The Clearing Winds of March
Once again March proved to be wet and cool here in Portland, Oregon and we had to pick our sailing days on the Columbia River in between frontal systems moving in off the Pacific. We watch the weather satellite and radar on the Portland NOAA website for breaks and then make a dash for the boat.
We got out Sunday afternoon just after the last hail storm and it started to break. When we first went out the wind was NW about 4 knots so we had full sail up. The wind slowly built to 15 with gust about 20 and we were moving upriver pretty fast. We had to reef down before we came back against it. This big nice boat, 40 something was just screaming around. They lapped up before we got up to buoy 14 using an asym spinnaker downwind. We had to give way to let them pass upwind so I took a quick snapshot.
