My father, Humboldt, and I had a bad feeling the moment we first saw that catamaran tied up at the dock at the Columbia River Marina. We stood on the dock shaking our heads. We’d just flown into Portland International Airport and headed straight to the marina. My father had a lifelong involvement on the sea, and a reputation for knowing the West Coast ports and waterways. For years, brokers and private yacht owners had sought him out to deliver vessels. I occasionally joined him as a deck hand. The yacht broker that had contracted Humboldt, to deliver the catamaran down the coast to California had said, “It’s a fifty-seven-foot, blue water catamaran with twin diesel engines. An offshore boat.”
That all sounded good on paper, but the boat didn’t look like an offshore boat, at least not for the North Pacific Ocean. Maybe for inland waters. It was a Carri-Craft, Blue-Water 57, made of fiberglass, with a shallow draft, wide beam, a square stern, and large sliding glass windows like you’d see in a Winnebago. The back deck had a big sliding glass door, the type that usually led to an outdoor patio in a backyard. The keyword we were tossing around that day on the dock was Blue Water, which in conversation over the phone with the broker, failed to clarify that it was a capitalized word, a product name. A true, blue water vessel tends to describe an around the world type, offshore vessel.
“What do you think?” my dad had asked me. Not that I was an expert, but he was just stalling for time, making up his mind if he wanted to take this thing out across the Columbia River Bar and into the open ocean, or not. He realized the broker had exaggerated the boat’s capabilities, probably to lure him into the delivery. “We can just go back to the airport and fly home,” he added.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t look like a very good sea boat.”
My father had schooled me over the years about what made a good sea boat. He’d run Navy towboats, offshore commercial fishing vessels, and operated the Humboldt Bay bar pilot boat. Those boats were all made of steel or heavy two-inch-thick planks, with reinforced bows, deep drafts, tons of low centered ballast, maybe a tapered stern, small reinforced thick windows, and doors that you could batten down, watertight.
The Carri Craft was the opposite of all those points. That big sliding glass door at the stern deck offered a nice view, but looked like it would implode with the first wave over the stern. The shallow draft catamaran was also very tall, with a top-heavy flying bridge over the wheelhouse. I don’t think it had an ounce of ballast in it. It was light construction, built like a houseboat, with large sliding aluminum frame windows down each side of the elongated cabin. It would be a very comfortable boat for a river or inland waters.
Another few minutes of indecision between us, then Humboldt said, “What the heck. Let’s go.” I agreed. Down the gang plank we went.
We had a day to gather provisions and familiarize ourselves with the boat. I could see the concern in my dad’s mind as he looked over the gear aboard the catamaran and surveyed the general construction of the boat. This was not the type of sea boat he was accustomed to. We bought enough provisions for a week and later that first day, my father came back to the dock with about sixty feet of heavy line and two used light truck tires.
“What’s that for?” I asked. I’d never seen him bring tires onto a boat before.
“In case it gets rough,” he’d said, “We’ll drag them behind the stern.” He didn’t elaborate any more than that. I thought he was just being over prepared.
Portland marinas along the Columbia River with Mt. Hood to the east – Photo by Rick Urban
On day two, in the morning, we saw a sharply dressed, middle-aged woman making her way down the pier with a suitcase. She looked a bit awkward, but stylish. She had on a nice flowery dress, jewelry, dark glasses, and a sun hat. She came aboard the boat.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Dolores. This is my boat. I decided to fly up from California and ride with you down the coast. Did the broker tell you I was coming? It was kind of last minute.”
“No, he didn’t mention it,” my father said somewhat doubtful. I could tell he wasn’t pleased to have the owner aboard, especially when she confessed to knowing nothing about boats or having been out in the ocean before.
You could tell immediately that Dolores was comfortable in front of people and was proud of her new catamaran. She said that she looked forward to having it in the Sacramento River where she could entertain aboard it. She’d always wanted a boat. She had built a couple businesses and now owned a video store in Sacramento and that’s where she spent most of her time. She also added that there was some urgency on the trip. She wanted to be in Sacramento in four days. My mind raced ahead to the more than 700 nautical miles of rivers, reefs and open ocean ahead of us and I thought it presumptuous to assume a four-day journey.
Dolores went to the master stateroom and placed her suitcase on the bed, letting us know that that was her spot. If she noticed my father’s seabag and charts already there, she didn’t mention it. My father had to remove his things from the master stateroom and go to a small guest cabin. I would sleep on the big chesterfield in the aft salon. I think at that point my father regretted ever stepping foot on this boat. But this was just the beginning.
