Logs & Stories -  November 2001

November 7th - In Monterey Harbor

 (Email from Bill & Karryn via Internet Cafe)

We left San Francisco Bay five days ago after being there six weeks, most of it in Berkeley. The whole experience was wonderful.

Here's an accounting of the time: - 31 days in Berkeley on a dock next to Marine Corps veteran Jon Dye and his magnificent Monk ketch, 16 of those while Karryn and Naomi were in Seattle ($16/night). - 4 days in Berkeley tied to the Berkeley Yacht Club. - 5 days in Richmond on a dock ($16/night). - 3 days in Sausalito, one at anchor, on at a yacht club mooring, and the third at a marina dock ($40/night).

Berkeley wins our vote for "Best City to Visit". The marina is located a short bus ride from downtown Berkeley, a small, unpretentious city with easy access to a boater's essentials (laundry, groceries, propane, ice, rental cars, and a small chandlery). It has a nice, mixed-use sort of feel, with the docks populated by a variety of tenants - racing sailors, liveaboards, landlocked cruisers, recreational fishing charter boats, even houseboats. Berkeley sits in what must be one of the most scenic spots anywhere, with an outstanding view of the Golden Gate and San Francisco. Because we had beautiful, summer-like weather most of our stay, nearly every night we were treated to a spectacular sunset, with glowing reds and oranges cast behind rolling Marin County mountains, the majestic Golden Gate Bridge, and the building-block San Francisco skyline. Ann, the marina's harbormaster, was particularly kind to us by letting us stay past the normal limit due to Naomi's surgery and recovery. I had been tense about the prospect of having to frequently move from marina to marina with only nine-year-old Jackson to help handle lines, a task that seemed especially daunting when our first days on the Bay brought twenty knot winds.

Our stay here was made delightful by frequent visits from friends, both new and old. Jon, the owner of the neighboring Monk ketch, became a frequent companion, either during the day when either of us was working on some boat project, or later in the evening when relaxing after dinner. Paul, owner of a very fast Merit 25, Singlehanded Transpac veteran, ocean racer and writer for Latitude 38, was kind enough to invite me boating on the Bay on four occasions (three times racing with him on 'Twilight Zone", and once on Seafire as race committee for a Sunday race). Both Jon and Paul got along wonderfully with Karryn and the kids.

We also had quite a bit on contact with folks we'd known before: Frank Adams, William Rodarmor, Robert Lafore and his daughter Becca, all of whom had known my family at the time we sailed Sorceress, a 40 foot Piver Victress trimaran, to Tahiti in 1970. We'd kept in fairly constant contact with William over the years, but I'd seen neither Frank nor the Lafores since. The whole experience was wonderful; our shared lives of thirty years ago made seeing them feel like finding long-lost favorite family members after a long separation. Our first visit was in Tomales Bay, before passing under the Golden Gate, when William, Robert and wife Joanie, Becca and partner John, came to greet us on a windy, foggy, Point Reyes afternoon. Our last was in Santa Cruz after leaving the Bay, when Frank, wife Sue and eight-year-old daughter Miranda took us to dinner after a sunny afternoon. Totally terrific.

We were also visited by out-of-town friends while Karryn and Naomi were in Seattle. Russ and Jeanette, owner/builders of another Searunner, visited us by car on their way back to their boat in Mexico, offering brief transportation, cooking lessons, stories about horror on the Oregon and California coasts, and advice about getting past Big Sur in one piece. I'd hoped they would stay and cruise the Bay with me, but their busy schedule compelled them to leave after just a few days. Michele Douglass with son Clayton and friend Ginger and her son Ryan were able to stop in one afternoon and help me take Seafire on a whirlwind tour of Angel Island with a quick peek at Alcatraz. Since this was in the period when Karryn and Naomi were in Seattle, and the only other adult I had any contact with was retired Marine sergeant Jon Dye, you can imagine how much I appreciated the visits.

I kept working steadily at a number of boat projects, the most significant of which was to install the autopilot.

Our departure from the Bay was somewhat unplanned. Mom had joined us five days earlier for a two-week visit, very much wanting to see Monterey, 100 miles to the south. We'd had dinner with the Lafores after docking the boat overnight in Sausalito, awoke the next morning to predictions of continuing good weather, and decided to depart to take advantage of it. We'd been thinking about visiting a few other parts of the Bay, but our gale experience off the northern California coast (with gusts over 50 knots and rogue waves of 30 feet) had left an impression on us.

With the exception of pea-soup fog, leaving the Golden Gate was about as straightforward as entering it had been. We motored south to Half Moon Bay, anchored shortly before sundown, and then left at the crack of dawn bound for Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz was neat. For those of you that don't know, the harbor there has legendary status among West Coast racing sailors. It is the home of Bill Lee, father of the modern ultra-light production sailboat. Thirty years ago Bill Lee was designing and building small, light, inexpensive boats that were super-radical, and terrorizing the stuffy yacht club establishment of the era. Just outside the harbor strong 20-knot northwesterlies blow all summer long and carry in large Pacific swells, which for the racers put a premium on surfing abilities. The conditions not only created terrific boats, they created terrific sailors as well, with many of the West Coast's best sailors developing and improving their skills in this area.

