After our friend Chris Kennedy joined us for our voyage North, we’d expected to spend at least a week sailing around the north/western Channel Islands while waiting for a weather window to dash up the coast to the San Francisco Bay area.
After a couple days of frantic “stash and lash” of all the things we’d brought aboard to take North with us, we set out for Catalina from Newport Beach Harbor’s little anchorage at the end of Lido Island just after noon on Thursday May 2oth. Our first destination was the nearest anchorage on the near side of Catalina Island since we’d gotten such a late start. We were sad to part ways with our Newport Beach mooring and anchorage neighbors Jim and Juanita on Artic Tern. They were heading South to Dana Point, then San Diego for a few days and then exiting the country for Mexico and points beyond. They left the anchorage earlier in the morning. When we exited the harbor and turned towards Catalina, we realized that with the West wind there would be no way for us to make it to our anchorage before nightfall. Too much tacking and not enough real wind for Mahdee to manage more than two knots. The weather forecast and wind pattern forecasts were for high winds of 30 knots or more on Catalina and Westward starting later that night, but lower winds along the mainland. David, Chris and I joked about just sailing the 15 or so miles down to Dana Point and surprising Artic Tern with a visit. After we all laughed, we looked at the wind indicator, looked at the measly 2 knots we were making and said “let’s do it” and changed course for Dana Point.
Picking up a little speed to 4 knots, we were pleased and continued to joke about seeing Jim and Juanita. Then, Chris said “That’s Artic Tern behind us and gaining!” Well, it turns out that they’d spent the morning at a nearby public dock getting water and doing last minute things and were just getting underway. They motor sailed up to us and discussed the situation; we told them our plans and the two boats sailed along for several hours keeping the snail’s pace Southward. Finally around 5:30 pm, both Arctic Tern and Mahdee decided to motor sail. At our speed of 8 knots, we quickly left them behind, though. They caught up to us as we spent a good hour getting the sails down. Not only were we unfamiliar with the gaff foresail, we were amazingly dimwitted about all the tasks that should be familiar and instant to dowsing the sails.
After entering Dana Point, we anchored near the Orange County Marine Institute. The small anchorage has a rocky bottom and really no holding. The sheer weight of anchor and chain were keeping us in place, but from time to time Mahdee would drag a few feet throughout the night. I spent much of the night up and down checking our position as our stern was getting very close to a tallship schooner The Spirit of Dana Point and I figured it would be bad to bump into that boat! After a 3 am trip to the foredeck to check on the anchor snubber, I became less worried when I realized the tallship had an active watch on deck all night long because of a group of school children who were camping on the boat for the night. I slept, figuring that in the light winds, they’d fend off Mahdee with no problems if we drifted further into them.
The next morning, we left Dana Point at 8 am, setting a course that could take us to Catalina or Long Beach. My druthers were to go to Long Beach because of the forecast maps I’d been studying but David and Chris were really wanting to get to the Channel Islands. As we sailed Northward, ranging in speed from a respectable 5.5 knots down to 1.2 knots by mid-afternoon, it became apparant that we’d not make it to Catalina that night either. We set our course for Long Beach with plans to anchor behind White Island, an oil processing platform strangly beautified with palm trees and a waterfall. The wind picked up around 4:15 pm and we flew at 7.5 knots towards Long Beach, dropping sails and anchoring well before sunset. As we entered the harbor, David noticed a schooner rigged gaff fore and main in the distance. Just as we dropped anchor, the schooner, Restless, sailed by us for a closer look at Mahdee. We grinned at each other, we gaffers lucky enough to be sailing schooners. “Pretty boat!” we all shouted back and forth over the water towards each other, waving and smiling. The Restlass, about Mahdee’s size and sailed single-handed by her skipper, went back out the way she had come, clearly she’d followed us in to get a “look see” at another schooner.
Because of the nasty weather forecast, we decided to stay put behind White Island in Long Beach until Monday morning. We set out our tasks to complete aboard that weekend–things that we’d planned on doing while sitting at a pretty anchorage in the Channel Islands. Ah, the best laid plans…here we sat behind an oil island in Long Beach, me sewing up jackline webbing, David installing more pad eyes on deck, and Chris getting a crash course in splicing 3 strand so he could splice the thimbles into the lazy jacks for the mainsail. We all fiddled around the weekend doing things that needed to be done. A never ending supply of tasks aboard the boat.
