A wild ride

The plan for today, Saturday, March 18, 2012, was to move the boat about 30 miles from Sausalito to Pete's Harbor in Redwood City - weather permitting. I was feeling some pressure to make it happen on schedule since I hoped to start work on Monday. The thought of commuting from Sausalito to Santa Clara 55 miles one way plus a $6 bridge toll each day was not particularly appealing.

Yesterday, it blew and it rained. Fortunately, it didn't keep Ben from Hirshfield Yachts from coming out and doing the annual maintenance on the engine. I don't think it has been done since sometime in 2008. I didn't relish the thought of taking off on what could be eight hours of motoring without the maintenance.

When I went to sleep last night, it was still blowing hard with gusts up to 25 knots. The boat was rocking and rolling me to sleep. Sometime during the night, I woke up and realized that it was dead calm. The marine weather forcast had been calling for winds of 5 to 15 knots with a chance of showers and a thunderstorm. By this morning the chance of showers had dropped to about 30% with a slight chance of thunderstorms.

When I woke up, I stuck my head out the hatch expecting to see fog. There was none. It was mostly overcast with a patch of sun to the south. The move was on!

I made breakfast, finished putting things away and pulled out of the slip by a little after 10 AM. I made a brief stop at the fuel dock to pump out the holding tank and the trip began.

There was so little wind that I fully expected to have to motor the whole trip. I did hoist the main to keep Laelia from rolling so badly in the wake of the ferries and tour boats. I got a closer look at the a tour boat called Golden Bear than I wanted. When I first spotted her coming from behind Angel Island, I thought she was a Coast Guard cutter headed out the Golden Gate. Her course would take her well astern of me. When she got closer, she started to turn toward the SF waterfront putting her on a collision course. I had the right of way but she didn't appear to have any intention of altering course. I didn't feel like playing chicken so I changed course to pass behind her.

This was my first trip out using a GPS unit on the boat. It is a hand-held Garmin GPSmap 76Cx. I had plotted out the trip on OpenCPN - a marine mapping program - and transferred my waypoints to the hand-held unit. The GPS unit does nice things like tell me how fast I am moving over the bottom, how long it will take me to reach my next waypoint, how long until I reach my destination, etc.

The first part of the trip took be past Alcatraz once again. The boat speedometer told me I was making 4.5 knots through the water but the GPS said I was making 2 knots over the bottom. That was expected - the tide was going out.

Conditions stayed pretty much the same for the first three hours as I passed Alcatraz, passed the SF waterfront and went under the Bay Bridge. Shortly after I passed the Bay Bridge a bit of breeze came up. I unfurled the jib and got a little boost from the wind. With the help, Laelia was cruising along at almost 5 knots.

Then the wind started to pick up. I shut down the engine and hoisted the mizzen. The wind was a good one for a ketch - a broad reach with the wind coming from a little abaft the beam (a little behind straight from the side.) In short order, Laelia was up to 5 knots again without the noise of the engine. Then she was going 5.5 and then 6 knots. Great sailing! According to the anemometer, the wind was around 10 knots with gusts to 15 - for a while.

Gradually, the wind picked up. In the relatively shallow bay waters, the waves build up quickly so it was not long before Laelia was starting to roll and yaw (turn from side to side) enough to make it a lot of work to keep her on course.

I dropped the mizzen - no small job under those conditions. Every time I would let go of the wheel to do some work, Laelia would try to turn to starboard into the wind. That got the sails to flogging (flapping) pretty hard. That's not particularly good. It accelerates sail wear and can cause some of the stitching to come apart. Nevertheless, I did get the mizzen down. It was a pretty sloppy job. Instead of being neatly rolled up and tied to the mizzen boom, the sail was mostly wadded up into a ball and tied. By the time this was done, I was starting to feel a touch of motion sickness.

Dropping the mizzen dropped the speed to about 5.5 knots with excursions to over 6 knots. Laelia was still rolling and yawing uncomfortably. I rolled up the jib a bit - maybe a quarter of the way. The wind was now a pretty steady 15 knots and clearly I was carrying too much sail. The remedy was to heave to (tack without letting the jib come across to the other side.) That pretty much killed the boat speed. Laelia was lying sideways to the waves and rolling heavily. It wasn't bad enough to be dangerous but it didn't do anything to help my already unsettled stomach.