In addition to an enormous number of Bill Lee designed boats, the harbor also had a relatively large number of Searunner trimarans. It is interesting to me that while Seattle's multihull community is monotonously dominated by Farrier folding boats, these craft have been almost nonexistent in the coastal marinas we've visited. The northern and central California harbors we've visited have a nice array of multihull designs, with Jim Brown's Searunner series being the most common but also strong representation of Marples, Cross, Horstman, Crowther, and Hughes designs. I suspect the coastal conditions put greater demands on the boats.

After a two-night stay at Santa Cruz, we departed for Monterey, a 22-mile passage. We had a great sail across the Monterey Bay, a broad reach with 12-foot swells and winds gusting into the mid-20's. Monterey, founded in 1770, is the second oldest Spanish settlement in California, having been settled a year after San Diego. The town is beautiful, having preserved and enhanced the older architecture of the region. In addition, the 6000 foot deep Monterey Canyon, a short distance offshore, has been the inspiration for both a world-class aquarium and a great deal of environmental activism. The water life in the area was amazing: the marina has a huge population of sea lions, which have the distinction of swimming in schools and leaping out of the water in a dolphin-esque manner. They were less appealing when we were downwind, and on more than one occasion they were rather startling when one surfaced right next to the dock when we were walking back to the boat in the dark. There were at least two sea otters that hung around the marine, one of which would sleep, floating on its back, in the innermost part of the harbor next to the boat ramp.

November 29th - In Channel Islands (Oxnard) Harbor

After spending a few days touristing around Monterey, Mom left us to take the train back to Bellingham, and we turned our attention toward making the 200-mile passage down the Big Sur coast to Santa Barbara. Our all-too-vivid gale experience off Cape Mendocino two months earlier (50-knot winds, 30-foot seas) had left us with a huge respect for the exposed portions of the California coast, and the McElroy's tale of their 70-knot gale off Point Sur (they'd had to set a parachute sea anchor) reinforced our caution. We had to spend another five nights in Monterey waiting for favorable weather. During the first couple of days, several lows had blown through, carrying with them unfavorable southerly winds. In the final days of waiting a severe depression in the Gulf of Alaska sent in large westerly swells which kept the Monterey Bay fishermen at the dock and turned the only possible Big Sur anchorages (Point Pfieffer, San Simeon, and Morro Bay) into surfing beaches.

We finally left Monterey on November 17, Karryn's 41st birthday, just after two cruising boats, which had been waiting along with us. Much of the passage was in fog or haze; we didn't get to see the coastline until late afternoon Saturday, and then only briefly. We sailed only for a few hours, the wind dying completely in the late afternoon. After sunset we were treated to an amazing night. The moonless sky brought out the Milky Way during the clear periods, and then turned to total blackness when the fog moved in. Repeatedly over several hours during the pitch-black night we saw dolphins streaking in from abeam the boat like torpedoes, glowing from the phosphorescence, stopping immediately in front of Seafire and swimming along with us. Initially it would only be a pair, then others would join the first two. During one session we stood on the bow for a half-hour while nearly two dozen of the animals played in front of us, bodies outlined in bright light, alternatively swimming between the amas, then darting to the side out of sight, three contrails from the hulls streaming astern and disappearing into the foggy blackness.

We rounded Point Conception mid-morning, and decided to stop at Cojo anchorage, a mile and a half to the east, because it wasn't certain we'd reach Santa Barbara before nightfall. Cojo is a wonderful place, the beginning of Southern California, air suddenly warmer and dryer, the cove protected from the prevailing northwesterly swell and winds, a beautiful beach with desert mountains to the north. We spent the day there, enjoying the scenery and climate, only one other ship in the large anchorage.

We made the passage to Santa Barbara early the next day, the scenery getting lovelier as we went eastward. From the ocean, Santa Barbara looks like Southern California paradise: high, somewhat green mountains, palm trees, a hill overlooking the harbor, no tall buildings. We stayed there seven nights, initially relaxing, going to the beach and generally enjoying the accomplishment of having gotten down the most challenging portions of the US west coast. After five days of leisure the weather got stormy and wet (1.7 inches of rain in about 8 hours, 1.2 of those in one hour), and we turned our attention to our next project: overhauling our 22-year old mast. We'd been concerned about finding a boatyard where we'd be able to pull the mast out of the boat, paint it, and remove and rebed the many fasteners. After a number of inquiries, we chose Channel Islands (Oxnard) because of its marine facilities and proximity to grocery stores and laundry facilities. We've been here for two days now and expect to pull the mast tomorrow morning.

The Editor had planned on using the SSB to send e-mail, as the harbor here is spread out with narrow waterways and without the forest of masts to interfere with signal propagation. However, I realized about half a day later that the mast will not be on the boat - no mast, no SSB antenna. Add another item to the to-do list: find Internet access!