Sail Asia, Central & Western District (2026)

16/08/2026

Day 33 - Mile 4774

It was a beautiful day and an uneventful motor up the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the customs dock at Victoria on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. Plenty of people out in their boats on the way. Strong currents at a few spots along the way as high as 6 knots where waterways met.

Float planes are a big part of the local transportation network and they land at Victoria Harbor. I have never shared the water with airplanes, so that was a new one.

The customs procedure is more straightforward than I expected. There is a phone booth on the customs dock that rings directly to the regional customs office and in many cases for a boat visiting from the US for a day, there is a short phone interview and you are sent on your way. In my case, being away for so long, by myself, and admitting to having some meat and vegetables on board, three customs agents came to have a chat but were very professional and courteous.

Afterwards I went directly across the bay to the city marina where I had made a reservation, met a bunch of friendly cruisiers at the dock and had a finger of scotch to celebrate my arrival.

15/08/2026

Day 32 (2) - Mile 4720

The wind picked up a little bit to 12 or so knots for a couple of hours after dark and I was making some ground at 4 knots. I hoped that this last gasp was going to get me over the line 17 miles away but it wasn’t to be. There were a few slow days at the very start of the trip and in the middle, but now with land in sight hours ago the lack of speed and progress is visible and land is… right… there… and not getting any closer very quickly.

It was a calm, quiet night, finally with some good stars after a lot of overcast nights on the trip. As the outlet for a major shipping port like Seattle, I expected the Juan de Fuca Strait would be thick with shipping vessels coming and going. There was more radio activity and a few ships and passenger ferries during the day, but the strait is 10-12 miles wide with the shipping lanes right in the middle, so there were a few vessels in sight in the distance but no issues with dangerous traffic. And the low hills and trees around felt a lot more rural than Singapore, Hong Kong, or Yokohama.

I was too close to land and inshore traffic (that never appeared) to feel comfortable sleeping. Around 4am local time, drifting in the gloam in a light fog and looking at slatting sails, I was about 6 miles from my lighthouse line having covered 10 miles in 6 hours, 140 miles in 48 hours. For a few hours there wasn’t wind to keep a steady course and when the tide turned I started drifting backwards. With no wind forecast for another 12 or 13 hours, I finally conceded to Mother Nature and started the engine. Of course I regretted it a little later but enough was enough!

I passed my line under motor an hour or so later and enjoyed a clear sunrise over the logging forests of Vancouver Island. From here I had about 60 miles to go the customs dock at Victoria.

12/08/2026

What’s the rush?

11/08/2026

Day 32 (1) - Mile 4720

Land ho! Finally in the middle of the day the clouds lifted and I could see Vancouver Island from 17 miles away. I had some light but steady wind overnight making a blazing 4 knots of speed over ground, but most of the day was spent drifting along with hardly any wind and only a gentle push from the swell.

I had some birds resting in the water keeping me company through the day. In the afternoon I replaced the navigation lights on the bow that had been damaged or wires corroded from bashing into waves earlier in the trip, and I wanted to have perfectly bright lights for what I thought would be a nighttime trip through a crowded Juan de Fuca Strait to Victoria.

My goal from the start was to sail from the lighthouse outside Yokohama to the longitude of Cape Flattery Lighthouse at the northwest corner of Washington State without using the engine at all for propulsion. For the last couple of days I have been slowly, stubbornly, sailing with undersized sails and light wind behind me. In 12 hours during the day I made 27 miles, a distance I would have covered in 2.5-3 hours when we were trucking along in the middle of the Pacific.

My dad could also be stubborn, in the best way, and I thought about him as I approached land. He would sometimes wax lyrical about the virtues of a good BLT sandwich and I had frozen meat and bacon left that I had to use or be confiscated by Customs on arrival, so I had a big BLT for lunch in his honor.

I had just missed my brother and his family who happened to be visiting Washington and Vancouver in the week or two leading up to my arrival. While that was disappointing and he graciously offered to change his plans and wait for me while I motored to make it to port, it was a big ask and there was also a part of me that was happy to have a slow decompression and reluctant to rush the last miles of the trip.

