Syzygy Sailing

(post dated–this post generally refers to events on 3/26 and 3/27)

Shuttle bus to Denver airport. Wait two hours. Flight to Dallas. Wait five hours. Flight to Gaudalajara. Taxi to bus station. Wait two hours. Bus to Puerto Vallarta. Taxi to La Cruz de Juanacaxtle. 1 mile walk with 125 pounds of luggage to marina office. Wait three hours. Dinghy ride to anchorage. 30 hours of traveling later: home. On my sailboat.

I met Matt and Karen in Mexico for my spring break. After a tumultuous year with many unexpected turns, I got to join the trip for a short week. It was an emotional reunion for me to get back on the boat. Two months ago, I watched on a computer Syzygy’s AIS track as it sailed out underneath the Golden Gate Bridge without me. While I don’t regret the life choices I made and the experiences I’ve been through over the past year, it was certainly tough to watch the trip begin without me.

Before arriving, there was some trepidation on my part of what it would be like. Would I not mind bobbing around and rocking back and forth in an anchorage? Would I crave the convenience of living on land with its easy access to a multitude of things like: showers, restaurants, home depots. In contrast to living on land, many things about living on a sailboat are simply hard to do. It requires a ten-fold increase in time to accomplish the simplest of tasks, such as if I wanted to make a quick trip to the store to get more orange juice. Would I fit into the systems and dynamic that Karen and Matt have created aboard the sailboat? Would I like long distance sailing? Finally, would I get seasick? I’ve never been out on an ocean in a sailboat. And with the oceans bigger, longer swells, it was distinctly possible that my body would not be fond of me messing with its balance and equilibrium.

As it turned out, I didn’t mind the rolling. Though I did nearly fall off the dinghy the first time I stepped aboard from the dinghy to the Syzygy. I also bumped my head a number of times the first day. I also had a pot of boiling coffee go flying onto the floor after the boat rocked back and forth a bit. I later stepped through an open hatch, landing on my butt on deck and my right leg dangling into the kitchen. So it takes some getting used to.

Part of the 125 pounds worth of luggage I was carrying included many of my things for when I join in June. It also included a bunch of games for Matt and Karen to pass the time on passage. It also included what I hope will soon be one of the most used pieces of gear on the boat: a bunch of scuba gear. My friends Dave and Pat Martin generously loaned me their scuba gear. By generously I mean that five days before I was to leave, I called them up (they live in Tennessee) and inquired about having them send me some of the gear. You could say I am a procrastinator. At any rate, both were prolific divers back in the day. They lent me so much gear I wasn’t able to pack it all down there….I was already at 125 pounds. But I did manage to bring down what I think is the most important part, which is the regulators and the dive computers. I say ‘I think’ because Karen, Matt and I all don’t know how to scuba dive. I was certified once 15 years ago and haven’t dove since. However, we’re planning on going to some of the best scuba diving in the world. How could we not have some scuba gear aboard? Matt has some learn-to-dive CD’s and I’m going to buy a couple of books. We’ll learn a bunch and figure out the rest. Pretty much just like everything else in this adventure.

I’m glad to be back at the sailboat. I already wish I could stay longer. We’re planning on sailing overnight down south to Tenacatita. There’s a jungle river trip we can take in the dinghy. There’s tacos to be eaten. There’s relaxing to be done. A little work on the boat here and there. Fun everywhere!

Jonathon here.  I thought I would post a couple of screen shots of Matt and Karen’s progress.  I know a lot of you have clicked through to the marinetraffic.com website with AIS tracking to try and find Syzygy.  Like Matt has said, if they aren’t in AIS range, you won’t see them.  But here’s two pictures of where they have been.

The first is from when they departed until I went to bed around midnight California time.  They had been sailing about 13 hours at that point.

The second is a somewhat overlapping track of their progress until about 6 am Thursday morning when they dropped off the map.  At this point they had gone about 110 miles in about 18 hours.  If they keep going through Thursday night they might be in the Santa Barbara/Los Angeles area Friday during the day sometime.  I imagine they will keep pushing through since wind and wave height seem to indicate good weather all the way down the California coast and Baja Mexico for at least the next 7 days. There are a number of AIS stations in Los Angeles and San Diego areas, so they might pop back up!

A while back we came across these superb videos made by Chris Humann (edited thanks to comment below) during his single-handed TRANSPAC race, in which he suspends a video camera from a kite and flies it from his boat while sailing. As soon as I saw the video I had to do it too. It’s so difficult to get good footage while sailing, since you’re usually limited to the deck of the boat–but Chris’s perspective and the footage he captures is just incredible.

Extensive online research revealed that there is a whole hobby out there dedicated to “KAP” or “kite aerial photography”. My immediate question was: why doesn’t anyone talk about kite aerial video? Surely video is better than stills? Turns out that getting steady video is wicked hard!

Most people make their own rigs and build it piece by piece a bit at a time, playing with different kites, etc, until they feel competent enough in their gear to hang an expensive camera off of it. This is probably smart, but I was in the mood for immediate gratification, so I put intelligence aside to make room for recklessness and in an impulsive moment I ordered a kite and a picavet suspension rig from Brooks Leffler’s web site, brooxes.com.

Brooks is the man–he made it super easy to get started. He handled everything personally, and I had my gear in a day and a half. I highly recommend his excellent little company; he is a good guy with great products and great service, and he deserves our business.

