Patrick and I rented a 32 foot Catalina cruising yacht from Seaforth Boat rental and took Michelle, my mom, and dad along on a two day sailing trip for my dad's 81st birthday. Patrick is my sailing partner and is as passionate about sailing as my father.
We left the Sunroad Marine in the San Diego Bay Saturday morning around 10 o'clock. The weather was calm and relaxing.
My mom, dad, and Michelle, lounging while we motored out of the bay.
The five of us motored out to the end of the point and passed by sea lions relaxing on the channel buoys.
Notice the reflection of the buoy in the water. Saturday was calm and clear.
Once we reached the end of Point Loma, we raised the main sail, sailed south to Buoy #5 in order to avoid the kelp beds and headed west.
My dad and Patrick raised the mainsail once we reached the end of the point.
We headed torwards the end of the point and noticed the wind was pretty much non-existant. We started up the "iron sail" (aka the motor) and motored out past the kelp fields. We passed the kelp fields and saw a few fishing boats floating around the edge of the field. It was right about here when the engine decided to overheat. We shut it down, trimmed the sails and continued to sail at 1 knot while we starting reading the owner manual.
Dad is busy trimming the jib.
We sailed for 30 minutes or so then turned on the engine and let it idle. The motor is water-cooled, and allowing it to slowly pump sea water through the engine while idling helped it cool down. Within a few minutes we were able to get under steam again....though we ran it at half throdle.
Fortunately the rest of the trip north was uneventful. We cruzed through a large pod of dolphins aprox. 2/3 the way up the point. There were dozens of them swiming to either side of our boat. Many would flip over when they swam near our boat exposing their white bellys in the shimmering green/blue water. Beautiful!
We made it to Ocean Beach by 4:00 PM and had hour or so to spare so we sailed past the Mission Bay harbor enterance and upto Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach. At that point we turned around, sailed south, and pulled into the Mission Bay entrance. We docked the boat at the Seaforth Mission Bay location and called it a night.
We ate dinner, drove Michelle home, and my mom and dad fell asleep on the boat while Patrick and I crashed out in our campers in the Seaforth parking lot.
The next morning I woke up and turned on my marine weather radio. What a suprise! We knew a cold front was coming in but we expected it to hit us in the late afternoon, well past our expected 2:00 PM arrival time back in San Diego.
To our suprise, the local marine forcast was calling for a "small craft advisory". Basically that means NOAA is predicting 25+ knot winds and 4 to 7 foot wind swell ontop of an existing north swell. Yikes!
The image above is a grib file showing the storm approaching San Diego. The colors show the size of the waves generated by the storm. Orange is big. The thick blue line shows the center of the jet stream. Its heading towards San Diego. Low pressure storms like this one spin counter-clockwise. We were on the east side of the storm....and therefore the pradominant winds were coming from the south.
The 500 mb weatherfax shows the same jet stream. Notice how close the links are together near San Diego. The closer the lines, the stronger the storm. The dashed lines off the coast of Southern California represent the cold front.
Patrick and I quickly packed up and headed down to the dock. My parents were thinking of cooking breakfast on the boat but we told them if we were going to leave we needed to leave immediatly. We packed up and left the dock around 8:30 AM and headed south.
The photo above shows Patrick at the helm as we left Mission Beach. The wind was 5 to 10 knots and the swells rolled us as we left the harbor entrance. We motored a mile out to sea then set the sails and pointed south. I took the above photo of La Jolla once we turned south. Notice how the storm is approaching from the west.
The wind quickly picked up to 15 knots. My Reeds Maritime Meterorology book classified the wind as "Force 4 - moderate Breeze" - small waves and fairly frequent white horses. We were making 6 knots easy. A few waves were forming. One of them was large enough to knock my GPS off the chart table. I went down and had to reset it. Everything not tied down in the boat was flying around. We spent much of our time at a 40 degree angle. Obviously taking photos was out of the question.
Within the hour we were almost at the end of the point and over six miles offshore. The wind was picking up. We didn't have any way to measure the wind speed but I would guess it was "Force 5 - Fresh Breeze - 17-21 knots" based off of the following description... "moderate waves, taking a more pronounced long form; many white horses are formed. There is a chance of some spray". We saw a whale spout 50 yards off of the stern of our boat.
It was getting pretty windy and bumpy. I was sitting in the stern seat and an occasional wave would break over the front of the boat sending spray all the way to the back. Around this time we were bouncing up and down while doing 7+ knots and my lucky water bottle flew off the back of the boat. I remember turning around and watching it quickly float away in the wake of our boat. I turned to my dad who was standing at the helm and had the hood of his sweatjacket tied down over his face. He simply stated the obvious "..well that ain't worth going back for." Patrick said he figured a whale would swallow my water bottle and spit it out his blowhole.
I had plotted out a point on the GPS aprox. two miles due west of bouy #5. We figured if we make it to this point and head east then we would miss the kelp fields. Yesterday the water was calm and it was easy to see hte kelp. The winds made this impossible today.
We set the GPS towards this point and continued to sail on a south east course until we reached over six miles out to sea. At this point we tacked to the east and headed towards this imaginary point. After a few minutes Patrick realized the wind was picking up. We were probabily facing 25 knot gusts and white crests were everywhere. We decided to reef the mainsail while we were still miles out to sea. We headed into the wind and spent about five minutes reducing the size of the main sail while "in irons". This is harder than it sounded and it took one person on the helm, one reefing the main sail and another helping with the reefing while adjusting the jib as we spun around around in the water.
This image from our GPS shows our track. You can see where we finally tacked east. The zig zag reflects us bobbing around in the ocean reefing the mainsail in 20+ knot winds.
Once reefed, Sumatra sailed relativly straight. We headed towards our imaginary point "Left to five". We passed the point and continued to SD 5. On the way towards SD5 we ran into a kelp field and had to head slightly south to manuver around it.
The slight dip in the red GPS track shows were we navigated around the kelp field.
Once we made it to the main channel, we headed north and flew the jib. We entered San Diego Bay making an average of 8 knots while surfing wind swell and hitting 9.5 knots (our top speed for the trip). Dolphins swam with us on either side of the boat.
The total trip north including the loop to Pacific Beach was aprox 23 miles in 6 hours. The trip back was 24.3 miles (longer because we stayed close to the coast on the way up but the weather caused us to head west on the way back) in 3.5 hours (we were hauling!).
I had a wonderful time with the crew. Special thanks to Patrick and Dad - their expert sailing skills made the trip home exciting but safe!
More pictures will be posted on Picasa at a later date. I'll post the link on this blog when its ready.
