Before leaving Ensenada I pulled in a weatherfax over the SSB (our shortwave, long distance radio) and noticed that we would be heading out into a developing low pressure system with a cold front moving over our position–i.e. a small storm.  The wind speeds were predicted at 25-35 knots and seas 12-18 feet–these sort of conditions are fairly substantial when you’re offshore in the dark, but not the sort of thing that need be dangerous if you’re prepared for it.  So Karen and I discussed the forecast and decided that we were game for it.  Personally, I was interested in testing our mettle.  Also, I thought it would be good to get our first storm experience under our belt, as a confidence-building exercise.  And really as far as storms go it was a small one, not too crazy.

As it approached, the wind shifted around from behind us–where it is convenient for the wind to come from—to directly ahead of us–not so convenient (though expected).  Still keen on making forward progress, however, we started beating into the wind.  For the first five hours or so of windward sailing we were ecstatic to discover that it was our most comfortable point of sail so far: the wind waves had not yet built, so were were sailing smoothly into the wind with a following sea.

As the winds increased, we progressively decreased sail area.  We had been sailing for hours with a full main and full jib.  First we took one reef in the main, then took two reefs in the main, then switched down from the jib to the staysail.  With the staysail and double-reefed main we beat upwind in increasingly shitty conditions for a number of hours. Here’s a really crappy little picture I just drew and took a picture of to illustrate:

This is the position we found ourselves in–beating upwind in the darkest night with double-reefed main and staysail–when the worst of the storm came upon us.  The “worst of the storm” involved 30 knots of wind, an immense quantity of driving blinding rain, occasional ambiguously located flashes of lightning, and reasonably sized obnoxiously pounding wind waves.

Beating upwind is not an advisable thing to do in a storm, unless you are trying to deliberately subject yourself and your boat to the strongest forces possible.  You can sit there and say that we should have changed things sooner, before we found ourselves in the situation of being over-canvassed beating upwind in a storm that is.  Three weeks ago I probably would have said the same thing–but I have learned some things since then.  One of those things is that if something is working well enough, then leave it well enough alone.  Too often I fall victim to experimenting with sail changes and modifications, only to find myself needing to change everything back–and exhausting myself in the process.  When there are only two of you, and sleep becomes a high priority, you must eschew the textbook sailing setup for one that is working well-enough to leave well-enough-alone.  So even though beating upwind in the storm was not ideal, we were still “fine”–fine in the sense that I judged neither us nor the boat to be in any immediate danger.  So, despite the increasing ridiculousness of beating upwind in those conditions, I still found myself wondering whether we should bother taking any measures to alter our situation.

Well eventually of course conditions deteriorated to the point where we needed to modify our situation.  Ahhh now the tricky part is what to change and how to do it, in the middle of the storm, isn’t it?  Trying to get something accomplished in those conditions–i.e. two steps shy of “worst conditions imaginable”–is touch and go.  If you mess something up with the sail, it will promptly flog itself to pieces before you have a chance to save it.  If you make an honest mistake with steering, you’re liable to find yourself on your ass, which in a boat means “knocked down”, which means getting your mast to touch the water–not cool.  Basically, you don’t have many chances to get it right.  Whatever you do, you want to pull it off right the first time.

We decided that we should heave to, and we also decided that we should get it right this time.  The last time we tried to heave to while experimenting in the dark prior to entering san diego, I was dissatisfied with our setup.  Specifically, I was annoyed that we were unable to completely stall the boat.

This time it worked out perfectly fine for us.  We hove to under double-reefed main and staysail, the motion of the boat became relatively calm, and we slept the night away (in turns).  The boat still fore-reached at about a knot, so I still want to work on that a bit, but as it turns out the hove-to position was still stable and calm, so perhaps I was being a bit perfectionist about it before.  If we ever experience a real storm we’ll see.

Perhaps that was an anticlimactic conclusion to our storm story, sorry about that, but we were safe and fine so that’s a good ending right?

The second day out from Ensenada we experienced our first storm–a small one, perfect for practicing.  You’ll hear that story in another post.

We had a lot of wind and big seas almost the entire time.  Like 20-30 knots of wind and 10-15 foot seas, for all but the last few days.  This was good, in the sense that we reeled off 150 mile days and got south fast.  But wind and seas like that make the experience tiring and challenging.

