Wednesday 16th.
We left our mooring buoy at Morro Bay around 09:30 for the overnight passage to LA. We were actually heading for Oxnard which is an hours drive north of Venice Beach. I couldn’t find a cheap berth in LA proper, and this seemed like a good alternative. We had originally considered Ventura, but this was closer to LA and more importantly to me, Mexico.
This passage was about 130 miles, which is about 26 hours at 5 knots speed. So by leaving at 9:30 we should arrive in the early afternoon the next day.
The official weather forecast from NOAA had gales predicted for Thursday night and Friday, so I didn’t want to linger. The sea state was good now but would deteriorate on the passage, but nothing too bad and nothing we hadn’t handled before. I was looking forward to about 15-25 knots of wind from behind, making for a fast passage.
We got the sails up as soon as we left the breakwater. with the wind aft of the beam (from behind) we were making good progress.
By the afternoon the wind had picked up more and the swell was growing, and for some unknown reason to me the autohelm started giving up, I took the helm, got us back on course , but it happened again fairly quickly. So out came the wind vane for the monitor self steering. I hadn’t used this in a while and it took a bit of fiddling to get it running, but once I did, the boat steered a great course south. I hit my bunk around 8pm leaving Kathy on watch, but around 11pm she woke me as we had gone way off course, a lull in the wind had caused the wind steering to fail. I fixed this and then started my midnight watch a little early and Kathy hit the sack.
A few hours later the predicted gale started to appear and winds were gusting to 25/30 knots. We were now in the middle of a load of oil/gas platforms that inhabit this part of the coast. I had managed to get a double reef into the mainsail, and we only had the staysail out, but we were hitting over 10 knots according to the GPS and that’s a lot for this boat, so I decided to furl up the staysail a bit. Unfortunately, the furling line was taught and I couldn’t pull it in. A quick trip to the bow revealed the furling line had come off the drum and wrapped around under/inside the drum and was far too tight for me to pull out by hand. Back in the cockpit I could see the wind was still strengthening and the seas building, it was starting to get a bit worrying, so I grabbed a torch, it was quite dark out, and a sailors knife and headed back to the bow. Sitting on the bow platform above the bowsprit, with the aid of the torch, I could see that the line was wrapped around the forestay several times below the furling drum, and I spent half an hour feeding the rope back through the drum, undoing the tension, while the rather rough sea was bouncing me around. Eventually it was all back on the drum. All the time we had been sailing directly towards an oil rig, it was looking pretty big now. The thing with oil rigs is that they are so bright in the sea, they look a lot closer than they actually are, at least that was my plan/hope.
Back in the cockpit things were getting worse, the wind steering was struggling and we were heeled over much more than I liked, the rails were close to the water. Furling the sail on my own was going to be difficult in the strong wind, so I called for Kathy to get out of her bunk and head on up to help me. This worried her a lot as I rarely need to call for help, and she was being thrown around in the cabin getting ready to come on deck. I had the usual explaining that we weren’t going to die etc etc but could she control the sheets while I winched in the staysail. once the staysail was mostly in, and with the fully reefed mainsail, the boat settled, I could get us back on course and everything was fine again, Kathy went back to bed, although it took a while for her to relax and fall asleep. Before Kathy headed below she took the helm for a bit while I worked on the windvane, unfortunately Kathy managed a crash Jibe, this wasn’t that bad, and only happened because I had undone the preventer from the starboard side of the boat, this is a rope that tames the boom when we might Jibe, I had forgotten to re-attach it after all the flapping (literally) with the headsail. A few hours later when the wind should have been really strong, it disappeared and we had to turn the motor on, which we used until sunrise when there was enough wind to sail again.
Arriving at Oxnard was simple, as we travel south the bars at the harbour entrances get less serious, this one looked a bit wild as we approached, but once around the breakwater it was very calm. Motoring into the Marina complex it was staggering to see so many boats here, perhaps a few thousand. In fact there are a few marinas and yacht clubs at Oxnard, and beyond them the water flows around a massive housing development where every house backs onto the water and has its own dock/pontoon.
Looking over the boat later I found the solar powered vent above the shower room had smashed off the coachroof leaving a 3.5″ diameter hole in the deck.
Also the line for the staysail furler had shredded its outer braid.
More about LA later.
Paul Collister.