Newport to Umpqua River, Salmon Harbor Sept. 8th – 10th, 2008

Overall, the weather has been decent in the morning and deteriorates quickly in the afternoon. The seas have been fair, 5-8 feet at 7-9 seconds, not steep swells and trailing north winds at 15-20 with gust of 25 knots, but afternoons quickly went to 25 -35 knots with gust of 40 knots and the seas increase due to wind another 2-4 feet. Not where you want to be to avoid a rough ride, and we promised ourselves we were not in a hurry, so no more rough rides if possible. While leaving Newport and heading south, since we had been into Coos Bay on the way north and considering the afternoon weather, we decided to pull into the Umpqua River and Salmon Harbor, which is in Winchester Bay. The bar at Salmon Harbor is a little tricky and small given that about a third of it on the north side has significant shoaling and the depths decrease to 12- 20 feet over some of the bar. At least that is what our depth sounder showed. The ride in wasn’t bad given the decent sea conditions in the early morning as we arrived at the bar at about 1: 45 on our cruise from Newport. The town of Winchester Bay, on the Umpqua River is where the Salmon Harbor Marina is located. It is a very small town, and the transients tie up to the dock, on a side tie. Next to us on the dock we met John and Mary, who were from Mississippi, really friendly folks who also gave us some great tomatoes and corn. They offered us a ride into Reedsport if we needed anything, and made us feel welcome on the dock. However, our plan was to stay one night and make Bandon the next day. Well the North Winds had other ideas as we continued to wait out the weather and adding to the problem were the conditions on the bar. At one time we had heard from the Coast Guard reports that Florence, Coos Bay and Umpqua were all closed to any size recreational vessel and only commercial traffic was allowed to cross. When the bars re-opened to vessels over 40 feet, we decided to still wait a while longer, as we are only 42 feet, but when they were closed completely we wondered what they did with folks trying to come in to seek shelter and we thought about the folks we met in Newport and wished them all safe. As it would happen on day two in Umpqua we were working on the boat doing little clean up things and small maintenance when we heard “Hey NuMoon” , and Del, Trudy and John from the Nordhavn named "Island Grace" walked up the dock. They wanted to make a long run, not harbor hop, and decided to wait out the weather in Newport. While waiting, they had rented a car to go exploring. They said a couple of the sailboats had left and we all hoped they were in decent seas. So we chatted a while and took pictures and off they went to continue exploring. We returned to waiting out the weather. We hoped to make another 40 mile short hop in the early morning to Bandon on the Coquille River, at least that way we felt we were making some progress south as it takes about 5 hours for us to go 40 miles.