And I should emphasize that it was really challenging.  It was hard not because of any technical difficulties, but simply because of discomfort and frustration and lack of sleep.  At times the discomfort of the boat motion and frustration of seemingly easy tasks was overwhelming.  I now well understand the expression “mouth of a sailor”, because at times I swore harder and louder than ever before.  At one point I had a teapot jump off the stove and spill water all over my head WHILE I was finishing mopping up two bowls of cereal from the floor.  That’s just one of dozens of comically ridiculous things that happened, all of which elicit an emotionally explosive need to simultaneously cry, scream, and laugh.  “Too ridiculous to have just happened” went through my head often.  I started thinking of our boat as a funhouse; it was laughable to be down below when everything was going every which way, things flying all over the place, etc, which was most of the time.  It got better.  We became more efficient with the watches and the sail changes, and more accustomed to the funhouse nature of being down below.  It got sunny and warm shortly after passing Cabo, and that was a big turning point.  By the end we were sleeping 6 hours at a stretch and drinking beers, and it was feeling good.   Now that we’re at anchor having successfully made that monster passage, it feels really good indeed!

So, I will post some more entries with specific stories from the trip.  Our priorities are sleep, relaxation, food, drink–the basic essentials of comfort really.  Eventually we’ll get around to such motivated tasks as laundry and writing emails etc, but there’s no reason to rush these things!

fyi we’re planning on sitting right here where we are for about a month.

We departed San Diego mid-day yesterday, in an attempt to time our arrival at Ensenada during the following day. At first, the wind was excellent (10 knots off the beam) and we made great time–yet again we found ourselves in a position to enter the harbor sooner than expected, in the dark, so we doused the jib and sailed obliquely away from Ensenada and then back, killing time until the sun rose (of course, on the tack back towards Ensenada the wind disappeared entirely, so instead of bobbing around in the 5 foot swell we motored slowly for a few hours).

Both of us felt a bit queasy on this passage.  The quartering sea didn’t help (in which the waves get you from the right butt cheek of the boat, if the boat had a right butt cheek that is).  I anticipate that the first day or two on passage will probably take some getting used to, each time.  However, once again the hardest thing about the passage was getting adequate sleep.  As soon as we were secured to the dock this morning we got back in bed and napped for another few hours.  I think that we will become increasingly comfortable with the abnormal schedule as we make more passages (one can hope).

We are in a slip at a marina called Baja Naval for tonight; we head south again tomorrow morning.  The check-in procedure was straightforward, except that the port captain here requires liability insurance, and there’s only one insurance place in town that does it, and they charged $210 for a year’s worth of insurance that probably isn’t worth jack because I doubt if they would ever pay any claim (the woman would not provide me with any paperwork outlining the terms of the policy).  The insurance thing is clearly a scam to take some more money from the yatistas down here.  It makes sense to me for a marina to require insurance, but not the government.  Hell, even in the USA your aren’t required to have insurance on your boat (though most marinas do require it).  We should have taken care of it while up in the states, but I had mistakenly thought that insurance was not absolutely required.

This baja naval marina is a trip.  Apparently the swell readily finds its way into the harbor, because all the boats and docks are in constant motion, as if all of us and all the docks were all lightly lashed together and set free, without any pylons or connection to land.  Like we’re tied into one big floating raft, with all the pieces going every which way and bouncing off each other ad infinitum.

I think it’s appropriate to kick off the drink links section with a donation of Belgian beer from Jon (Haradon, one of the other owners of Syzygy), and the toast he wrote to go with it (which he asked Karen to read to me).  Jon wishes he could be on the trip currently, and is planning on joining us in June, but in the meantime he sent us to a pub in San Diego with Belgian beers on tap (he emailed us with two location choices).  Thank you, Jon, for the Belgian beer and the kind words as well.

The footage makes Karen and I seem ridiculous.  And maybe we are.  But it was a fun evening.  (please stay tuned for the toasts from other drink donors, and thanks again to all of you we love you!)

At the request of family and friends, we purchased a SPOT tracking device.  It cost $50 (after mail-in rebate), plus a $100/year subscription fee.  For our purposes, each time we press the “check in/ok” button on this little jobby, it communicates our position to one of their satellites, and then it shows up as a pin on our SPOT map, which I added to the sidebar and also to our “Current Location” page (a bigger version).  We plan on pressing the button about once a day; that will be our daily position report.  Supposedly it will have coverage in MOST places, including the coast of Mexico.  However! Important note that THE SPOT WILL NOT SHOW OUR POSITION WHILE WE CROSS THE PACIFIC, SO DON’T WORRY!

