Thoughts on using winter's cold and dark times to plan summer sailing adventures
by David Schmidt 7 Jan 16:00 GMT
January 7, 2025
The fog parted to reveal Vancouver Island's jagged skyline © David Schmidt
Early January in the Pacific Northwest can be a contemplative time. Daylight hours are short, with only about eight hours and 30 minutes' worth of lumens hitting Bellingham, Washington today...provided of course that the sunlight can penetrate the "dark curtain" (read: the area's often-constant cloud cover). While this can get a little dreary at times (ahem), it's also a natural opportunity to take stock of one's goals for the new year, and to start cementing plans for the coming sailing season.
Way back in 2007, I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working as a desk editor at SAIL magazine, getting ready to marry my then-fiancé (now my wife of over 17 years), and doing my best to use my job to catch rides on as many cool boats as possible (Mea culpa: I leveraged the heck out of my business card for this purpose!).
Sometime that spring, I got the chance to cover the Van Isle 360—a circumnavigation race around Vancouver Island that's run as a series of stage races—for SAIL. (Mental note: I still owe my longtime friend and mentor Kimball for setting me up with that life-changing opportunity!)
My wife, who grew up sailing multihulls in the Pacific Northwest, was super supportive of the trip, even though it meant being gone for two weeks, less than two months before our wedding date. It wasn't until an early morning watch, somewhere between the Brooks Peninsula and Ucluelet off of Vancouver's often windswept west coast, that it hit me that she might have had her own motivations for encouraging this trip: Snow-covered and sawtooth mountains defined my eastern horizon, and albatross slowly patrolled the seas around me.
As a lifelong sailor and climber, this was my paradise found. By the time the dock lines were made fast in Ucluelet, my internal countdown timer for departing Boston for the Pacific Northwest had already begun.
I've since been lucky enough to have sailed down Vancouver's West Coast a second time, and even now, almost 18 years since that first Van Isle 360, I often find myself drifting off to sleep thinking about places like Telegraph Cove and Winter Harbor.
So, you can imagine my response when my good friend and longtime skipper, Jonathan, sent out an email to the crew, seeing if anyone would be interested in sailing in the 2025 Van Isle 360.
Big surprise: My reaction (and Coreen's) was the same in late 2024 as it was in 2007.
Cooler still, Jonathan proposed using a series of Puget Sound races this spring as our crew's warm-up, thus creating even more great opportunities to go sailing with a wonderful group of longtime friends aboard his fast and always well-maintained Riptide 44.
While my work calendar dictates that I can only do half of the Van Isle 360, I find myself constantly daydreaming of all the great sailing that awaits. And that's to say nothing of the stunning scenery, the sleepy little ports, and the massive tidal rips that the race negotiates as it takes the fleet around one of the world's most gorgeous islands.
The VI360 will likely be my biggest personal sailing adventure of 2025, but I'm also looking forward to the spring's warm-up races on Puget Sound, and to some local sailing on Bellingham Bay (another place that's not so hard on the eyes). Then there are some planned trips to the mountains, some travels, some time on my slackline, and summer evenings spent flying two-string kites with my friends at the local park, all of which are adding buoyancy to life at a time with only eight hours and thirty minutes' worth of daylight.
As for late spring and early summer lumens, this is when the Pacific Northwest pays out its dividends and long-term capital gains: On June 20 (the summer solstice), Bellingham will enjoy an impressive sixteen hours and (almost) ten minutes of daylight. And while there's no guarantee that we won't experience "June-uary" conditions, odds are great that the annual high-pressure systems off the U.S. West Coast will deliver plenty of blue skies come July.
So, if you find yourself wading through another dreary winter, perhaps this could be an opportunity to start planning your year's sailing adventures. If nothing else, it helps put your head in a way better place than wallowing (doom scrolling?) through the news cycle and counting days until spring's first green shoots make their appearance.
While 2024 might have been a year of impressive global sailing events (e.g., the Olympics, the America's Cup, and the ongoing Vendée Globe), there's no reason that 2025 can't deliver its own "embarrassment of riches" on a much more personalized level. At least that's my plan!
May the four winds blow you safely home.
David Schmidt
Sail-World.com North American Editor