Syzygy Sailing

(post dated–this post refers to events on 3/7)

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?

some images and video between Ensenada and La Cruz

(writing this at the nav table, in a slip at Baja Naval, Ensenada, BC, MX; these are some disconnected notes and observations regarding the 1.5 day passage from San Diego to Ensenada)

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.

Pete and Ray hopped a ferry on Catalina to catch a plane out of L.A. this past Saturday.  Karen and I are extremely grateful to them for joining us during the first leg of our journey.  Their mere presence on board to assist with watches would have been more than enough, but their assistance extended far beyond that.  Pete fixed (finally, for real) our engine overheating problem, fixed the ssb, spliced the radar wiring together, repaired the windlass after I broke it, and got our outboard running, and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head.  Pete is better at working on boats than anyone I have either met or even heard of.  I consider myself pretty capable at this point, but I felt like a novice apprentice in the presence of Pete.  Together, Pete and Ray gave us great advice at every turn, and while we are understandably very excited to be off on our own, we will sorely miss Pete and Ray.  Thanks Pete and Ray!

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.

I’m writing this post from a cafe in Santa Barbara.  We left the slip in the Emeryville Marina on the morning of Wednesday the 10th, filled our diesel tank with fuel, then motored straight out of the bay.

For the first 24 hours after pulling out of that slip, I was constantly waiting for something to break, or someone to make us go back, or perhaps even for someone to wake me up from a dream.  After everything that goes into this project and after so many setbacks problems letdowns and asskickers, the scalded and scarred side of me made it impossible to believe in the moment when that moment came.  Only in retrospect can I say with confidence that 2/10/10 was the day we left.  For good.

The weather was kind to us.  A third of the time we had enough wind for decent sailing, a third of the time the wind was super light and the only sail we could keep full was Jon’s drifter; here’s some footage of Jon’s sail doing her thing:

Big props Jon for that sail–nothing else would have worked and that sail is the BOMB.

A third of the time there wasn’t enough wind to fill any sail.  As mentioned in an earlier post, the weather off the west coast this time of year can be rough, so we elected to keep moving forward, even if we had to turn on the engine to do so.  You may recall that earlier in the week our departure was thwarted by an overheating engine; after 25 hours worth of motoring in which the engine temp never went above 167, it’s safe to say that the overheating problem has been fixed.

We rounded Point Conception in the middle of the day yesterday–Point Conception is the spot on the California coast where the land takes a sharp turn to the east.  After Point Conception, the wind drops, the temperatures rise, and the winter storms in the pacific become less of a worry.  I had been warned to be cautious with the rounding–it sticks right out there in the pacific, so the wind and seas are frequently big and dangerous.  After days of light wind, I must grudgingly admit that I was rather hoping for something dramatic.  We approached the point with barely enough wind to fill the drifter by itself; less than an hour later we were speeding along at 8 knots, surfing to 10, under a full genoa and double reefed main.  8 knots on land isn’t very impressive–8 knots in my boat feels like the boat is trying to lift off and fly right out of the ocean.  It was a glorious day.  And the boat was glorious.  She sailed herself (with the Monitor windvane at the helm), and we kicked back and had a beer while the boat surfed the waves and, to be blunt, hauled ass.  It was something else, watching the boat sail herself in conditions that would have had a human skipper working hard at the wheel.  It was something great, is what it was.

It was a dark night full of stars last night, and we were still sailing fast when Pete and Ray called Karen and I away from making dinner in the galley, to join them on the bow.  The stars were bright, the bow and the ocean were inky black, and the school of dolphins was enveloped in a glowing phosphorence as they played with our bow, swimming along with us, zipping back and forth and over and under each other, racing Syzygy in the ocean.  As they swam the the phosphorescence formed a cocoon of light around their bodies which trailed off behind them, like a comet’s tail.  Their motions made a whishing sort of sound, like a dozen torpedoes through the water, much louder than I could have expected.  That sound testified to the speed and power of their swimming.  They were fast.  So fast . . . When picturing how such an experience would appear, I never thought about the sound, and I never realized how ridiculously strong a water creature would have to be to move so fast and agilely through the water.  Dolphins are powerful, the experience was powerful.

We reached Santa Barbara at 3am last night.  Driving straight towards thousands of lights on shore in the middle of the night is tricky–you’re used to miles and miles of empty space all around and all of a sudden you are so close you could damn near throw a rock onto dry land.  There’s nothing worse for a boat than dry land–except maybe a container ship–and it is oh so hard to see anything in the ocean at night until you can almost reach out and touch it.  Anyway, it may have seemed like I was warming you the reader up to some climax in which I ran our boat hard aground after the very first passage, but fortunately not.  I learned two important lessons though:
1) don’t make landfall at night unless you absolutely have to.
2) don’t break your windlass.  While setting the anchor in the dark and in my tiredness, I made the mistake of backing down on our anchor at nearly full speed.  That’s 23 thousand pounds of boat coming to a rapid stop, and the windlass took the brunt of that force.  When the chain came violently taut it totally mangled our windlass–the same windlass that we painstakingly dismantled and serviced with loving care last month.  I think that we can fix it back to some working state, but it hurts my heart to have messed it up right at the end of an otherwise beautiful passage.  However.  If that was our payment for the rest of the otherwise safe and successful passage, I pay it gladly.

So for tonight we are at a slip in the marina here, as we bent various bits of the windlass back into place (I say we but actually I think Pete may finish the job in the time it takes me to finish this post).  It’s warm and sunny, and life feels really really good to me right now.