I got the main down with some difficulty. By the time I got the sail down, I was feeling seasick. I made a dash for the wheel and got Laelia headed downwind again. Being at the wheel seemed to help my stomach feel better.

But lo and behold, when I looked up at the main, things were not as they should be. The main has several battens (plastic rods that lie parallel to the foot of the sail) sewn into pockets in the sail. I have never liked battens. They are supposed to help the main hold its shape in light air. What they seem to do is get caught in different parts of the rigging at the most inopportune times. That's what happened now. Instead of the sail falling down neatly between the lazy jacks (sort of a rope cradle to contain the sail when it is dropped) one of the battens got caught in the lee (downwind) lazy jack and was holding part of the sail cocked skyward instead of lying along the main boom as it should. I could only hope that the wind wouldn't catch it and pull the rest of the sail out of its resting place as well.

Laelia was still moving along at better than 5 knots with only the jib. I checked the GPS and discovered that if we kept moving at this pace, we would get to Pete's Harbor at almost dead low tide. That could be a problem since the Redwood Creek channel is fairly shallow at points. I needed to slow down.

I decided to roll up still more of the jib. Now, the people who love roller jibs say that they are wonderful because all you have to do is roll it up and it gets smaller. Before roller jibs, I had to drop the jib, unhook it from the forestay, bag it and stow the bag. Then I would pull out the replacement jib, hook it on the forestay, tie on the jib sheets and hoist the new sail. That sounds like a lot of work, but the mechanics of it are pretty simple and there isn't much that can go wrong with it.

I discovered that trying to roll up a jib under pressure is not a trivial task as its proponents would have us believe. I put the furling line on a winch and started cranking. It didn't appear to be working. I let Laelia turn until the jib started to flog and I cranked. That worked a little better. I got the sail area reduced to about 1/2 the amount of the full sail but the flogging makes a horrible noise and I wondered just how much of that the sail could take.

I got Laelia headed downwind again and she was still clipping along at 4 knots. Then, I noticed that there was a problem with the jib sheets. With all the flogging, the weather sheet (the one that wasn't doing any work) had pulled it self all of the way out of all its blocks (pulleys) and wrapped itself around the lee sheet (the one doing all the work.) My bad! I should have had a stopper knot (a knot in the end of the sheet) to keep the sheet from coming loose. It wasn't an immediate problem, but if I had to gybe (turn so the wind is coming over the other rail) it would be a problem. I wasn't eager to try to fix the problem. Laelia was still trying to broach (turn sideways to the wind and waves) every time I stopped paying close attention to the steering and my stomach was telling me that if I had to leave the wheel and do much work, I would be feeding my breakfast to the fish.

By now, we were down to the San Mateo bridge. I was hanging on hoping that as we got closer to Redwood Creek, we would be in more protected waters and I would be able to work on the problem in conditions where Laelia would be better behaved and my stomach would not be so queasy.

The wind continued to increase. I managed to roll up some more of the jib. Now we were down to about 1/4 of the full size jib and still doing 3.5 to 4 knots. The wind was blowing 20 to 25 knots and the waves were 2 - 3 feet. The fronts were steep, not nice big rounded swells like I would see on the open ocean.

As we got closer to Redwood Creek entrance, our course gradually curved toward southwest. Our course was taking us closer to shore so the waves did not have room to build up. Before long, the waves were pretty much gone and Laelia would steer herself long enough for me to fix some of the problems. I got the main straightened out a bit and got a sail tie wrapped around it and tied down the the main boom. I was able to unravel the stray sheet from the working sheet and get it run back through its blocks. I promptly gave it the stopper knot that I should have done long before.

The GPS was a major help here. I could see channel markers but the GPS gave me added confidence that I wasn't off on the wrong channel. It also helped me figure out just where Pete's Harbor was. Things look different from out on the water than they do when I'm standing on shore.

As I was getting close to Pete's Harbor, I started the engine and tried to roll up the remainder of the jib. I wouldn't quite do it. There was still a small corner of the jib peeking out. It wasn't enough to be a big problem, but I couldn't figure out why it was happening.

Even with the help of the GPS, I managed to go in the wrong entrance at Pete's Harbor and had to turn around in a very cramped space with the wind still blowing 15 knots in gusts.

