Amazingly, a lot can be accomplished while one is sitting around an anchorage twiddling one’s thumbs. Huh? you might ask. What am I talking about? Well, lets see. We had a nice sail down the coast from San Simeon to Port San Luis. The day started off with fog and a slow go (4 knots) but after a couple hours the fog burned off, the wind was steady and we sailed downwind at between 6 and 8 knots most of the way. Towards the end of the afternoon, winds were kicking up and we were seeing something closer to 10 knots. My goal was to average 5 knots to make it to Port San Luis by sunset and we had no problems meeting that.
The waves were forecast for 6-8 ft swell/12 s and 1-3 ft wind waves. Pretty much that was it. After getting into the calm of Port San Luis, we anchored, kicked back and expected to stay an extra day because the forecast was for 9-11 ft swell/13 s with 2 ft wind wave which we really didn’t feel like going ’round Pt Arguello and Pt Conception in. We figured we’d wait for the day afters’ smaller 7-9 swell/13 s +2 windwaves. We noted that the same trawler we’d seen anchored in Carmel and who’d shown up for a night in San Simeon was already anchored here at Port San Luis. We’d heard him on the radio talking to another trawler about his plan to be at Dana Point (just North of San Diego) on October 1st. So, figured he’d be waiting out the same swell as us. Indeed he did. We waited, waited, waited. Now it’s been 4 days of waiting. In theory we’ll be leaving tomorrow morning (the 5th day). We’d planned on leaving today and when we went to bed last night I secured everything so that all we’d have to do is jump up, haul the anchor, grab coffee and a granola bar and go.
However, bang, bang, bang in the night the big rollers came into the harbor. Around midnight I checked the weather–a new Small Craft Advisory for big seas was set by NOAA/NWS for the night with West swells of 12-13 ft at 13 second interval plus wind from the Northwest. I turned off the alarm clock and slept in today. It turns out the seas mellowed out and were 8-10 at 14s in the morning and nearby buoy readings were around 7 ft at a wonderfully long 22 s in the afternoon/evening. Ah…tomorrow should be good.
So, what does one get done while hanging out “waiting” at anchor? This time, I sewed a section of bolt rope that was loosening on the foresail, re-connected a privateer knot on the foot of the mainsail, David re-did a downhaul on the mainsail and we did a few other little maintenance things. The BIG thing that happened was we turned on the EU2000 and spent hours and hours and hours playing with the SSB radio as well as three different weather fax (on computer) programs on three different computers and four different operating systems (my laptop has Windows7 as well as Ubuntu Linux dual boot, David’s computer has Debian Linux, the Nokia N810 using MAEMO). After all the playing around, we managed to finally get the best weatherfax images with an open source program called HamFax on my laptop running Ubuntu.
The other “notable” thing was that we managed to finally get the wireless router set up so my EVDO cel phone attached to my laptop running Ubuntu rather than Windows can provide Internet access for anything on the boat (e.g. David’s Nokia or any other computer turned on). In the past, I’d have to pull out my old Sony Vaio notebook computer and have it act as the EVDO access point. Small but important to get that done. Now, we can tear apart the Vaio, finally installing its new hard drive and take the old Windows 95 OS off without worry that the boat will be offline. This particular project has been just hanging out there for far too long.
Final stuff done–catching up with professional (and non-professional) reading. I think we’re all the way up to the periodicals in April/May 2010. Amazing. A few more days stuck at anchor with not much to do and we might be “current.”
Port San Luis has some lovely sunsets.