09/08/2026

Day 31 - Mile 4661

Starlink - miraculous innovation or the loss of solitude and reflection at sea?

Just a year or two ago, when I was offshore I had very little connection to life ashore. Iridium satellite data or voice was (and still is) painfully expensive. A few voice minutes set aside for an emergency, and a data link good enough for 128-character text messages or weather and routing forecasts that took 20 minutes to download. Even that was a luxury compared to a few years previous. With the arrival of Starlink suddenly we have the potential of high speed internet at practically every corner of the globe, streaming high def video and chat, scrolling and news updates to our hearts’ content, uninterrupted contact with friends and family.

I appreciate these things. I appreciate accurate weather forecasts and updates whenever boredom or uncertainty strike. I appreciate being able to look up a manual, an instructional video or search for information and knowledge to get out of a jam, seasoning ideas for the evening’s meal. Words of encouragement from loved ones. I do feel safer and better prepared having a pocketful of resources that were unimaginable 5 or 10 years ago. But on starting a solo ocean passage I probably expected more of a disconnect from normal life. More time reading, pondering, staring at the sea, talking to the birds like the explorers of 50 or 100 years ago. Part of the challenge was to be the isolation and relying only on my own resolve, wits, and experience.

Of course the satellite dish can be turned off or locked in a drawer. It is only a matter of self control, right? But like having GPS, an emergency beacon, or long-range radio, easy communication has changed the flavor of life at sea for better and for worse. For trips in the future I will think more carefully about boundaries, limits, and the experience that I want to have in my escape from the usual day-to-day life.

continued…

07/08/2026

Day 30 - Mile 4574

Unlike a fully crewed and/or racing boat, maneuvers like gybes and sail changes are slower and I make them more deliberately while sailing alone. In general I try to keep things to one or two moving parts at a time to keep control and minimize the chances of a screwup. Here I’m dousing and stowing the storm jib (5x speed) earlier in the trip.

It’s warmer and it has been a beautiful and relaxing day with a gentle following swell but the slowdown has arrived. Fluky wind from multiple directions and at times I’ve had to follow the wind 30 degrees off of the direction I want to go. Occasionally I have good wind for 15-30 minutes while passing under clouds with good boat speed but then slowing again to 1 to 3 knots. By the end of the day, 24hr mileage run has fallen as low as 80 miles per day for the first time since the first days of the trip.

06/08/2026

Day 29 - Mile 4479

Here’s a run through of some of the electronic tools I have at the navigation station for monitoring traffic, weather, and environment. During a quick check between naps I might just look at ships/nets on AIS (Automatic Identification System) and radar, and several times a day I look at weather forecasts and suggested routing based on multiple weather models.

First is the chartplotter, a multiuse display for charts, radar, and ‘instruments’ - sensors for wind speed and direction, boat speed, depth, water temperature, and barometer. In the clip I look on the electronic chart at a ship about 17 miles away. Then switch to the radar mode to zoom in on the same ship. Then a page I have customized to show indicators of boat speed and direction, wind speed and direction, gps coordinates, time, the lifetime trip meter of the unit, etc.

Passing over the primary autopilot control keypad, next is a display, scrolling through wind speed and direction over the previous 30 minutes, depth, location/time/course/speed, speed/tide, autopilot control screen, and a couple of screens showing wind speed/direction. To the right is the backup autopilot display and control, a completely separate system and network for redundancy.

On the iPad I look at the graphical routes suggested by and overlaid on six weather models (downloaded several times a day over starlink), followed by the numerical and then graphical representations of that same information. This tells me more precisely what I might expect in terms of timing, wind speed and direction, temperature, boat speeds, wave heights, estimated time and distance remaining, etc.

Last is checking other vessels and my historical actual route on a new mini computer with TimeZero navigation software that I installed just before leaving Japan. This is networked with the other gear to show all of the same data in a different form and in a larger format that I can view on the big screen. It also logs all of this data plus my course in a file that I can review and save for later.

continued…

05/08/2026

Day 28 - Mile 4346

I sat outside on the aft deck in the fair but cool weather yesterday to try to make up for the amount of time I have spent inside on this trip.