When I did find the right entrance, it took some fancy maneuvering to get into my slip. I guess it looked like I was having a problem (I was). A man came out and hollered at me to ask if I needed help. I said I did and asked if he could take a line when I got into the slip. He had to go a ways to walk the docks to get to my slip and I had Laelia in the slip quickly enough that he turned around and went away.

What a relief to be in the slip! The wind kept howling as I straightened out the sails and did all the post-sail cleanup. If anything, the wind got worse. In what was perhaps a feeble attempt to make amends, Mother Nature put on a nice sunset. Too little, too late!

A close examination of the roller furling jib revealed that the jib had stretched enough that there wasn't enough furling line available to finish the job. Whoda thunk it.

I called Judy to let her know I had made it OK, ate the sandwiches I had intended to eat during the trip and went to bed. After a couple of hours, I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep so I got up and wrote all this.

Things I learned today: The big one was that I won't be singlehanding a trip like this again until I have a wind vane to help with the steering. Things were on the edge of getting really ugly today because I couldn't get away from the wheel long enough to fix problems. Also, I was reminded that I have a way to go before I get my sea legs back. I don't like being seasick, but I can deal with it if the boat can mind herself while I lean over the rail and call out my name to the fishies. And finally, I like roller furling jibs even less that I used to. I hope to replace it before I head offshore.

All is well that ends well. I got here. Nothing broke. I didn't run aground or run into any other boats. That makes it a successful trip in my book - but it was a wild ride!

And by the way, I found out I'm not starting work Monday. Maybe Tuesday. Maybe Wednesday. The background checks are not finished. The good news is that Judy and I can have some more time together when she gets here tomorrow and we won't have to drive up to Sausalito to rescue my car until Monday.

Into the belly of the beast

In the Fall of 1977, I discovered Silicon Valley. It was quite by accident. I really wanted to go back to San Diego but in those days there was very little work there for computer geeks. A friend recommended that I look for work in the rapidly developing San Jose/Santa Clara area coming to be known as Silicon Valley.

In short order, I found a job there at Four Phase Systems and proceeded to work toward The Dream. Simply put, it was to earn enough money to build a boat and go back to cruising as soon as possible. For about three years, I kept pretty much on focus. But then I started getting distracted by the "Money, Sex and Power" ethos that is so pervasive in Silicon Valley. In the end, my loss of focus cost me my marriage and my dream. I sold the steel I had bought for the boat at scrap prices. I spent much of my savings on learning to fly.

Eventually, I remarried and moved to Phoenix - a long way from the ocean. I was blessed with two more wonderful daughters and 21 mostly wonderful years of marriage. During those years, The Dream would resurface and I would try to stuff it back into the dark corners of my mind where it wouldn't bother me.

It worked - until I retired and started to wonder what to do with the rest of my life. (See the first entry in this blog for the gory details.) I have bought Laelia with the intention of fulling The Dream in some measure. I miscalculated - I bought more boat than I needed and it needed more work than I expected. I decided to come out of retirement for a year to pay for The Dream.

The good news is that I now have a job. The bad news is that it is in Santa Clara - in the belly of the beast, as I have come to think of it. It is stomach wrenching to be surrounded by ambitious, young hustlers, immaculately groomed, wearing ties and driving BMWs. It brings back old memories and fears. Once upon a time, I stuck my hand into the fire and got burned. Now I am reluctant to come close to anything that looks like that fire.

I believe that age and experience has brought me to the point that I will not be so easily distracted. Living on the boat helps keep me focused from one day to the next. Having a deadline of April 2013 to be heading south also keeps the pressure on. The deadline is pretty much non-negotiable. The hurricane season on the west coast of Mexico starts in June and I need to allow time for stops in San Diego and, possibly, Cabo as part of my shakedown.

It also helps that Judy is eager for me to get started. The sooner I start, the sooner I get back and we can, perhaps, resume our life together. From time to time she asks me how something I am considering will contribute to getting on with The Dream and I realize I am getting a bit off-track.

Additional bad news about the new job is that it is about 1.5 hours (55 miles) from my current location in Sausalito. With $6/day bridge toll at the Golden Gate Bridge and gas prices edging up toward the $5/gallon level, I figure it would cost about $500/month to commute from Sausalito. That's not acceptable. Saturday, if the weather permits, I will be giving up my slip in beautiful Sausalito and moving the boat south to Pete's Harbor on Redwood Creek in Redwood City.

