by our boat after we had dropped our anchor in Liberty Bay outside of Poulsbo, Wa.
Cruise the web for cruising families. You’ll see some differences: large families of four kids or more, sailing on a large catamaran; small families with a single kid, voyaging the world on a boat not much bigger than a daysailer.
They cruise in Fiji, Australia, Mexico, the Med, northern Europe and along both coasts of the United States.
In most cases, cruising families are made up of two married or committed parents and the children they have had together. And it makes sense. Balancing a weather-dependent cruising schedule with parenting plans, custody arrangements and divorce decrees requiring travel notifications is a formidable challenge indeed.
Our family has to manage all of those factors. My kids are from my first marriage. My husband is their step-father. Our boat is in Puget Sound and my kids’ dad, J, is in Portland. We have a 50-50 parenting plan.
As I write this, I am sitting on the back porch of my childhood home in Hutchinson, Kansas. I am supposed to be on Polaris with my husband and kids, cruising South Puget Sound.
But I got a text from my mom a little more than a month ago that she had been feeling short of breath and unable to even take a quick walk around the neighborhood. She was going to the doctor to see what was causing it.
The flood brought us to Sucia Island, pushing our speed over ground to 9 kts for most of our trip north.
Our goal was to grab a mooring buoy in Fox Cove. It’s a smaller and slightly more exposed anchorage near Sucia Island, but the forecast for the next few days was sunny and very light wind.
At high tide, Little Sucia—the tiny rocky island just a few hundred feet away from Sucia—works with its sister island to create a south entrance to Fox Cove. It’s a deceptive welcome that hides the abundance of rocks lurking just under the surface. We opted to round Little Sucia instead and entered from the west side of the cove.
