Day 3: Oregon again

It has occurred to me that I've been titling each day according to land borders that are entirely theoretical constructs to us right now. I'm fairly sure I could see some mountains at one point yesterday but otherwise we can't see the coast.

Day 3 has been the best kind of passage day - uneventful. It was sunny except a bit of mist overnight. There has been a nice amount of wind. It is still very rolly, enough so that I have been woken up from a dead sleep slightly in the air from a bad side wave.

Other than a fishing boat that kept trying to dance with us, we've seen almost no traffic. By the Strait of Juan de Fuca and by the Columbia River we say a lot of shipping traffic and last night we were surrounded by tuna boats but today it has mostly been just us out here.

Marge* has been steering since we left the coast of Vancouver Island and so our job is to navigate, keep an eye on the systems of the boat for breakage, tweak Marge or the sails, watch for other boats, download and listen to the weather 4 or so times per day, take care of our bodies, and enjoy. A mellow day on all of those fronts so for the first time this passage, I read a book during part of one of my watches.

NUTS & BOLTS
Route: Still angling slightly offshore to position ourselves outside of the forecast 35 knot winds in a few days in N CA.
Conditions: NW wind in the teens. Swell is slightly more North than West but mostly still a roll factory. Finally reaching all day as we had expected to do from the outset.
Most common sail plan: Double reefed main and a scrap of genoa.
Mileage: 122 nm sailed in 24 hours with an average speed of 5.1 knots.

*Marge is our nickname for our Hydrovane windvane whose tall blue sail reminds us of Marge Simpson's hair.