The wind blew strong and hard, we heard a few emergency calls of boats on the rocks on VHF channel 16 and we were glad that we were snug behind White Island on this particular weekend. We decided to leave as early as possible and so set out at 5:45 am to raise the sails and get a move on. With a wind blowing from the West (where we needed to go if headed for Catalina) 6:20 am saw us at 5 knots and we sailed a course towards the Northern Channel Island of Santa Cruz planning on anchoring on her protected Eastern side in Smugglers’ Cove. We motor sailed for the first 8 hours of our trip to keep a speed of greater than 6 knots. We shut down the engine at 2 pm with the winds driving us at 6.5 knots. At 3 pm, the clew blew out of the No. 1 jib; David and Chris spent 35 minutes taking down the sail and putting up the smaller Yankee cut jib. David decided not to attach the tricing/downhaul line to the newly hanked on jib. I worry excessively about not being able to get sails doused so I bit my lip and didn’t say anything because I figured my over-worry was not appropriate and I certainly wasn’t going to be crawling out 11 feet on the bowsprit to deal with it myself.
After the jib sail change, I noticed two sailcars were not properly lashed and Chris climbed up on the boom, securing them to the mainsail with a bit of marlin. We sailed on for an hour ranging between 4 to 6 knots and then the wind picked up to a bit over 25 knots, shifted to the Northwest and the seas shipped even more so over the foredeck, splashing against the raised deck and onto the butterfly hatches on the mid deck. We learned, after a few hours of this, that Mahdee’s deck to cabin interface can seep water through when waves are pounding on the cabinfront. No drips, just seepage. The butterfly hatch over the stove let a few drops of water in as the waves crashed over it. We later secured its latch more tightly and put “make sunbrella covers for deck hatches” a higher priority on my sewing list.
Anxious to reach our unfamiliar anchorage before dark, we sighted Anacapa Island and began calculating how long it would be before we were in the Anacapa passage and Smuggler’s cove. With a COG steady between 6.5 and 7.5 knots but increasing winds to over 30 knots had us heeling excessively, so we decided to reef by dropping the gaff rigged foresail. We’d sailed quite a bit with just the other three lowers and knew the boat’s performance thus rigged. We really didn’t want to reef both the foresail and the mainsail. So down with the foresail at 5:15 pm. We sailed on. At 7 pm, going only 5.4 knots against the seas and wind we turned back on the motor to help us get to our anchorage. The closer we sailed to the Anacapa Island and Passage the stronger the winds blew. We began to consider continuing onwards on the South side of Santa Cruz, sailing all night to reach San Miguel, heaving to and then getting into Cyuler Harbor after daybreak.
We decided to simply use the full power of the engine to tack up into Smugglers’ Cove instead. As we got closer and knew we’d be making it into the cove, David and Chris took down the mainsail and then went forward to get the jib down. I was at the helm and fighting my own little battle with the mainsail reefing line that was loosely hanging down over the cockpit and which I couldn’t manage to wrap up around the sail lashed to the boom to save my soul. As I fought with it and tried to keep the boat pointed in to the heavy wind, the reefing line would wrap itself around a spoke of the wheel and I’d instantly be backwinding the jib as I unwound the reefing line and tried yet again to get the line up over my head wrapped around the boom. It would stay there a minute and then as I struggled to get it tied off, the wind would whip it out of my hands and back down over the wheel for another go at backwinding the jib as I struggled to keep the boat pointed into the wind so David and Chris could drop the jib. I was mentally cussing out David, who had insisted that we not put an external solid wheel around the spokes because he doesn’t like the way it looks. Argh! It took about 30 minutes to get the jib down without that downhaul/tricing line. The experience was exhausting for all three of David, Chris, and I. And, there was one lone boat anchored in Smugglers’ Cove who was probably very frightened to see this big 29 ton schooner doing circles around it with an out of control jib flying. Each time the jib backwinded, it took every bit of power of the engine to bring it back into the wind.
I was actually amazed that the Cummins was able to perform the deed in the high winds. The winds seemed very high to me and as I had the WX channel on the radio that evening, I learned that the wind at the weather buoy at Anacapa Passage had been clocked within the hour of our anchoring at 38 knots. Our anchorage was right there and really didn’t seem any less windy than the Passage itself. David rescued me from the maurading reefing line at some point along the way as he came back towards midships I called out “Help me!” and he realized my odd predicament. Chris and David secured the jib on the end of the bowsprit as I turned circles around the mid section of the anchorage, both checking out the depth and keeping the boat moving at a fast enough pace that the deck was not rolling so much while the guys worked on the foredeck. Once the jib was secured, we dropped the anchor and settled in with over 250 feet of scope out in 5 fathoms of water. With the waves crashing on the rocks around the cove, I did figure that I’d not get a wink of sleep and volunteered for the night’s anchor watch.