Everyone suggests first practicing with just the kite, getting to know how it functions in different conditions, etc, but I was just too impatient for that sort of thing. So the day after my new toys arrived we went out to the grass next to the marina on a pretty windy day and just did it. Put it all together, started the kite flying, then hung my $400 video camera from the picavet suspension and just let out the entire 500ft of line. It was funny to watch my little video camera become a little speck way up there, hanging directly over the sailboats in the marina.

Here’s the basic setup: you launch the kite and let out a hundred feet of string, then you attach the picavet suspension rig to the string. The picavet is an elegant arrangement of lines that serve to keep the camera mounting bracket perfectly horizontal no matter what angle the kite is at. You mount your camera on the bracket at whatever angle you want it to be, and then it stays at that angle the whole time.

About the video camera: I love my sanyo xacti videocamera, because 1) it’s WATERPROOF and 2) no tapes–it holds over an hour of top quality footage on a little 8gb memory card. Plug it into the computer and download all the footage in a minute. We have used this trusty little camera to film underwater in the bay–just put it under the faucet afterwards to rinse it off the saltwater. If only sanyo would make an waterproof version of their HD videocamera!

That first trial run in the marina created very, very shaky footage. Check it out:

Pretty much unusable stuff. I get the feeling that this is pretty common with kite aerial video, which in hindsight explains why the online traffic is all about kite aerial photography. I think you need the wind to be extremely steady without any gusts to get decent footage. Conditions the day we first tried were less than ideal:

The most annoying aspect of the trial run was how long it took to wind up the line to bring the whole rig back in, so I built a new winder to which I could chuck our portable drill–this sped up the whole take-down process drastically.

Emboldened by our trial run, the next weekend we took it sailing. It was a bit more challenging to deal with the setup from the deck of a boat, but all in all totally doable. We sent it out when the wind was about 10-15 knots, I let out the kite and all 500ft of line, and then the wind picked up to 20 and then 25 and I thought the line was going to break and I was going to lose the whole thing, so I hooked up the drill and wound that sucker back in. The footage was super shaky again, which is a bummer but I guess to be expected in those conditions. Also, the angle of the camera (easily adjustable, from the ground!) wasn’t quite high enough, so the top of our mast is never quite in the shot. This is unfortunate, but no so bad for our first try. I’m very happy with all the gear and the setup–thanks to Brooks for a simple and excellent product. Now we just need to send it up in better conditions, and hopefully sometime soon we can get great aerial footage of Syzygy in action.

This past Monday we sailed on the bay with friends Kevin Tompsett and Liz Roberts. This was the second week in a row that we had partially dismantled the engine and then put it back together in time for a sail (and we’re going to try for a third time this weekend). The conditions were varied, and interesting enough that I’ll give some details. First, here is our track:

We left the marina at 10am, a good 3 hours earlier than our usual average departure–which explains why we had no wind for the first 3 hours:

Upon motoring out of the marina, we immediately discovered–via an unusual and alarming noise eminating from the engine room–that the drive belt of our engine was rubbing on the alternator belt, an unfortunate and potentially disastrous condition caused by my improper reassembly of the engine the previous day. We elected to motor very SLOWLY, thereby minimizing the bad sound, and in this hobbled and tenuous state we were able to make it out of the narrow channel and hoist the sails.

Upon hoisting the sails, nothing happened. A situation caused by a total lack of wind (refer to wind archive graph above). So we sat around with the sails up for a half hour, floating for a bit. When the wind finally picked up enough for some proper sailing, we headed for angel island, and promptly sailed directly into the wind shadow of angel island. Disdaining engine usage–for reasons already mentioned–we floated around in a state of no wind for another hour or so. We sailed away from angel island a few times to reach some wind, and then elected to turn around and sail right back into the wind shadow. These maneuvers, confusing though they might seem, are well documented in our gps track above. In our defense: these things happen when you don’t particularly care where you’re going or how long it takes to get there.

As we made our way up racoon strait (the section of water between angel island and tiburon on the mainland) the wind rapidly increased. By the time we hit the west end of racoon strait we were bowling along, way overpowered, under full jib and full main. Without fanfare, I took this opportunity to change into my foulies (there isn’t enough good raingear to go around, so I try not to flaunt my enviable ability to stay bone-dry). We started burying the leeward rail in the water, hefty splashes started coming over the bow. We partially furled the jib, which helped very little. Kevin had been playfully mouthing off about us not doing any “real” sailing earlier in the day, so I decided it was an ideal time to take him up to the bow to help me set up the staysail. Within half a minute seconds a big splash soaked him through.

Thus outfitted with main and staysail, we sped under the bridge. When we made it a mile and a half past the bridge, the wind slacked off some, at which point we checked the time, Liz and I chose beers, and we decided it was time to head for home. The way back involved some fun sail changes–we went wing-on-wing for a while and scooted DDW (dead-down-wind) along the headlands, taking advantage of the flood current starting to pour back into the bay (it happens along the edges first). Back in the bay, we went off towards angel island a bit to get some room on the wind, so that when we jibed we would be ability to come up into the wind enough to use both foresails. Then we unfurled the jib again, and with both jib and staysail drawing well, we sailed just about as fast as our boat will go. The wind was still blowing and it’s a bit of a task to jibe with both headsails at once, so we sailed right into the lee of alcatraz for the maneuver. The jibe accomplished, we jammed along on the port tack until it was time to douse the staysail and main and crawl back down the channel at a lazier pace.

Super light then quite heavy wind, and myriad sail combinations, all in one glorious day.