sailing casita

Day 1

We departed (on time!!) from Alameda at 07:30 on Sunday, July 31st 2022. We motored out the Gate and then turned south. Once we were clear of the shipping lanes we raised the sails and turned off the motor. It is always so wonderful to be under sail, with only the sound of the water and the wind.

The first day was pretty uneventful, at first we found ourselves close hauled in light air but eventually the wind clocked around to the NW and we were able to set the spinnaker for a while. Eventually we ended up running dead downwind wing and wing with the main and the jib poled out.

One of the major upgrades we made shortly before this trip was upgrading our autopilot and boy were we loving it! We were pretty tired from being up late the night before with last minute preparations so we both did a little napping, not at the same time of course!

The fog came on pretty thick that night so we were very very glad to have our radar and a new loudhailer that we had installed just a few weeks prior. We were happy to have the loudhailer but listening to it for 8 hours straight we could have done without.

Sometime around 4am or so I posted this on our Predict Wind tracking page:

The return was a big blob that was shifting directions and shape and at times was closing the distance between us quite rapidly. I was pretty sure it wasn’t a boat but it’s pretty freaky heading straight toward an unknown in the pitch black and fog. We ended up concluding it was a couple squalls, which I need to get better at recognizing on the radar. The rest of the night was uneventful.

Day 2

Day 2 was pretty mellow, the weather was beautiful with lots of sun.

We spotted some humpback whales slapping the water with their fins. Devon spent a lot of time coaxing our solar panels to work. We did a lot of fishing, but unfortunately no catching so I made pasta for dinner. We sailed most of the day but the wind starting dying off in the evening and by 9pm it was almost completely still. We had about a 3 foot swell, which was fine except swell and no wind = slapping sails. After listening to the main slatting back and forth for an hour I started the engine and we motored through the night.

Day 3

The third day started out with no wind and stayed that way until the afternoon so unfortunately we did a lot of motoring. On the bright side, the water was very calm so I was able to get some nice footage of some dolphin pods that visited us!

The weather models were predicting winds increasing in the afternoon along with a mixed swell, the usual NW swell and a short period S swell from a category 1 hurricane (Frank) off the Mexican coast. The wind took a long time to arrive but once it did it went from maybe 5 knots to 20 gusting to 25 pretty quickly. We raised the sails and shut the motor off, then put a reef in the main and switched from jib to staysail. We were making great time and we started to worry that we would reach our destination (Prisoner’s Harbor) before dawn. We put a 2nd reef in the main and furled the staysail but that didn’t slow us down much. The predicted NW swell had also arrived, about 5 or 6 feet and fairly short period. We were running almost dead downwind so the swell was pushing us about quite a bit. By this time we had entered the Santa Barbara Channel with the mainland to port and San Miguel and Santa Rosa Islands to starboard. It was still looking like we would arrive in the dark so we decided to take a less direct route by gybing our way down the SB Channel.

Gybing is pretty much never fun (to me anyway) but gybing with the strong, gusty winds combined with the steep swell in the pitch black (it was around 1am) could actually be dangerous to us or to the boat. Our solution was to “chicken gybe” by turning broadside to the wind then continue turning until we tacked and ended up in a broad reach on the other tack. This maneuver would briefly put us broadside to the waves, which might be uncomfortable, but in the current conditions it did not pose a danger. Well it all sounded good in theory but we weren’t quite able to complete the tack, I’m sure this was due to the loss of speed from the maneuver and both headsails being furled. So we kind of got stuck, with no speed through the water we lost steerage and we ended up just sitting there. Then we noticed that everything seemed to have calmed down a few notches and we weren’t being pushed around so much by the waves.

That’s when it struck us, we were hove to! I know, it should have been obvious but hey, we were both sleep deprived. So we just stayed hove to and it was great, until the southerly swell arrived. Then it became really uncomfortable. Like being in a washing machine but with erratic motion on all three axes, not just two. We stayed hove to until we got underway at 3am, figuring we would arrive at Prisoner’s Harbor between 7am and 8am. The wind had started to calm down and then it just kept calming down and down until we could hardly sail so we ended up motorsailing (really just motoring with the main up) the last few hours. We had the anchor down by 7:30, we were both exhausted and happy to have arrived!