first night at sea

We've been motoring up the coast from Astoria for about 18 hours. Now everyone's sleeping and I'm the only one awake. We saw three orcas earlier! The ocean's really peaceful right now, but navigating at night's a little nervewracking. You can see little lights on the horizon occasionally from other boats. But all night long only one boat has come close enough to show up on the radar. I felt like I was playing chicken with it; every time I would try to skirt around it it would come closer. I finally decided to take a sharp turn the other way, and I avoided it by a long way, but the whole thing was a little more exciting than it should have been.

This is the view to the left of the helm when there's light.

(better pictures to come, promise!)

Navigating took me a while to get the hang of but now it feels pretty easy. We have the chart on a computer monitor, which syncs with our GPS so we can watch the boat moving on the map. And then there's the radar, which reads large objects on all sides of us. And there's the autopilot, which has a knob on it that you can adjust to turn. For tighter situations that require a faster response, we would turn off autopilot, but here we only need large course corrections so the autopilot suffices. I'll take photos of set-up eventually (I think it's pretty cool)!

So, around 9:30 tomorrow morning we hit the straits of San Juan de Fuca and go through those for about 10 hours to Victoria.