We learned the next morning from the lone boat in the anchorage that throughout the previous afternoon and evening eight boats had tried to work their way into the anchorage but only Mahdee succeeded. All were sailing or motor sailing but none of the others had the power required to work up into that heavy wind.
Having Chris along on this trip allowed me to focus on anchor watch, navigation, log entry, cooking, fetch, carry and fix while David and Chris shared helm and foredeck duty. Though I wa busy, I felt it was a vacation not to have to help David haul and lug the big sails around. Blissful.
The weather forecast and wind charts for Point Conception and northward were showing that the next few days we should expect a few days of “no wind” or very light winds. So, while we’d originally planned to hang out a few days around Santa Cruz and San Miguel Islands, we ended up getting up Tuesday morning May 25th and motorsailing to Cojo anchorage, just Southeast of Point Conception. We motorsailed all day at between 7 and 8 knots speed against 20-25 knots of wind on the nose. I slept while David and Chris kept up the log, eating peanuts and chocolate and sharing the helm. Come late afternoon, we were close to Conception and it seemed we’d be able to keep on motorsailing. More motoring than sailing, actually. We did a pass by Cojo so we’d recognize it if we had to fall back to it and continued on Northwards. David slept in the evening for several hours and Chris sailed into a lovely moonlit night. I kept Chris company and brought him hot tea from time to time, but kept inside the charthouse for much of the late evening as Chris was dressed properly for the cold and I was not. David took the helm at midnight and ran until early morning. I navigated and kept up the log, feeding David hot coffee and we decided to bypass Port San Luis and Morrow Bay to keep moving North while our weather window lasted. We were motorsailing (mostly motoring) at between 5.5 and 8 knots, settling in at an average 6.8 knots. We were very happy to pass by the coastline with Big Sur with very little to no wind at all. We’d heard stories from other sailors of heavy winds driving from the North West towards the steep cliffs of that part of the coast with no refuge anchorages. We decided that we’d make it to San Simeon, happy that we were moving along so nicely and still no sign of a Northwest wind. Then we settled on going Northwards even further to Monterey Bay. Our timing was bad for entering the Monteray Bay anchorage was such that we’d be there just at sunset. Hopefully enough before that we’d be able to see our way.
As our luck has been consistent, we have limited winds all day until time to enter our anchorage and then the winds kick up to a “challenging” level for dowsing the sails. We anchored in the very rolly Monterey anchorage. It is outside of the harbor proper and would be a nasty lee shore situation in a Northwest wind. I spoke with the harbormaster on the radio who confirmed that we’d be expected to have light winds from the southwest for the next two days so we coud rest easy. The harbormaster offered us a berth inside the harbor if we’d like for the next day. We’ve been trying to avoid slips as the rates are typically around $1/ft/day which can cut into our budget quite quickly.
We were thrilled to have made it nonstop from Santa Cruz Smugglers’ Cove to Monterey anchorage in 36 hours and felt the rest of our travels to the San Francisco Bay area could be more relaxing.
We rocked and rolled through the night in Monterey anchorage, David took anchor watch duties and ran a bridle from a winch along the cockpit combing to the anchor chain foward to calm the rolling action. It worked to some degree but needed attention as the wind shifted against the wave action even more so. In the morning, Chris and I were rested but David was tired. We decided to not buy fuel in Monterey Harbor at $3.80/gallon but rather to go on to Half Moon Bay/Pillar Point Harbor where it was $3.14/gallon. As we sailed up the coast with a brisk Southwest breeze pushing us along at a nice 7 knots with only the main, staysail and yankee jib. Within an hour we were heeling excessively and taking waves over the bow though our speed was less than 8 knots. We reefed the mainsail to the second reefing point and maintained 7.5 knots for about 30 minutes until we outran the wind and rainstorm providing all the wind. Our speed sank to 4 knots and we debated what to do–wait for the storm to catch up? We put up the gaff foresail and increased speed to 5.1 knots for a while. Shook out the reef in the main two hours later. By 2:00 pm, though, we were becalmed in rolling swell and wondering how long it would be before we’d catch some more wind. We were only 11 nm from Ano Nuevo, a famous elephant seal rookery with a sheltered bight protected by rocks and kelp extending SE from the point. We decided that we’d be sheltered from the likely SW wind that night so we turned on the Cummins engine and began a motorsail over to Ano Nuevo. We anchored in 5 fathoms with a rocky bottom. We’d expected sand but could feel that it was rocky and we were surrounded by kelp beds in the fairly protected spot.