I have mixed feelings about this SPOT jobby.  The box it came in was hugely wasteful, with extra stupid pieces of cardboard, the website interface to get it working is terrible, their widget that I put up on our site messed everything up until I did some extra html coding, and even using the damn thing is extremely counter-intuitive.  It’s hard to tell when you’ve successfully turned it on, turned it off, or sent a signal, which is not so cool when you’re out in the middle of the ocean trying to figure out whether it worked to upload a checkpoint or not.  I anticipate it to be buggy, so mom please don’t worry if it malfunctions on us and you stop getting position reports.

So, to be clear: the lack of a daily check/in is not a cause for concern.  It probably means that we’re either having too much fun and forgot to press the button, or else that the piece-of-crap thing busted on us and is no longer working.

(fyi, the pins that you see on land in San Diego are a result of my initial testing right after we bought the SPOT, on foot and by bus; we left the boat in the marina)

Karen and I departed Catalina on Sunday morning, bound for San Diego.  It was a joyous departure, being alone for the first time.  We experienced a consistent 20 knot winds out of the West and Northwest for the whole passage; this wind speed and direction allowed us to haul-ass the entire time.  It was a fast, enjoyable, comfortable ride.  It was wonderful to be out there alone, wonderful to be feeling good and sailing well.

There were two notable incidents: just before sunset we were hailed by an aircraft carrier, which identified itself as being at 20,000 yards, and would we please not come closer than 5,000 yards as they were doing “night exercises”.  I thought to myself–isn’t a “yard” an inappropriate unit of distance in this case?  Later in the evening I spotted a vessel off our port bow, and after a few minutes I determined that we were converging, and not wanting to collide with them I hailed them on the radio.  During my radio call, I identified their exact position, and it took two attempts before they identified themselves as “warship 88″ and thanked me as they had “only just noticed us” . . . and I thought to myself–what kind of warship doesn’t notice a sailing yacht first?  I told them not to bother altering course, as I would pass behind them.  We passed about 500 yards astern of them–close enough to see that yes, indeed, they certainly looked like a warship–and then they turned off all their lights.  WTF?  Pretty freaking unsafe to sit around with no lights on.  What kind of boat sits around out in the ocean with all its lights off, especially when it can fail to notice an approaching vessel less than 4 miles away?  Karen and I have no valid explanations.  If it was hanging out there all stealth-like to look for smugglers or illegal immigrants, then maybe they should take lessons on reading their radar effectively–we had lights on, AIS on, and were headed right for them, after all, so what kind of small unlighted illegal boats are they ever going to find?  Anyway, strange things happen out in the ocean I guess, like encountering incompetent stealth warships.

As it turned out, we made such good time that we ended up arriving at the entrance to San Diego around midnight.  It being greatly preferred to enter during the daylight (a lesson learned during anchoring outside Santa Barbara in the dark), we decided to sail around killing time until the morning.

We proceeded to spend the next three hours messing around with sail combinations and positions, unsuccessfully attempting to stop the boat from sailing.

If one simply douses all the sails, attempting the sailing equivalent of “hanging out”, what happens is that the boat bobs around in the waves in a surprisingly violent way, while everything in the boat is rudely thrown from left to right and back in endless repetition until it all breaks, and furthermore sometime during that endless repetition all semblance of sanity departs from the minds of all crew on the boat.  So we don’t do that.

Heaving to is the preferred method of “stopping” the boat.  It is a balanced state in which the force of the jib and the main sail balance each other, working against each other, holding the boat slightly into the wind, such that the boat moves neither forward nor backward, but drifts directly downwind at about 1 knot.  The basic position of the sails required to heave to is straight forward: jib sheeted to windward, main eased to leeward, rudder to leeward.  Every boat is slightly different, however, and modern boats in particular can be hard to successfully heave to (so I have been told).  I was under the impression that our boat, it being heavier, with a medium-length keel and skeg-hung rudder, would have no trouble heaving-to.  I have discovered otherwise.  None of the various methods Karen and I tried throughout the night were successful.  With greater skill no doubt I will get it right, but no matter what I did that night our boat would sail forward.  The slowest I got her to was 1.5 knots–if that was 1.5 knots drifting directly downwind I would have been satisfied, but alas it was 1.5 knots forward, and I would be satisfied with nothing less than a perfect textbook heave-to.  Perhaps that was ambitious for 3 in the morning; perhaps I was being a little insane offshore in the pitch black in a healthy 20 knots of wind, but we were trying to kill time anyway and what else better did I have to do?  Our boat would not be stopped.  Don’t get me wrong, I am glad that our boat loves to sail, but clearly it will require further practice to get her to stop.

