The Transit

We found Corsair in Blaine, a town right on the Canadian boarder, about three hours north of Tacoma by highway and about 110 nautical miles north by sailboat. Transiting her down here in the middle of winter took some careful course plotting, a hardy and understanding first mate (aka wife), and a bit of luck with the weather. 

We targeted President's Day weekend as we both had three consecutive days off. When we did the sea trial, it seemed the engine could only manage a cruising speed of about 4 knots. Since we had a hard deadline, we plotted the course assuming we would be motoring the whole way, and only sailing if the winds were particularly favorable. We also wanted to spend the nights only in marinas so we could count on shore-powered heat and ready assistance if something went wrong with an unfamiliar boat. 

The days are pretty short around here this time of year, and we had no interest in trying to navigate after dark. Even leaving at sunrise and going until sunset gave us only 10 hours of travel time every day. The charts indicated we would luck out with favorable tides and currents most of the way, but even then the trip plotted out to be about 3.5 days. We figured we would have to leave the boat at a marina in Seattle and go back to pick her up and finish the transit the following weekend. 

As it turned out however, the knot meter reads under speed by a knot, the currents gave us even more of a boost than predicted and we not only had great (even sunny ) weather for this time of year, but we got a strong following wind on the last day. We averaged just over 6 knots for most of the course, and so in the end we were able to make it all the way to Tacoma in a just the 3 days - and with plenty of daylight to spare.

The transit was a blast, presented a few challenges and taught us a lot about the boat. I'll put the actual float plan and some entries from the log in a subsequent post, but for the time being here's a sequence of shots from the trip...