*****
The first sixty miles of the trip were smooth, motoring down the Columbia River to Astoria, gliding along with the current at 14 knots. Mount Hood towered majestically above the river to the east and an equally snowcapped Mount St. Helens stood to the northeast. This was before St. Helens erupted and blew it’s top off in 1980, smothering Portland in volcanic dust. We met a couple ocean going freighters and a tow boat with an empty grain barge headed upriver. The tow boats could navigate up the Columbia and Snake Rivers, almost 500 miles, all the way into Idaho. Scores of smaller sailboats and pleasure boats dotted the channel as we moved toward Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River.
Dolores had noticed the used, light truck tires and coiled lines on the stern deck and asked what that was for? She thought it cluttered up the sitting area where she had a lounge chair. She sat in the sun and enjoyed the smooth ride down the river. She asked again, how fast we could get her boat to San Francisco Bay and up the delta to Sacramento? She wanted to be home by Tuesday. This was Friday afternoon.
My father tried to politely, but realistically, brush off her timeline, saying, “We’ll see how the conditions are. I’m not sure about Tuesday.”
“This boat’s fast enough to get us there by then,” Dolores countered, noting that she’d done the math on the 700-mile voyage, factoring in the boat’s 12-14 knot cruising speed and how much fuel it held. She was good with numbers. She had it figured out, theoretically.
My father lacked patience at times on the sea. That quickly became apparent having an owner like Dolores aboard. He didn’t call her a plow jockey, but that was one of his off handed slights that he occasionally leveled at country people who didn’t know the ocean, which was ironic because his father-in-law had been a dairy farmer in the Sacramento River Valley. I could see that he wasn’t going to let Dolores have the last word on anything regarding the boat, which was probably his mistake at the outset.
“We’ll see how the conditions are,” he repeated. “This boat could be dangerous if the seas are up.”
Dolores, proud of her expensive boat, took the bait. “Well, if Christopher Columbus could make it across the Atlantic 500 years ago, this boat will definitely make it to California!”
“Columbus had a better boat,” Humboldt added, matter of fact, further annoying Dolores.
*****
Humboldt in the Merchant Marine in Japan in 1938; He ran U.S. Navy towboats on the West Coast in WW2 – Gates Family Collection
Usually, on these yacht deliveries, the owners never traveled with you. Over the years, Humboldt had delivered scores of boats, up and down the West Coast. Some of the yachts came from Southern California and San Francisco, some from Canada going south. He would run the southern California boats up the coast to Puget Sound and British Columbia where the owners would fly in and cruise for a few weeks. Then he would return the boat to the owner’s home port. The owners were never aboard. The transit took too much time. The weather and seas were unpredictable, and the passage could be more than a thousand miles and take more than a week, depending on weather.
Several West Coast headlands in Washington, Oregon, and California jut far out into the Pacific Ocean, forming extremely volatile sea environments, mixing currents, winds, fog, and reefs. On some trips you could get stuck in a port and need to wait out foul weather until the seas laid down and you could resume passage around these headlands. On this trip, we’d be navigating Cape Blanco in southern Oregon and Cape Mendocino in northern California, two notorious wind and reef infested environments.
Some of the yacht deliveries that Humboldt had done in his career were exceptional boats. They were offshore sea boats, steel hulls, more than sixty feet long, owned by regional executives from the timber, energy, and construction industries. They were true, blue water vessels. Dolores’s boat wasn’t in that category. It was more of a houseboat than a yacht and she had no savvy about the sea, yet she wanted us in San Francisco Bay, no later than Tuesday.
Humboldt didn’t think like that, at all. He always believed that you operated around ocean conditions and within the limitations of your vessel. This wasn’t a train track with a schedule. Since WW2, my father had owned six commercial fishing boats, mostly single operator salmon trollers. One, the Verona, had caught fire and sunk close to the beach. He swam to shore. Before that, back in 1935, when Humboldt was a sea scout, he and his best friend, Hank O’Brien, had to swim to the beach at midnight in a windstorm after rolling Humboldt’s sailboat – the Cachelot – near the Humboldt Bay harbor entrance. Hank, never made it to shore that night. They never found him.
Wikimedia Commons – KDS444
As I think back to that Blue Water catamaran trip, I think we were lucky to get across the Columbia River Bar without incident. We’d tied up for the night in Astoria and set out early the next morning when the tide was at flood stage, which would be smoother than an ebb tide. The swells that morning on the bar were mild to moderate, they weren’t steep and there was no white water on their tops, or rogue waves in their midst.
