LandfallVoyages

 

 

 

 

 

 

We haven’t talked much about our trip around Point Conception or our first failed attempt. We left Morro Bay for Port San Luis Obispo and had a fairly nice sail down. We arrived at night, as usual, but were able to navigate through the mooring fields and find the anchorage in the dark and we only had about 20 near collisions. We anchored without incident between the two piers and had a nice but rolly night. I can’t remember what we cooked that night but it was the best thing that we’d ever had, as it usually is after a day underway. We were hailed, “AHOY LANDFALL” over the radio at about 10:30 by our friends on Guaneen, a 50′ teak ketch out of Washington. They had sailed out of Morro Bay before sunrise and had arrived 3 hours later than us, it took them 16 hours to make the 20 mile run that had taken us 4. They headed 30 miles offshore because that’s what they do.

The weather had looked good on the reports for the next couple of days but each morning they had revised it and it didn’t look good anymore. Point Conception is dangerous. The wind and the swells come across the northeastern pacific from the Aleutian Islands all the way down, uninterrupted, to Point Conception. Most of the rest of the coast trends southeast, but just above Point Conception it is straight north/south. Additionally, there is a mountain range right near the ocean through there, so the wind and the swell get squished right up against the land like a bunch of children all tring to run out the door for ice cream all at once.

Finally, after 5 days, the weather report looked pretty good. NOAA  said 10-15 knot winds and a 4-6 foot swell. Not bad.

When we got up in the morning, the report was the same, not bad and we prepared to go. As the sun came up I looked around at the sky and said “BULLSHIT! NOAA is wrong.” I’d surfed that area for 25 years. You learn a lot about the weather when you surf and I could tell by the angry orange sky and the clouds pulled and stretched like piano strings that it was going to blow and blow hard. Everybody else, our friends on Guaneen and my wife and son were ready to go, I was out-voted so we went. We headed southwest for 2 hours and it just kept getting windier and windier. By 7:00 it was blowing 20 and the swell was more like 5-7 with a couple of 8’s thrown in. The wind was behind us but the swell was dead on our beam and rolling us around like mad. Everything that wasn’t nailed down had landed hard on the floor and all of us had fallen down at least once.  After two hours I called the weather’s bluff and demanded that we (Landfall) abort and head back. Our friends on Guaneen decided to go for it and so they went.

There were 2 storms on the way, one the next day and one two days after that. As a northwest storm passes the Central Coast, the wind switches to southwest. Port San Luis is wide open to the southwest and at best it’s very uncomfortable in a storm. At it’s worst, it’s very dangerous. One year when it blew really hard, ’98 or ’99, there were seven boats up in the parking lot in the morning that had broken free from their moorings. We had to head for Morro Bay. There was no point in staying where we were certain to get pounded. We turned northwest and sailed for a couple of hours and it was rough. Our tack was taking us farther west than we would have liked so we had to tack and head back towards Morro Bay. On our new tack the wind and the wavers were at odds with one-another and it became much more uncomfortable. To stay pointed far enough away from the wind direction to sail we had to take the waves, bigger now, right on the side and the chop was all coming up over the bow and it just kept getting worse and worse. It was blowing about 30 now and we were only making about 4.5 knots. I was nervous. Scared shitless, to be exact.

Due to our great discomfort and my fear for the boat’s integrity we decided to drop the sails and simply motor directly into the wind. The pounding increased but the rolling side to side was almost gone. Our speed under full power was usually almost 7 knots, we were doing 2.5 – 3 at full throttle, the wind was pushing us back that hard. We were taking a lot of water over the bow, sometimes even up over the cabin top, water everywhere and we found many new leaks. Eli’s computer ended up on the floor, swimming. Our flatscreen TV had saltwater running out of the bottom of it. They don’t work well after that.

When we were about six or seven miles south of Morro Bay we heard a Pan Pan come out over the radio, a call from the Coast Guard asking mariners in the area to lend assistance to a boater in trouble. A small Boston Whaler’s engine had died just off of Hazzard Canyon in Montaña D’Oro State Park. We were only a couple of  miles from where they reported the trouble and we were obligated to help. We tried to motor over towards the vessel in distress, but could hardly make any way toward them. With our binoculars we searched and searched but it was just about impossible to locate a white sixteen foot boat in a sea of of five foot whitecaps from a mile away while we were bobbing up and down ten feet ourselves. We turned back towards the harbor. During the next two hours, while we were motoring north the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol went out to rescue the boater. They passed within a mile of us twice but we never saw them.

Later we learned that the Harbor Patrol had their own problems that day. Their twin engined Radon Craft, some 30 years old, had gone out on the rescue. On their way to the search area one of their engines had dropped RPM’s down to about half. They couldn’t figure out what the problem was in the rough seas so they shut that engine down and continued on only one. They found the distressed vessel and towed it to safety. Later they discovered what the problem was. A fiberglass repair on the bottom of the hull from many years before had failed. The fiberglass had delaminated from about the waterline on the bow all the way to the transom on one half of the boat. The only thing that had kept the boat floating was one thin layer of glass about the thickness of what covers a surfboard. Their rescue boat was 1/16th of an inch from disaster. If that one layer had been perforated the boat would have sunk within seconds. The engine problem was actually the fiberglass hanging off of the back of the boat obstructing the propeller. As it turned out, Morro Bay’s city leaders elected to repair the failing thirty-five year old boat rather than finding money in the budget to replace the boat that should have been replaced fifteen years ago. The Coast Guard, with their brand new million dollar self-righting motor lifeboats decided to remain in the safety and comfort of the harbor. They stay there a lot.

Six hours after we dropped the sails we neared the Rock. The ubiquitous Rock at the entrance to the Morro Bay Harbor entrance. As we turned ninety degrees to our new heading, with the wind on the beam rather than dead ahead, our speed increased from 2 1/2 to 7 knots again. Following a very bumpy ride through the legendary (read dangerous) entrance we were home free and humiliated, but we were safe from the coming storms. It was about 5 weeks before we got another decent weather window to head south.

Our friends on Guaneen, as I mentioned before, decided to continue around Point Conception. I talked to them the next day and Scotty told me several times that I had definitely, DEFINITELY made the right call. The actual conditions around the point were, according to Carlyle And Scotty, were 30-40 knot winds with some gusts over 50 and 12-18 foot seas with 6-8 feet of chop on top of that. They likened it to the Oregon coast in the winter. Now I’m glad we didn’t go, but this shit is still hard to write.

A few weeks later we paid Scotty and his friend Gabe, the one-armed sailor, to help Tamiko sail the boat around Point Conception. They said it was “COMPLETELY FUCKING BORING”. They’re all still mad about it. It was a lake. No wind, no swell, just motoring all day and all night, for 24 hours to Channel Islands Harbor and absolutely nothing happened the entire time.

Eli, Nala, and I rented a car and drove to Santa Barbara, rented a hotel room with an ocean view and a Jacuzzi tub, and went out for sushi that night. The next day after the three sailors decided to bypass Santa Barbara and head to Oxnard, we drove down and met them on the dock.

I hate this story.