I visited this week with Joe Beck, who works in the sales and design department at Lee Shore Boats in Port Angeles.
He said they just launched a 21-foot, catamaran-style boom boat that the company recently completed building for Exxon Mobil, and they spent much of Thursday morning on sea trials with the new vessel.
As an aside, when I got to Joe’s office, he wasn’t there.
I called him on his cellphone, and he told me they had just gotten through with sea trials and they were on their way back to the shop.
However, he had to stop at his home to throw his clothes in the dryer.
Seems it was a bit rough on the water, and poor old Joe got drenched.
Apparently, there were chuckles all around except from Joe.
Joe added that when the customer takes delivery, the boat will be shipped to Sakhalin, Russia.
Lady A is no longer
When I drove by the yard at Platypus Marine in the middle of the week, I saw that Lady A was not on the hard where she had been for the past couple months since her ill-fated sinking off Dungeness Spit in October.
The 67-foot wooden yacht belongs to Judson Linnabary, owner and president of Platypus Marine Inc., who, along with a crewmember, was aboard the vessel when she sank in 180 feet of water.
I understand Lady A was crunched up, put in a drop box and disposed of in the local landfill.
Wind savvy
The high winds the area experienced early last week appear to have died down, but be assured they will return.
This gives us all a teachable moment on how to gauge wind strength by observing sea conditions.
Wind speed is quantifiable and therefore can be measured.
Ships, boats, airports and many buildings lining most waterfronts are equipped with anemometers that measure the direction and speed of wind.
In Port Angeles, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has measuring equipment atop the Port of Port Angeles building at the marine terminals, and measurements are available in real time at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-Winds.
Absent an anemometer, using the Beaufort Wind Scale is a handy guide in determining wind speed based on the observed conditions of the sea.
Mariners have for centuries used the turbulence in the seas to gauge wind speed, but there was no standard scale.
As a consequence, their observations could be very subjective — one man’s “stiff breeze” might be another’s “soft breeze.”
Adm. Sir Francis Beaufort (1774-1857), while serving aboard the HMS Woolwich in 1805, developed a system for estimating wind strengths without the use of instruments.
Beaufort’s scale was based on the effect of various wind speeds on the amount of canvas that a full-rigged frigate of the period could carry.
He first mentioned it in his private log on Jan. 13, 1806, stating that he would “hereafter estimate the force of the wind according to the following scale . . . ”
Scale revisions
The scale has undergone a number of revisions, the last of which was around 1960.
In my household, a graphic of the scale is kept within reach of the telescope, which is pointed out to sea.
In that way, a user is able to easily observe the waters in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, determine the wind speed and then refer back to the real-time data provided by NOAA and make certain their equipment is accurate.
Others along the waterfront have devised their own methodology for measuring wind speed.
Chuck Faires, the harbormaster at Port Angeles Boat Haven, told me that his father, Joe Faires, who was the harbormaster from 1952 to 1982, used to cast a glance at the smoke stacks of the paper mill to get a sense of the wind.
If the plume of smoke coming out of the smokestack was going straight up, there was little to no wind.
If the smoke was coming out at right angles to the stack, then the wind speed was about 25 knots, and if the smoke was lying down on the water, the wind speed was approximately 35 knots.
Since Chuck’s youth, this approach was known to him as the Joe Faires wind scale.
On Wednesday, Tesoro Petroleum provided bunkers to Orient Lotus, a 623-foot bulk cargo ship that is currently heading up the Columbia River.
Tesoro’s refueling barge was to be in Seattle on Saturday to bunker the 915-foot container ship Hanjin Copenhagen.
The refueling barge will return next Sunday for her scheduled refueling of Densa Puma, a 614-foot bulk cargo ship that is flagged in Malta.
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David G. Sellars is a Port Angeles resident and former Navy boatswain’s mate who enjoys boats and strolling the area’s waterfronts. Items and questions involving boating, port activities and the North Olympic Peninsula waterfronts are always welcome. Email dgsellars@hotmail.com or phone him at 360-808-3202.
His column, On the Waterfront, appears Sundays.