After four hours of putting sails up and down in the dark, within sight of all the lights of San Diego, Karen and I convinced ourselves that it would be just fine to enter the bay in the dark after all.  We motored up the channel without incident, and were directed by the harbor police to tie up to a quarantine buoy for the rest of the night.  This accomplished, we passed out for three hours, roused ourselves to motor over to the “cop dock” as they call it around here, and procured a transient slip for a few days at $10.50 a night in which to park the boat.

In retrospect, I am not happy with our late-night change of plans decision to enter the harbor.  If we thought it was a poor choice at the start of the evening, it was certainly a worse decision after we were considerably more tired out.  It all turned out to be perfectly fine and there were no close calls or dangerous aspects of entering the harbor, but it was still the wrong choice.  With or without achieving a  perfect heave-to, we could simply have sailed back and forth for a few more hours.  Tiredness can be an unbelievably powerful force–somehow it convinced me at 4 in the morning that it would be light by the time we got into the harbor proper, which was a silly thing to believe considering it only took us 40 minutes from that point to reach the quarantine buoy.   I suspect there will be many tired situations in the future, and so we would do well to remember it and to steel ourselves against it.

All in all, though, it was a safe and enjoyable first passage for Karen and I, and it greatly eased our minds about our ability to sail alone in a comfortable and happy fashion.

And, to the present: I am glad to be stationary in San Diego for a few days.  We have a number of errands on our list: we need to tie up loose ends from our former life (bills, taxes, etc), purchase spares, and do a few maintenance tasks on the boat.  It will be our last convenient chance to take care of things before heading into mexico–which we hope to do in about a week.

We had bit the bullet and purchased a cruising guide to the islands offshore from the West Marine in Santa Barbara–that turned out to be a very good decision. My charts for most of the channel islands coastlines are not very detailed, and the two anchorages we have experienced so far are small and difficult.

The purpose of an anchorage is to 1) provide shelter from wind and waves, in that order, respectively and 2) to provide access to land.  The unfortunate trade-off of being in an anchorage is the possibility of contact with land.  It is difficult to overstate exactly how undesirable it is to make contact with land in a sailboat.  For a boat even to “bump up” against any piece of land will almost assuredly result in the boat sinking (unless of course your boat is made out of metal, as Pete never loses a chance to mention–but his metal boat is very heavy and sails very slowly though, so I forgive him for remembering the benefits of metal whenever possible .

Anchoring up against the land is like bringing your hand up next to a candle flame for warmth–the warmest you will be is right before you get burned.  Anchoring is just such a gambit: you are angling for protection, but the most protected spot is right up close against the very land that will sink your boat at the slightest contact.

We pulled into the “Scorpion” anchorage on the night of the 17th just before dark, and it was easy to see that being in that spot provided very little in the way of protection from either the wind or waves.  In this case, the word “cove” was completely misleading.  The cliffs were sharp and hard looking, and instinctively I wanted to stay away.  However, a comfortable half a mile away from land, the depth was well over a hundred feet and we may as well have just floated around the ocean, for all the protection to be gained by the spot.  A quarter of a mile away, the depth was finally shallow enough for us to anchor.   It felt very close to the rocks.  Pete assured me that we would experience anchoring situations far closer, so we dropped the “hook”.

Part of the anchoring process is to “back down” on the anchor: one puts the motor into reverse and backs up on the anchor to better dig it into the bottom, and to test that it will hold well.  The first time I backed down on our anchor that night, it started dragging.  I let it settle (did nothing else) and backed down again and it held.  The process had taken close to an hour and we were tired and cold and the wind was blowing us away from the land, safely out towards open water, so at that moment it seemed like our anchoring job was perfectly safe and solid, well done let’s get warm and have a drink, etc.  Then of course the wind shifted just after we got into bed, blowing us diagonally towards the land, and all of a sudden those rocks looked much closer, and much much sharper than they had a few hours earlier.  The fact that the anchor had dragged the first time I had backed down on it came back to haunt me–why did it drag the first time and not the second?  I didn’t do anything differently the second time.  Was it just chance?  If I had backed down on it a third time, would it have dragged?  Given these thoughts, of course I couldn’t sleep well.