The place was really lovely, a farmhouse up on the hillside, lots of cliffs, rocks, trees, and green. Sea otters swam nearby and one sea otter spent the evening having his dinner in the kelp bed just a boat length away from us. I took several pictures but haven’t uploaded them to the computer yet.
The swell rolled in from the South, but all in all, a safe place to spend the night. I took bearings, entered waypoints into the Matrix AIS radio and took the anchor watch for the night. The boat rolled 10 degrees to port and 5 degrees to starboard most the night long. We didn’t want to set another anchor nor did we want to run a bridle so we just dealt with it. We had everything set for a “quick getaway” since we knew we weren’t anchored in an ideal spot in all that rock. It is lucky the CQR was catching and holding anything. But, the gps track I ran that night shows that we didn’t move more that 60 ft in any direction from a center point. Considering we had out 200 feet of chain in 5 fathoms, I figure we didn’t budge. We are used to spending 30 minutes cleaning all the mud and grime off our anchor chain as it comes up. However, in this anchorage, there was no mud holding us. In the morning, David pulled up the anchor and found the chain and anchor clean as a whistle with only a giant starfish clinging to it. He removed the starfish before it could get caught up in the anchor roller and we were off for another day’s sail.
We sailed on Northwards to Pillar Point Harbor of Half Moon Bay. As we got close, I called the harbormaster to arrange for a mooring or slip or anchorage. The moorings are limited to 45 foot boats so we decided that a slip would work for us. At $0.70/ft it was a bit more affordable than other spots. We’d planned on showering in the marina after checking into a slip. However, the winds were up a bit when we came into the harbor and we noted that the anchoring area was wide open. So, we anchored rather than pulling into a slip and started a fire in the stove to heat up water for our showers. Knowing that we were adjacent a water supply, we each had a long, hot shower here on the boat. Specifically 4 gallons each (the full solar shower waterbag) Ahhhh. Nice and clean.
After getting into Pillar Point Harbor, we decided the small harbor town atmosphere was very nice and that we’d be happy to spend the long holiday weekend at Pillar Point rather than in San Francisco. David and Chris rowed over to the inner harbor on Saturday and went on a quest for fresh vegetables for us. They had nice little adventure and came back with apples, oranges, onions, carrots, and two kinds of lettuce. Heaven. It was very windy when they returned and a nice fellow from the Half Moon Bay Yacht Club actually gave them a tow since he seemed to feel sorry for them rowing in all the wind.
On Sunday, David and Chris rigged up Tinker (our inflatable Henshaw Tinker Traveller) and sailed around the harbor. That weekend, We also kicked back and watched (on my laptop computer) a couple of sailing films: Captain Ron and The World Twice Around (about the Brazilian Schurmann family following the path of Magellan). Monday, we went to the Half Moon Bay Yacht club for their chili dinner (yummy!) and the three of us sailed Tinker over to see an aquaintance from San Diego who built a schooner of similar size to Mahdee. We toured his schooner and then sailed Tinker back to Mahdee in the fog. With hardly any wind, eventually, Chris and I each took up an oar and paddled while David steered with the rudder. So much for dingy sailing in the evening.
Tuesday saw us up bright and early; excited to sail under the Golden Gate Bridge later that day. The winds were good, starting out at around 10 knots and growing to about 25 by the time we sailed under the bridge just after noon. We went under the bridge, Wing-on-wing (main to starboard, gaff foresail to port, staysail and jib to starboard) flying in at almost 11 knots. 1.5 knots of current, the rest wind. We were facinated by the spiky tidal rips under the bridge and dodged the ferry traffic as we continued into the bay. As we turned south and passed under the Bay bridge to sail South to the marina we’d arranged to leave Mahdee in for several days while we visited my brother and picked up our car, Buttercup, we realized that we’d likely have to anchor and wait for the winds (which were now up around 25 knots with gusts over 35 knots) to die a bit before entering the unfamiliar narrow and shallow channel to Brisbane Marina. We dropped the hook adjacent the channel in 4 fathoms and sat back to have dinner and watch the beer can races. The winds died at 7 pm and we motored into the marina with no problems. Since the marina office was closed, a nice fellow on an adjacent boat lent us his shower key for the evening. Ah, more hot showers. More heaven.
On Wednesday, Chris hopped a ride with his daughter (who was passing through the Bay area on her way back to her home in Eureka) and David and I took off for a driving adventure. More on that later.
We had an awesome trip up the coast, learned a lot about Mahdee and really look forward to our next lengthy trip.