The Columbia Bar crossing is notorious because it covers six miles of undulating exposure to unpredictable standing waves, winds, currents, river, and tidal flows. Since Captain Robert Gray first sailed across the entrance in 1792, some 2000 vessels have perished and over 700 people lost their lives on that stretch of water.
I was thankful when we reached the sea buoy mid-Saturday morning and made the portside turn for Newport, a town on Yaquina Bay, 115 miles to the south. That first day on the ocean was an uneventful, calm day at sea, of just jogging down the coast, passing some smaller headlands every few hours, which would unveil a new vista to the south of the rocky, Oregon Coastline. The growl of the twin diesels added an ambience of sound to the passage. Most the day I was outside on the flying bridge, enjoying the sun and 20-mile panoramas.
*****
Later, Humboldt and I were sitting in a bar on the Newport waterfront having a beer, talking about the trip. The run down the northern Oregon coast had taken about 10 hours and we’d crossed the Yaquina Bay entrance, another jetty lined corridor, about six o’clock in the evening, with a couple hours daylight remaining. We’d tied the boat up at a pier after refueling. My father always like to have plenty of fuel onboard in case an entrance was closed by sea conditions, and you had to run further along the coast to find safe harbor access. Dolores stayed on the boat. She hadn’t asked where we were going.
As we sat there in the bar, Humboldt was talking about getting an early start out of Newport at sunrise the next morning for the next 100 nautical mile leg of the trip, around Cape Perpetua, to Coos Bay, the largest seaport in southern Oregon. It sounded like a good plan. I was watching the sunset sipping my beer when Dolores found us at the bar.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, with a little too much edge on her voice. “When are we leaving?” I got the immediate sense that she thought we were going to shove off from Newport in the dark and run all night to Coos Bay. I was wrong. She thought we’d shove off and run all night and into the next day to Brookings, the last port town in Oregon, almost 170 miles south. That was at the outer range of the boat’s fuel capacity.
My father casually replied that we were going to stay tied up in Newport and leave at sunrise. He was enjoying his beer up to that point. He didn’t expect pushback. He said he didn’t like running at night close to shore during the spring because of floating logs and debris from the rivers. “You can’t see it at night. And going farther offshore with this boat is not an option,” he’d explained.
“What am I paying you for??” Dolores was frustrated. She didn’t appreciate his subtle digs at how risky her new boat investment was on the ocean. “I told you I need to be in Sacramento for work Tuesday. We need to go. Now.”
My father seldom got overtly mad, but internally, he was undoubtedly having a dialogue about telling this pushy landlubber where to get off and where to stick it. He didn’t say anything. He just calmly stood up and said, “Okay, let’s go.”
Dolores was satisfied as we walked back to the boat.
We crossed back over the Newport Bar at sunset. The weather had started to change. Wind was picking up from the Northwest. We had to run at a slower speed with the waves pushing from behind. At nightfall, everything turned black. The sea. The land. The waves. You could only see the occasional light on the distant shoreline.
The new plan, how Dolores saw it, was to run all Saturday night and into Sunday down to Brookings, get fuel, and continue down the Northern California Coast. By running around the clock, we’d arrive in San Francisco Bay by Monday night, and Sacramento by Tuesday morning, in time for her to go to work. But there were a lot of “what ifs” in between. My father told me he had no intention of following that schedule. He would refuel at Coos Bay, no matter what.
By now, he’d reconciled himself to Dolores’s persistent, no compromise manner, and settled in at the helm, although he told me he still thought it was a mistake to be running at night. He didn’t mention to Dolores that he still planned to refuel at Coos Bay. He and I would take turns running the boat while the other slept. Dolores didn’t have to do anything except watch the clock or take her sea sickness pills.
*****
I tried to doze off on the sofa in the salon. I lay there in the dark, listening to the twin diesels, feeling the sea under the boat, lifting, and pitching the hull unevenly but not dramatically. The engines were right under the floor boards near the rear of the catamaran where I was sleeping.
We had probably run about three hours. I’d fallen asleep.
Then, in the dark of night, about ten o’clock, there was a tremendous crash. The boat rose, shuddered, then fell back awkwardly. Vibrations started pulsing through the hull. The engines immediately came to a dead stop. The props weren’t turning. The seas began throwing the boat around haphazardly. At the sound of the impact, I came out of my slumber, flew off the couch in the darkness, and bolted up to the wheelhouse. Humboldt was working the twin throttles and gearboxes.
