Amy McCullough - The Box Wine Sailors: Misadventures of a Broke Young Couple at Sea

Our first day on the ocean was mostly beautiful. I had cried the night before, frying thin-sliced potatoes in oil on our two-burner stove while rocking on the wakes of fishing boats returning across the Columbia River Bar. Giant seabirds I later identified as brown pelicans were dive-bombing the water all around us, filling their flexible beak pouches with tiny fish and gulping them down; theyd rise up thirty or forty feet in the air, then tuck their wings and plummet so quickly that the subsequent splashes had us frequently popping our heads out of the cabin to investigate. We werent yet used to the sound.

We were anchored right near the entrance to the Pacific, behind Clatsop Spitperhaps a precarious spot, but we had never done this before, and we wanted to have as much time as possible to get from Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia, to Tillamook Bay, our first scheduled stop along the Oregon coast. And we wanted to do it all in daylight. The opposite, north side of the mouth is called Cape Disappointment; lets just say Clatsop Spit had a better ring to it. We had made a dish of lentils and canned corn sprinkled with Tony Chacheres Creole Seasoning the night before and set it aside so we wouldnt have to attempt cooking while underway the next day.

The Columbia River Bar inspired many of the cries against our trip. Not just anyone can cross the Columbia River Bar, people would tell us. Special pilots are flown out to incoming vessels just to guide them across. Its called the Graveyard of the Pacific, you know. Yes, we knew. Wed taken a field trip to the Maritime Museum in Astoria earlier that year. There is a giant map in the entry corridor with little red lights marking all the historical shipwrecks in the region. And though we said many times later that the bar was the least of our troubles, we took it very seriously.

As such, we waited for a light forecast to make the crossing and were rewarded with a whitewash of fog and relatively calm seas. Rather than giant breakers and boats careening up waves at terrifying angles, our seascape was filled with bored seagulls, an impeccably opaque grayness, and the white stern lights of fishing boats speeding past us.

Eventually, the fog blew off and a lovely Oregon August day took over, bringing fifteen-knot winds on our beam. We set the sails, engaged the autopilot (a robotic arm that adjusts the tiller to keep you on course), and sat on the deck in the sun. The waves were long and low (for Oregon), but we both felt better sitting up high, rather than in the cockpit closer to eye level with the four- to six-foot swell.

I had never been too prone to motion sickness; Jimmies history with it is, shall I say, on a par with how his body handled its first ocean encounter. At some point midday, we ate our lentils and corn, I hungrily and Jimmie begrudgingly. As afternoon came upon us, the winds picked up, as it turns out they often do, and the sea became an instant mountain range, its peaks and valleys growing more dramatic with each gusty whip. We maintained a facade of coolness, taking deep breaths and looking around with calm, collected expressions on our faces. We felt thankful it was sunny. We wondered if there was anything we could do.