Aries 32 - Thistledown
Here's my first mass-email for my sailing trip... let me know if you don't want to recieve these, or if you get it second hand and do want more, or if your email address changes or whatever. maybe I will try one of those blog things...
so, the trip has begun, I moved everything I own onto my boat, installed the last of my can't-do-without cruising gear (mostly the monitor windvane), loaded up on groceries, filled the water tank, got my sails back from the sailmaker, and started sailing down the coast. Thomas Cannon came with, an old co-worker from snapfish. We left around 2pm on thursday, november 3, headed for half moon bay. We were figuring on staying here a night or two, and then heading for santa barbara.
We caught the ebb tide on the way out the gate, starting off making good time, but the weather was not in our favour. We had a head-wind coming down the coast, which is a-typical for this trip. We made long tacks back and forth, and ended up sailing all night just to make this 15 mile hop.
I'd made this trip with Thomas before, on his modified hereschoff 29' ketch. We had similar headwinds when we did it that time as well, although that time we made it into port around 10pm, instead of 10am. The headwinds are why I should have left earlier (although I wasn't ready). As we get later into winter, I've been told that the wind will either be dead calm, or it will be strong in the wrong direction. The day after we arrived in half moon bay though, there were good northerly winds, so there may still be some good weather left. Once we get south of point conception (santa barbara) the weather should be o.k. again... as well as warmer, and maybe drier.
On the way down the coast, a weld on my boomkin broke. This is a stainless steel frame extending beyond the back of the boat, supporting the backstay. the backstay is a wire going from the back of the boat to the top of the mast, holding the mast up. when the weld broke, the boomkin bent upwards, until it was pressed against my monitor self-steering windvane (installed just days before). If the windvane hadn't been there, the boomkin probably would have continued to bent upwards until it ripped off the boat and the mast came tumbling down (very bad). I'm pretty bumbed, because now I'm stuck in half moon bay looking for a welder to get repairs, but in a way I'm lucky I didn't lose the whole rig. It's also probably better that it happened here, rather than in some remote island where it might be hard to find repairs.
We had quite a few minor problems besides the boomkin; The throttle connection on my engine stopped working, leaving us in very-high throttle coming into harbour. We ended up killing the engine and sailing to the anchorage with just the jib. I'm finding that it's pretty easy to manuvuer the boat around with just a jib, and it's so easy to roll the jib or let it go forward to de-power. A shackle broke on a block for my windvane lines (we ended up hand steering the last bit into half moon bay), and one of the tails on my windex came loose. We couldn't really get a good sail shape on the new jib, because the leach was too long and my fairlead tracks don't slide forward. The reefing lines on the mainsail squeaked *very* loudly all night, I think just because one of the reefing blocks needs some oil or adjustment or something... I had thought at the time that some piece of metal in the boom was creaking and might break, but now I think it was just a squeaky block.
Since I've been here, I did some work on the boat. I loosened my backstay and bent the boomkin into place, and I made a couple of templates for pieces of steel I'm going to get welded into the boomkin for reinforcement; I'll have the welder make these and weld them in as soon as he's available. I drilled out the locking holes in my jib-sheet track so I can lock the jib fairleads in new positions. This was anoying because I'm running my drill through an inverter and it kept throwing my circuit breaker. I moved a couple of fairleads from my aft track to the forward track, and just drilled a couple of oversized holes, hopefully in the correct spots for the new jib sheeting angles. When working on the jib fairlead track, I had to remove a couple of screws that stuck up too far (so I could get the block off the aft track), and so I filled in the holes with penetrating epoxy; since I had some left-over, I dribbled some around my handrails and into the cockpit-coaming scuppers, hoping it might clog some of my deck leaks (I plan to more thoroughly fix my leaking deck when I get to mexico). I fixed my throttle control problem, the morse cable had come loose at the cockpit end (I'd just fixed the engine end of the connection a week before). I spent a little more time looking at my transmission, but I'm hoping to wait at least till santa barbara to really work on that more. If the welder doesn't show up soon, I'll probably fix my windex and oil my reefing block.
I got sea-sick on my way down the coast, but it wasn't completely un-bearable. I was queasy most of the time, and avoided going down below, and threw up once probably around 4am. This is probably one of my biggest concerns about being physically capable of completing this trip, although my friend tiff (who is in the coast gaurd) says that most people completely get over sea-sickness after a few days at sea, and I've never spent a few days at a time at sea. It was good to have Thomas with me; he doesn't really get sea-sick. He was able to go down below and read charts and cruising guides, etc. In my rush to get out, I hadn't really looked at any charts ahead of time. Him being there also meant we could take turns taking naps so we weren't up all night long. Even when thomas was below decks, I ended up nodding off a lot while huddled up in the cockpit, just waking up periodically to check the horizon and make sure we were still on course. Especially on sea-ward facing tacks, I don't think we were in any danger of hitting anything. The windvane worked o.k., but I'm noticing that the boat actually will steer it self fairly well. A few times I noticed that our course was kind of zig-zagging a bit (though not *that* bad) and I checked the windvane to find it had dis-engaged somehow. We did sail a truer course with the windvane engaged though, and since it saved me from losing the mast it was a worthwhile investment.
I have a "collision avoidance radar detector" which is supposed to detect radar from other ships and sound an alarm when it senses those ships. It has a squelch setting to filter out noise or set a range, so in theory this should have told us if a ship was approaching. In practice, at least so far, we didn't find it useful. I didn't play with it much on this trip, but thomas turned it on, and it just sort of churped periodically, not really consistent with trafic, and so we ignored it until it got anoying and we shut it off. I'm hoping that in the middle of the ocean, I can turn it on when sleeping, and that an alarm will in fact be indicative of a ship on the horizon. When far from shore, there will probably be less noise to filter out. There wasn't really much traffic on this leg. There were ships headed in/out the gate as always, and we saw one big tug headed up the coast pretty quick, but that's about all I saw... nothing we were in danger of running into.
Now that I'm waiting for a welder, Thomas may not be able to sail with me to santa barbara. I guess it partly depends on how long it takes to get a welder. Another old co-worker from snapfish, David, will probably sail with me after Thomas, so if Thomas can't keep sailing, maybe David will meet up with me here or something.
"Obiwan" (Jonah), my friend from the appalachian trail is sailing his boat "araby" with Erin (Erin sold me my last boat, the santana 22). They're leaving Sausalito on Saturday, headed for the channel islands. I'll probably meet up with them once we're both down there. The channel islands are off the coast of Santa Barbara.. I may end up stopping in there on my way as well, depending in part on how far offshore I go as I head for Santa Barbara.
there are pictures of my boat etc still at /sailing/aries32/ ... although I haven't added anything all that recently. I'm currently getting a spotty wireless connection from my anchorage, and it's been pretty difficult just to send this email.