“Starboard shaft is damaged,” he stated flatly. “We hit something. Maybe a log.”
He told me to try and keep the boat steady into the northwesterly waves, using the port engine. The wheelhouse was dark except for the dim light of instruments. He was going below to see if we had hull damage or water leaks.
Night seas – Photo by Rick Urban
Dolores appeared in the wheelhouse, worried. She asked what happened?
“Hit a log, maybe a deadhead!” Humboldt said.
He didn’t stop to explain that a deadhead was a submerged log, floating mostly below the surface. He was all business now. He disappeared, headed down into the lower hull and stern engine compartment with a flashlight to check the hull structure and fittings, see if the bilge pumps were activated. He was very agile and could move around quickly in tight spaces.
I’ll give my father credit, he never once told Dolores, “I told you so!!”
We were unable to really see the log at night on the ocean. It could have been a floating pier section, or some other flotsam that had broken loose for that fact, but we went over the top of whatever it was, and the boat’s starboard drive was damaged. We were down to one engine, at night, about 20 miles south of Newport, off the coast of Yachats. The nearest commercial ports that would have repair facilities were Coos Bay farther to the south, or back to Newport. We chose the run back to Newport, it was closer.
Dolores panicked somewhat at the intensity of the event. She wanted to call the Coast Guard. My father said, “No way.” He had a certain pride about taking care of mishaps at sea and he would never call the Coast Guard unless we were sinking or completely disabled. We still had one engine and the hull was intact. We weren’t taking on water. The seas were rough, but not threatening.
Humboldt put the port engine into gear, and we started to move north.
I noticed Dolores was taking some pills. It looked to me like too many pills. Then she passed out on the large sitting area in the wheelhouse. I was concerned, looking out the forward windows at the waves in the night, and glancing back at her, kind of lifeless, lying there on the mattress. I thought about taking her pulse but decided not to. She appeared to be still moving around, though unconsciously.
The boat had a different feel going against the seas. Now, we were running with one engine against the wind in total darkness, at half speed. The short, stubby bow of the catamaran had this broad, flat, angled fiberglass surface panel that linked the two hulls up near the bow. It was a terrible design for the ocean. The wind was strong enough by then to be pushing the waves up from behind, turning the tops of the swells into white water crests. That’s the only thing you could see, the white water coming out of the darkness. The crests appeared to be about five feet higher than the boat’s wheelhouse windows.
If you had too much speed, the wave would hit that flat fiberglass panel linking the two hulls with a head on, dull thud, that shook the whole boat. You had to slow down on each approaching swell. Otherwise, the boat would rise sharply, shudder from the white water hit, then plunge off the backside with a jarring impact. It was a long night. We ran for three hours against the wind and swells in total darkness, at half our cruising speed. We crossed back into Newport harbor well after midnight, limping along on a single engine, returning to the dock.
*****
Cari Craft Blue Water 57 catamaran – Internet photo
Early Sunday morning, Dolores was on the phone and up at the harbor master’s office, looking for somebody to work on the boat. I’ll give her that. She was tenacious and didn’t take no for an answer. She had a very direct manner when she wanted something done. She was probably a good businessperson. I thought good luck finding somebody to come down and fix the drive shaft on a Sunday morning in Newport, Oregon. She had a diver under the boat within two hours. She told him, “I don’t care what it costs, fix the boat.”
The diver and his shop team worked most of Sunday at double wages and by late afternoon, they had the bent drive shaft repaired and the propellor replaced. The boat was ready to go. Dolores no longer insisted that we run all night. I think she was starting to give up on the idea of being in Sacramento by Tuesday morning. She offered to take us out to dinner in Newport.
I was doing okay with Dolores. I wasn’t a lifelong seaman like my father. I had patience and was pretty flexible getting to know people from different walks of life. That evening at dinner we actually had a decent conversation, my father included. We had all been through something a little nerve wracking and dangerous and could now laugh and talk about it.
But the undertone of Dolores’s commanding manner kept resurfacing, now, directed at the waitress, not us. Dolores kept ordering her around; give us more of this, take this away, this wasn’t good. At the end of the dinner, after Dolores paid the bill, my father slipped a larger tip to the waitress and apologized for our employer’s manners. Dolores of course, did not see that exchange.
