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We spent 4 nights over New Years at our Y.C. outstation. We had a pleasant
time, weather here in the Portland, OR area was cloudy with sunny periods,
occasional drizzle and cold at night (about 35 degrees). Most of the New
Years action was down at another vessel on the dock, which had a TV
satellite hookup and everyone around here is football nuts, except Debbie
and I. We'd rather read and snooze and go for walks.
So Monday dawns cold a very foggy. As we had a quiet New Year my head is
relatively clear and painless for a change. After hanging around until
about 11:00 AM waiting for a break in the fog, we decided to head home
anyway. We've got radar and we've got our great navigation software running
and we feel pretty confident that we can get there.
"There" is about 15 miles up the Columbia river to the City of Portland.
The worries are that we are in a suddenly narrow seeming river, with a lot
of small boats out sturgeon fishing and, as we discovered, some very large
freighters plowing their 15 kts progress up and down the river. We know
that, as we get closer to Portland, the traffic will increase with tugs,
barges and other pleasure vessels.
The fun began as soon as we cleared the Outstation docks. After about 20
feet, we lost all sight of land. Now we're in this cold glaring white bowl
creeping towards the entrance into the Columbia River. The radar is
sweeping away but even so it's a little nerve-wracking. A fellow boater who
was going to follow us as they have no radar, chickened out in the first
hundred feet and turned back. That was probably wise because if they had
lost sight of us, they really would have been completely lost.
So we creep out into the Columbia absolutely blind. Debbie is sitting on
the foredeck with her intercom and I am monitoring 2 radios, the intercom,
the radar and the computer. Then we hear, far away, the distant echoes of a
large ship's foghorn, sounding the automatic blast as the come up the river
behind us. I still can't see them on radar, but the sound of that horn gets
louder and louder... man they really move. It's unnerving. Then I see the
blob on the radar about 1 mile and closing fast, so we hug what we hope is
the edge of the navigable channel (according to the computer) and watch the
blob come up on us. Louder and louder, it's like a train in the middle of
the night. The radar shows them right beside us but I still cannot see the
ship. I have both salon doors open and I can hear the propeller and water
noise from their passage.
Then Debbie has a great idea. She yells, let's tuck in behind this ship, we
can run fast and she will clear our passage. Debbie claims that she can
just see the darker mass of the ship against the fog, I still cannot see it.
Oh well! So I run the throttles up to 3000 RPM and soon we're hurtling
through 0 visibility at about 18 kts, trying to catch the freighter which
has since disappeared in the mists but which I can still see at 1/4 mile on
the radar.
Racing through the fog with zero visibility is a scary business. At least I
know that we are in mid-channel and that there is a large blob moving ahead
of us to clear the way. We keep closing on the stern of the freighter,
we're being kicked around in her wake, but we still cannot see it. The 2
blobs on the radar representing us and the freighter, are now one blob when
Debbie reports she can see the stern of the freighter and we should slow
down! Now I can see it and she's right! We're at about 100 feet and
closing fast on that big nasty propeller.
The rest of the trip was a game of slowing down a little, losing sight of
the freighter, speeding up again and just getting the dark mass in view. I
never did match the speed.
As we reached Portland harbor the freighter began to slow and soon we had to
decide whether to pass or not. I called the freighter pilot on 13 and asked
his intentions as I did not want to pull up beside him just as he decided to
make a turn. He laughed and said that they had been watching us on their
radar doing the yo-yo maneuver close behind them. He mentioned that they
had almost run down a pleasure boater farther down the river.
The fog was slowly lifting and we were fortunate to be able to transit
Portland Harbor with about 1/4 mile visibility which is a major improvement
over no visibility and we arrived safely in our boathouse. An exciting end
to a rather slow weekend.
Joe & Debbie Engel
Marine Computer Services & JRE Consulting, Inc.
MV Freda Fly - 40' Tollycraft Tri-cabin
Portland, OR
