My sister asked why do you guys always seem to sail at night?

It's a good question.

Sailing at night doesn't make a lot of sense. We have had no moon so visibility is near zero. Bombing along at six or seven knots, the first indication that there is a whale in front of us will be a loud crash. Fish boats roam around without any AIS indicating their position, heading, speed, and closest point of approach. Mostly they seem to want to hunt us down and run us over. There are dozens of different ways to get in a lot of trouble in hurry. It would be much better to sail in the daytime.

So why night?

It's really a problem with the way they designed the west coast of the US. They didn't build it with ports conveniently spaced 60 miles apart. Often we want to go 100 miles or more. Often a distance that cannot be covered in a day:

Neah Bay to Astoria: 153 miles
Astoria to Newport: 115 miles
Newport to Coos Bay: 92 miles
Coos Bay to Eureka: 180 miles
Eureka to San Francisco: 232 miles

And those aren't wimpy statute miles of 5280 feet. We're talking real nautical miles: 6076 feet long!

A few of those distances we could fit into daylight hours if we pushed hard, but there is another wrinkle. The way they designed the coast, they put bars in front of the ports. Imagine that. "Oh so boats will come in here. Let's put this shallow lump of sand across the entrance and then when the water flows out of the bay/river in a big ebb tide opposing the strong winds there will be steep, dangerous, breaking seas. What fun!" At the Columbia River bar, those seas can pile up to 60 feet high and there are 2000 vessels littered around the seabed there. Every port has a memorial to their lost mariners. The coast guard controls the bar and will close it in rough conditions. So we can plan on arriving at Coos Bay in 15 hours, but there is no guarantee that we can get into Coos Bay when we get there.

The best bar conditions tend to be at the end of the flood tide. So we try to time the arrival for that.

Once all the math is done, calculating wind speeds, wave heights, distances travelled, exit time, entrance times it turns out it's best to leave when the bar is happy and arrive at the next bar when it is happy. Then we are happy sailors. And oh yeah, it turns out we end up sailing in the middle of the night.

The conventional wisdom is that all of that is too much trouble and a lot of people go from Cape Flattery to San Francisco non-stop in 6 days and 6 nights and just skip the entire coasts of Washington, Oregon, and Northern California.

That's cool too, but we are enjoying our coastal explorations.

We have maybe another overnight or two between here and San Diego, but we are getting closer to the section of coast where they space the ports closer together and don't put as many bars in front of them. So it will be more day sailing the rest of the way.

In the meantime, I hold the belief that whales pop up in front of us all day long and we steer around them, but at night they hold their breath and stay below the surface.