We didn’t drag that night, and everything was fine.  I paid for this lesson with lost sleep, elevated anxiety.

The next day we departed for Catalina.  We arrived at the twin harbors area the following afternoon, after a sleepless night on passage bobbing around in zero wind (yet another eventually fruitless attempt to avoid using the motor).  After checking out and dismissing the cherry cove anchorage (full of moorings, not a single spot to anchor) we radioed the harbor patrol to ask where, exactly, was a spot for us to anchor that wasn’t completely full of mooring balls.  We ended up in little fisherman cove.

Yet again, “cove” was innappropriately applied.  More like little fisherman beach, or even more accurately little fisherman bit-of-sand-next-to-more-sharp-rocks.  I positioned us equidistant from rocks and mooring balls, as far away from land as seemed sensible given that we still needed some bottom under us in which to anchor, and that the whole point again is to actually have some protection.  We set the hook, backed down, and all was well.  We went ashore, did shore stuff like shower and laundry and eat french fries, we came back to the boat and ate a great meal, we slept well, the cruising life was good that night, and in this case what I mean by that is that it was actually relaxing and free of anxiety.

Last night we woke up to the sound of our boat banging up against something–this is an unfortunate way to be awakened at 3 in the morning.  It turned out to be a mooring ball–the wind had shifted 180, and apparently our anchor rode was about thirty feet too long to come up short of the mooring ball, and forty feet too short to float past it and tangle us all up in it.  To be frank, at 3 in the morning in my underwear I could have cared less if our rode had fouled around the mooring ball, if only the damn thing wouldn’t have banged against our hull, and then I would have slept for a few more hours and the tangled mess would have at least been a post-breakfast task.

I pulled in 25 feet of our anchor rode–leaving 105 feet of anchor rode in 35 feet of water, or a scope of 3:1.  A scope of 3:1 is the minimum that I was willing to go to, given the situation (usually 5:1 is really nice and 7:1 is overkill).  The mooring ball floated about 10 feet astern of us.  I went back to sleep.  I had just enough time to fall asleep before the damned ball started banging on the hull again.  Given that I was unwilling to shorten the rode any more, I pulled out a second anchor, emptied out the cockpit locker to find the rope rode for it, tied the 300 feet of rope rode onto the anchor, dumped it into the bottom of the dinghy, spent five minutes trying to start the outboard, motored out the second anchor in the dinghy as far as I thought my rope rode would reach, lowered it to the bottom (about 70 ft), motored back to the boat . . . and ran out of rode about 15 feet away from the boat.  Spent 20 minutes pulling the rode and anchor back in, motored 30 feet closer to the boat, lowered the anchor again, went back to the boat, reached it this time, put it onto a winch, then fell asleep laying in the cockpit as karen winched the boat in a hundred feet toward the second anchor.

Moral: anchoring is a skill learned solely through trial and error, and each lesson comes at a high cost.  The price of the tuition is paid with sleeplessness anxiety and unwanted unexpected frantic activity in the middle-of-the-night.  The consequences of failure can be high.  Karen wrote a less serious post about it that I recommend, as an antidote to my worried writing . . .

In the middle of Karen and my night watch between Santa Cruz and Catalina, while we were still on the edge of the shipping lane, we were enveloped in dense fog.  I aimed us out of the shipping lane and turned on the radar, but the AIS was the true hero.

We had a 505′ container ship come up behind us doing 20 knots, and because I had the AIS and I could see where they were and where they were headed the whole time, I didn’t even have a need to hail them on the VHF, and never had any reason to worry about them.  They ended up passing less than a half mile to port of us–we never saw or heard them.  During all of this, the radar was most unhelpful.  When the ship was a mile away I could see her as a small blob on the radar (largely because I knew where to look from the AIS, and as she passed us at a half mile, the radar showed her as an amorphous blob extending for over 125 degrees worth of our horizon–as if an entire island was headed our way.

I took two screenshots from the AIS while it was happening, to show off here.  The first one shows the container ship passing us, the second one shows how we could see all sorts of other traffic headed out of LA, through which we passed uneventfully later that night.