Pete's Harbor is much smaller than Clipper Yacht Harbor and has "personality" - albeit a bit on the funky side. Also, it is located in the tidal flats. I have to pay close attention to the tides when I come and go. At low tide, the channel is quite shallow in places. Getting stuck on a falling tide would mean a long wait until the tide comes back in to float me free. Once out into the bay, there's not a lot of room to go sailing. Much of the south bay is quite shallow so I'm pretty much restricted to the channel that runs from SF to Alviso and it is getting pretty narrow by the time it gets to Redwood Creek.

The trip south will give me a chance to try out this newfangled GPS stuff. It didn't exist when I owned my first boat. Navigation was a combination of dead reckoning and celestial navigation. Now I hear that some foolhardy souls actually go to sea without learning celestial navigation and rely totally on GPS. It seems scary to me. Electronics and seawater are not a good combination! Nonetheless, I have bought a handheld GPS complete with marine navigational charts. I used a freeware program called OpenCPN to plot the course for my trip to Pete's Harbor and download the route and waypoints into the handheld unit. I am also laying out the trip on paper charts in the traditional manner - just in case.

So - back into the belly of the beast but with a difference. Forewarned is forearmed. Experience is the best teacher, etc, etc, blah, blah.

Sailing with Judy

The stars have finally aligned for Judy to come to the boat and go sailing. The weather was forecast to be sunny and warm with light and variable winds. What more could we ask for?

 We got to the boat yesterday evening after an enjoyable dinner with daughter Suzanne in Davis. This morning, I had a bit of work to do. The longitudinal bulkheads in the starboard cockpit locker were made of rotting pegboard and I had to replace them or run the risk of a bunch of tools and other junk falling into the engine compartment when the boat heels. I had made up a replacement while I was at home in Placerville last weekend.

While I was doing this, Judy took advantage of being away from home, the beautiful weather and the absence of other responsibilities. She was (gasp) reading a book in the daytime! Normally, her work ethic will not allow her to take time to read until she is in bed in the evening.

It took about an hour to install the new panels. Then it was time to put everything away and prepare to sail!

As we headed out the channel toward the bay, the wind was from dead ahead - of course. That meant we motored until we were well clear of the Spinnaker Restaurant. That it gave Judy a chance to learn to steer the boat under the easiest conditions. No problem - she's a natural! It was great to have her steer while I put up sails. It saved me racing back and forth between the wheel and the sails.

When we picked up some wind, I shut off the motor and we were under sail - a completely new experience for Judy. I am happy to say that she was practically jumping with delight!

We were on the wind making about 5 knots and pointed right at Alcatraz at first but as we got farther out into the bay, the wind direction shifted until we were running almost dead down wind to stay pointed at Alcatraz. Judy was steering off and on as I played with sails so she got to see how sail trim affects the steering. Laelia is a joy to sail when we are on the wind but not so much when the wind goes abaft the beam (i.e., it is coming from someplace between straight from the side and directly behind the boat.)

I had picked sailing toward Alcatraz again because we set sail just after high tide. That meant that the currents would be flowing out the Golden Gate and it might be hard to get back if we went out under the bridge and the wind dropped. It turned out to be a good decision. As we got close to Alcatraz, the wind dropped until we were doing 1.5 to 2 knots. The outgoing tide kept us from making enough progress to round Alcatraz. After about half an hour of dealing with shifty winds and getting nowhere, we gave up and headed back toward Sausalito. As soon as we did that, the wind picked up again and we were moving along at a comfortable 5.5 knots - for a while. Then the wind dropped again and our speed gradually fell off until we decided to crank up the engine and start motoring again.

We hadn't been motoring long before I looked astern and noticed that there was a line across our wake behind us. On our side of the line, the water was fairly smooth. On the other side, it was very choppy. The choppy water quickly overtook us and began pushing the boat toward the Marin shoreline. We had witnessed the birth of a rip current caused by the outgoing tide. It made me grateful we weren't engineless like the sailors of old. We might well have been pushed onto the rocks at Pt Cavallo.

We were back into the slip at 4:30 - just in time for a very pleasant happy hour. We drank wine and enjoyed a snack as the sun set behind the hills to the west.

Judy says she really enjoyed the sail and is looking forward to more. Now if I can just persuade her to sail to Tahiti with me...