*****
We departed Newport Harbor on Monday morning at sunrise. The wind driven seas had not diminished overnight. I was running the boat from the flying bridge as we crossed out over the Newport Bar. The sun was just emerging above the coast range to the east. My father was below going over some charts. To my shock, an enormous wave set was building and closing in fast on the channel from the northwest. We were the only boat in the entrance channel at that hour.
I slowed down as the swells steepened and moved toward us. I thought the first wave was going to topple into ground breaker. I braced myself as we shot up the face of the wall of water, teetered at the top momentarily, then dropped hard off its backside. The flat-bottomed fiberglass twin hull made a loud, jarring slap on the water, like an 18-ton bellyflop. My father was on the bridge in a second. The next two waves weren’t as steep.
That was the only startling event during our Monday run down the coast to Coos Bay, almost one hundred miles.
During those long stretches between headlands, we continued to enjoy the vast coastal panoramas to the next major land outcropping. Navigating a long coastal run at sea really forced you to reset your inner time clock. It could take hours to reach the next headland on the southern horizon, jogging along at maybe 12 knots. Mentally, you had to slow down and not anticipate, just immerse yourself in the ocean’s rhythmic ways. My father and I spent most the time together up on the bridge, chatting and enjoying the coastal ride in the sunshine.
We were avoiding Dolores and she was avoiding us, staying below decks in the salon. She still urged us to make the best time possible south. The fewer the stops, the better. After leaving Newport Harbor, my father had broken the news to Dolores that he planned to refuel at Coos Bay and spend the night. She didn’t like it at all. But she’d stopped arguing and settled into our plan, at least that’s what we thought.
*****
Humboldt on the tuna boat at sunrise off the Oregon Coast – Gates Family Collection
The year before, my father and I were off the coast of Oregon, near Coos Bay, delivering a tuna boat from San Francisco to Seattle. That was a more relaxed trip and a much better sea boat. A sixty-five foot, all steel, offshore commercial fishing vessel. We were running up the coast, at times, 50 miles out, cruising in the warmer waters, beyond the chilled coastal current that came down from Alaska and hugged the coastline. The sea life was totally different in that offshore zone. The water was pale, turquoise green and about 70 degrees versus the dark gray-green coastal waters at 50 degrees. In the warmer waters, we saw scores of dolphins, tuna, and sharks all day long. We caught an albacore, and I cooked it in the galley oven.
While we were underway, I’d go to the foredeck, look over the anchor winch at the bow and watch half a dozen dolphins riding the underwater bow wake, surfing the submerged wave, playing with the boat’s momentum, occasionally jumping out of the water. The water was exceptionally clear, without the dense plankton and silt of the coastal waters.
At night, we shut the engines down and just drifted in silence offshore. My father and I sat together out on deck listening to the sea. The ocean could be serene when it was that calm. On the longer trips, one of us was always awake, on watch, for steamers, when we drifted at night. I think my father was most relaxed when he was far offshore. He never drank at sea. When I was born in 1950, he was 100 miles off the California coast fishing tuna by himself. He later heard about my arrival via marine radio.
That night aboard the tuna boat, 50 miles off Coos Bay, I was on deck reading a book under a halo of deck lights powered by a generator deep inside the boat. My father had gone below to get some sleep. The sea was quiet. It was just after midnight. There was no wind.
I slowly became aware that something was watching me. Something very large. It was the enormity of its breathing that caught my attention. Just beyond the illumination of the deck lights, in the darkness, something had silently surfaced on the ocean and was watching the boat and the lights, and me. From the sound of its lungs, it was enormous and likely weighed tons. I never saw what it was. I just listened to its slow, deeply resonating inhale, then a long pause, and a powerful exhale, purging its lungs. I thought it was too far from shore for a sealion. It must have been a whale, attracted by the lights so far offshore.
*****
When we’d shoved off from Coos Bay Tuesday morning, we had another rough ride out over the bar. Dolores remained below decks. The sea’s character had deteriorated overnight. The waves were steep like haystacks on the bar and the boat pounded its way out to the sea buoy. Three miles out, the waves shifted to big, elongated rollers, lifting the boat, and lowering it smoothly into the deep troughs.
But Cape Blanco was ahead, a notorious wind infested, rough water environment. Blanco means white in Spanish. The cape was named by the explorer Martin de Aguilar in 1603, when all he probably saw was white water during his passage almost 400 years before. It was the most western point of Oregon and California and most of Washington. We knew the seas would be considerably wilder down there.
