Lucia Delivery – Leg 2: Astoria to Anacortes
The second leg of Lucia’s journey northbound took us from Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River to Anacortes in the San Juan Islands. We had a different crew this time.
We made this 400 mile journey over three days leaving (very) late Thursday night. We had planned to cross the Columbia river bar during optimum conditions at 3-4AM but when we arrived in Astoria at 11pm it was a dead, glassy calm. Even though the river was ebbing hard we decided tranquility always wins so we flushed out over the bar at close to 8 knots with our speed plus the water and in a few short hours were in the open ocean. This calm more or less lasted our entire journey and the crew was happy to not have any mishaps but a little disappointed all around that there were only a few hours of sailing in a 3 day journey. Due to our speedy departure from Astoria we arrived in Anacortes about 10 hours early which meant we could catch the Saturday afternoon train instead of waiting until Sunday morning. After some heroics with the life raft we boarded the Amtrak and shot home like a rocket.