...like, nearly 30 days of it. Humidity was low, winds were more commonplace, all of which exacerbated fire dangers out here. While in the Willamette Valley we only had a few fires typically smaller and more easily contained, as you know from the news it was record setting and tragic in many areas around the West.

Sailing wise, the Willamette and Columbia Rivers were quite low, we had no snow to speak of last season thus no spring freshet to speak of with the spring/early summer melt. In some years the freshet has lasted into July. This year by July water was at record lows. Since there are dredged channels in the rivers up to Portland from the coast, about 96 miles west there was deep water to sail in but a lot of sand bars and beaches not normally of the dimensions they were this year.

There's not so much sailing on the Pacific off of Oregon save for boats headed north or south. Between, for example, the Columbia River bar and the Strait of Juan de Fuca in Washington, there's only one inlet for boats at Gray's Harbor and very, very few stop there. So it's few hundred mile jaunt up north.

South is a bit better but save for Yaquina Bay at Newport, bars can be tough crossings and not a whole lot of folks go in or out in sailboats. The harbors on the NW coast are river inlets hence have typically narrow entries and sometimes poor conditions. Then too, it almost always involves dredged channels which are sometimes not dredged in smaller harbors in a timely fashion. So most folks offshore are just passing by often clear to San Francisco.