Dolores wanted to know what our next port stop would be. She was thinking Humboldt Bay in California, about 15 hours to the south. My father was thinking Brookings, Oregon, just seven hours away, on the other side of Cape Blanco. Dolores was visibly frustrated at the measured pace my father planned. She disagreed with all the fuel stops. She wanted to run the boat like a car, close to empty and keep moving. Even though she’d given up pushing for all night runs, she wanted a steady 12-15 hours underway. She was a driven person and seemed accustomed to getting her way, even if she didn’t have a clue about the ocean environment around her. But something had changed in her manner. I would later realize that it was the beginning of the end.
*****
Oregon Coast, near Coos Bay, on a rough day – (Photo from The Portland Monthly)
Those big, smooth roller waves started to change noticeably farther down the coast from Coos Bay. First, besides the significant swell running out of the northwest, we started getting hit from the east by counter echo waves, bouncing off rock walls three miles away on the southern Oregon coast and reverberating back out to sea. That counter pressure steepened the northwest swells, almost into standing waves.
Then, as we approached Cape Blanco the winds picked up, taking the tops off the swells as they got steeper. Another big roller lifted our boat’s stern twenty feet and sent us tobogganing down the wave face as it rolled past at twenty knots. I backed off the diesel engines to slow our descent into the trough as my father had instructed me. The weather was clear with visibility at over ten miles, but strong winds were disrupting the waves.
Humboldt was getting uncomfortable with how the boat was handling in the seas. He left me on the bridge at the throttles and went to the stern. He tied a 30-foot line onto each of the two light truck tires that were stacked on the rear deck, fastened the lines to the cleats and heaved the tires off the stern. The lines immediately snapped tight. The tires rode just below the surface, creating a substantial drag against the power of the swells.
Dragging those tires helped keep the stern from broaching on the bigger waves. You could feel it at the helm. The force of the wave hitting the boat, the lift, the acceleration down the wave face, the stubby bow of the catamaran driving downward, starting to dig into the wave trough, with its big square stern rising sharply. Without the drag of the tires and backing off the throttles, the boat would likely nosedive, broach, and possibly capsize in the trough.
Dolores remained below in her stateroom. She’d been taking motion sickness pills.
The problem with the Carri Craft was that it wasn’t a true catamaran. My father had seen it in an instant at the Portland marina. It had two hulls at the bow, but the two hulls almost immediately joined near the bow and transitioned into a mono-hull square stern, like a sport cruiser. It was difficult to control in seas. If it had been a true double hulled cat, the passage would likely have been uneventful.
The trip around Cape Blanco was a rough ride and demanded concentration on powering the diesels down and correcting the sway of the long shallow fiberglass hull. Dragging the tires proved invaluable. It took us about three hours to navigate the white waters of Blanco. We pulled into Brookings Harbor early afternoon.
Dolores fired us on the spot.
She accused my father of incompetence and said she wouldn’t pay him. He never asked for money upfront. She said she’d pay me. Humboldt gathered his things, slightly offended at being fired. Nobody had ever fired him from sea duties before. Ever. Not in the Sea Scouts, the Merchant Marine, the Bering Sea fishing fleet, the U.S. Navy, aboard a dozen commercial fishing boats, the bar pilot boat and tow boats of Humboldt Bay, or any boat he’d ever delivered along the entire West Coast.
He was a little comical at first, getting his seabag, packing up his charts, in his wiry manner of moving about, cursing Dolores under his breath, saying stuff like, she shouldn’t even have a boat, glad we’re off this death trap, didn’t want to do this anyway, she’ll probably sink the thing, etc.
Then we walked up the dock and had lunch at a waterfront cafe. We also had a good laugh at being fired by Dolores. It would be different to be fired by somebody who knew what they were doing.
About half an hour later, a heavy-set man in coveralls came up and said he had been hired by Dolores to take the boat the rest the way to Sacramento. He wanted to know if he needed charts and where the dipsticks were located, on the diesels for checking the oil? We were a bit taken back, but it added to the humor. My father advised him that he might ask for cash up front. We later caught a Greyhound bus home from Brookings and continued recounting the moments, about Dolores, the Carri Craft, and the whole experience.
In the end, Dolores made it to Sacramento. One of my father’s waterfront connections in Noyo Harbor at Fort Bragg, California later told him that Dolores and her Blue Water catamaran had come into the harbor on fumes, almost running out of fuel at sea. She’d been lucky that day that the tiny entrance was even passable. But true to her word, Dolores eventually sent me a check in the mail and thank you note for my services. She never paid my father.