The all-sea trip around Cape Horn to California by standard sailing vessels typically took about 200 days (about 6.5 months) and covered . Some trips took almost a year. The all-sea route enabled enterprising emigrants to ship baggage and supplies they hoped to sell in California for gold dust. The Cape Horn route was essentially the only route where low, medium or high weight or high volume goods could be shipped cheaply. Other routes, which often cost significantly more, usually specialized in high value, low weight goods like mail, passengers or gold dust. Starting out with essentially nothing, goods from the East Coast or Britain were often desperately needed and usually sold for high profits. The long delay between seeing a market, ordering the goods and shipping the goods made business risky. Some of the cargoes that were usually profitable were food, liquor, lumber and building supplies. Ship loads of other types of goods sometimes saturated the marketplace, forcing the goods to be auctioned off at a loss. Most cargoes included a variety of goods to minimize this problem.