Today the fresh wind has come in for one last blast, up to 30 knots of breeze and bigger seas, maybe 2.5-3 meters (8-10ft) on the beam. I reefed the main a bit more and the small, ugly yankee is doing fine. Cold, gray and rainy all day with a big shift in wind direction before slowly going back over the next day or two. Unfortunately it looks like the wind will continue to fall for my final few days approaching land.

04/08/2026

Day 27 - Mile 4181

Logically you know that the gimballed stove is going to do its job every time, but it’s always a little bit of a surprise when it does. I’ve been trying to mostly eat my usual diet instead of just rice and curries or dehydrated food like a lot of people do offshore. It can be a little tricky to stand in place to cook depending on the sea state though Daybreak has a sensible, narrow galley to brace yourself unlike a lot of more modern boats.

On the roughest days early on when I didn’t have much appetite or patience for cooking I would have a big cup noodles or these chalky, shortbread-like ‘Caloriemate’ Japanese meal replacement bars that don’t sound very appetizing but aren’t bad at all with a coffee or tea. 400 calories per pack and a choice of chocolate, vanilla, ‘fruit’ (citrusy), cheese (goes down a lot easier when you imagine it translates to ‘strawberry’), and maple.

The wind fell a little bit today to 16-22 knots, a break before one more stiff day on the way tomorrow.

A few hours after dark a Chinese cargo ship hailed me on the VHF and we had a five minute conversation. The radio operator had all kinds of questions and I guess he just wanted to practice his English but maybe they wanted to know exactly what a Hong Kong sailboat was doing so far from home, especially as I have added ‘Solo Sailor’ to my AIS description. They were doing exactly the opposite trip as me, Vancouver to Tokyo (twice as fast), and we agreed that Singapore is very hot. I asked him what they were hauling and it sure sounded like ‘Canadian weed’ but I’m fairly certain that wasn’t it. I don’t think Canada is known for its cheese so I’m gonna go with ‘Canadian trees’.

Caloriemate photo from thetastyfinds.com

03/08/2026

Day 26 - Mile 4025

I had a beautiful clear night last night to close out the lull in the wind as it fills in again for the next several days. Clear with a bright moon, but rolly as ever with deck hardware rattling right above my head as I tried to sleep so I furled away the headsail and let the mainsail do the work. Speed over ground was still ok at 7 to 9 knots with the help of the swell. Of course now that I’ve shifted back to 20 minute naps I didn’t see a ship all night.

The wind started increasing right on the forecast with gusts of 30 to 35 knots around midday and I gybed (turned with the wind) with well-reefed sails to stay close to my direct route. The swell was more comfortable on the new course though the sea was more confused with the new wind.

I had noticed some chafe worsening on the knot on the clew (the aft lower corner) of the mainsail so I temporarily secured the sail while cutting the line and tying a fresh knot for the last leg of the trip.

The backup autopilot sounded a little bit different and was running longer with each shift of the rudder. I found the fluid in the reservoir had dropped from a slow leak so I topped it off and everything was back to normal.

Later, an hour or two before dawn, I thought I would get another quick gybe done before bed (I have not been adjusting my sleep very well as the daylight hours slowly shift). In the middle of the maneuver the headsail furler mechanism seized and the sail would not roll in or out, then wrapping the sail awkwardly around the forward rigging as I realized what had happened. It took about a half hour on the foredeck struggling to untangle the sail overhead in the wind, but luckily it was not fully deployed when the furler seized.

Immediately I thought it was from sea water being forced inside the mechanism by the waves and rusting the bearings, an issue I had about 4 or 5 years ago. Somewhere on my preparation list was a check and fluid fill for the unit but since it had been totally trouble free for years it never made it to the top of the list and might not have shown up anyway.

Continued in the comments…

Sail Asia

16/08/2026

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11/08/2026

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