John O’Hagen posted the Navigation Practice paddle and 4 intrepid souls joined him on the water this morning: Jay Murdock, Jane Hardy, Greg Cade (Happy Birthday to Greg!) and myself, Debra Kettler.

Launch conditions were pretty calm with cloudy skies, air temps near 65F and water temps about the same. The swell was mixed …W 3 to 4ft @ 8s and SW 1ft @ 15s. The wind was about 5kts from the W.

We left the Aqua Adventure dock at a timely 8AM and headed to the mouth of the channel, saying hi to Jon Brindle in his new HUKI S1X-Special surfski along the way.

We were armed with charts and GPS, although you’d think those GPS would have better agreement….the wreck is here, no it’s here!

We first headed out the channel at 290Magnetic, hoping to catch sight of the buoy marking the sunken RubyE, only to find that the buoy was missing. We made a course correction and then headed on towards the Yukon at 330Magnetic, Jane leading the way.

We found the Yukon, took a short break and headed toward Crystal Pier at ~45Magnetic, under sunny skies. Of course this was easy to find and with the SW swell at our back (and a bit from our left (W), causing a slight southerly drift) we made the 1.5nm in 22minutes.

A break for food and water and a little dip….before heading to the tower on the north jetty.

The bearing for the tower was ~165Magnetic, but taking into account the swell coming from the west, we used a heading of 180Magnetic, to maintain our course.

The tides were against us all day in the channel (high tide of 3.6ft at ~9:45AM), but the swell coming in on the way home made for a bit of fun.

We were treated to a couple of dolphin in Quivira Basin on our return.

We also met Jason and his 8 year old son, Jack, on the water…It looks like Jack will be joining our paddles very soon!

Link to our GPS data for the day

Thank you to Jay and John for the photos….