Where we are now and some perspective.

Two weeks ago:

29-AUG-2019 – Today is the first day Jennifer and I are not sea sick and scared. Overcoming being frightened is just a matter of realizing that we can do this. We have trained, practiced and prepared. It is very little different than coastal sailing other than there is no heading in when we’re tired of this.

Other differences of note are a single point of sail (leaving the sails untouched) for more than 24 hours at a time. We’ve gotten used to large rollers with waves atop them, and found that on starless, moonless lights the only orientation one has are the instruments.

On the first day of the trip, fifty miles in, our wind vane self-steering broke. There is a sacrificial coupling to protect the mechanism that did just that. The piece is 35-years old, so I suspect metal fatigue or corrosion. We hope to have something made quickly in San Fran, or else San Diego. There are no replacement parts available.

The first twenty-four hours were a maddening game of ”did it always make that noise?” Yes, it did, nothing on the boat changed when we left the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

We have been using weather routing software to get us around bad weather and no wind. A few things are necessary to make this work: A weather prediction model, there are several, take your pick. Detailed information on how fast your boat goes on various points of sail, called polars, and good routing software. We have been using PredictWind. OpenCPN has some very good software as well, but that only runs on a laptop. My battery is not lasting very long these days – Note to self, replace laptop battery.

Finally, one must sail at the speed predicted by the polars, or you arrive after the weather has changed (or before). Last night I didn’t tell the model we would proactively reef our sails. At day break we were twenty miles behind where the model planned, sitting becalmed and surrounded by thunder storms.

Because we must run the electric auto-pilot 24 hours a day, our energy consumption is higher than planned, so we must run the engine regularly to make up for what the solar panels can not produce. We are also motoring to get us out of the windless seas.

The first three days, we didn’t eat very much, as we expected, but today we ate some excellent blackberry pie that Jennifer made from blackberries she picked in Neah Bay.

Friends we made in Neah Bay say they will see us in San Fran, but I expect we will be gone by then. I hope we’ll see then in San Diego.

Alicja was nice enough to watch us on AIS and call us as went around the corner out of Neah Bay.

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Moro Bay, 16-SEP-2019 – In the week since we last posted, so much has happened that it is difficult to be believe it has only been a week. The friends from Neah Bay arrived the night we left San Francisco from Sausalito. We saw friends, Barry and Carol at their home in Pleasant Hill, our friends Keith and Elizabeth in their home in San Fran and our friend Sieglinde who drove to meet us where were were docked in Oakland. The days were full and it seems impossible that we were only there seven days.

Since then we have hopped down the coast: Pillar Point Marina in Half Moon Bay, then Monterrey, with an overnight to Moro Bay where we relax, make friends and wait for weather.

When I asked Jennifer about the weather, she described good conditions for us to leave Moro Bay to get to the next stop. I asked whether today should be our day to make the hop? She explained it would be a good day to make the hop, but then we’d be stuck there waiting for weather and that would not be a good place to wait – unprotected from swells and wind. We’ll stay here on the Moro Bay Yacht Club dock for $25 per day, waiting for weather.

With us on the dock are Abe and Jill, who are sailing north from San Diego to Port Townsend. They came aboard Caro Babbo for dinner last night; we had a lot to discuss. They are making their first journey of any length and are even more newbies than we are.

Also here are Mike and Marcia, heading south as we are, but day sailing only, a hop at a time. They came to the same conclusion as Jennifer regarding how long we should wait, and they expressed their thoughts before Jennifer disclosed her thoughts, so it was very good to hear they had arrived at the same conclusions. Which brings us to weather and offshore passages.

I am, and I suspect Jennifer is also, absorbing what we learned in our seven days offshore. We have our offshore friends, like Ray Penson, who welcome us to the family of offshore sailors. Others still see us as nuts and wouldn’t do anything like that.

For both Jennifer and me, it is all about the weather: what is the weather we should be out in?

We’ve met, in last few weeks, people who wait for weather that does not exceed 15 knots. We know we’ve sailed in 20-25 gusting to 30, but it is not pleasant in Caro Babbo, which is a light displacement vessel, but that begs the question, what weather should we consider proper weather for a passage?

Mike and Marcia’s calculus was reassuring to Jennifer. For me, I know we can sail in heavier whether, but do we want to? How much practice should we have before we say, we know how to do this and we just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

Weather prediction changes so much of the decision making. Thirty years ago, which was when most of the people my age we meet were doing their sailing, routing decisions we mostly statistical based on Pilot Charts. Pilot Charts give information on an area of an ocean: typically, how many days in each calendar month, did the wind blow in what direction and what strength. Sailors made course decisions based on these. It meant that sailors would be becalmed and would be in strong winds and big waves. The roll of the dice determined how much of each one would see.

Weather faxes, which are the handwritten newspaper diagram forecasts delivered by Single-Side-Band (SSB) radio lessened bad weather sailing, which the detailed forecasting and weather routing software available today have made much more rare.

Though we get to pretty much choose how heavy the weather we want to sail in is, what is that weather? Part of the decision is based on what other sailors consider normal, but larger part is what weather can be realistically waited for? Is it realistic to wait for weather that will blow reliably at 10-15 knots for some number of days. The answer is looking like, yes.

I still am absorbing our seven days at sea. I had wanted to be back offshore relatively soon so that I wouldn’t let my fears grow and wouldn’t need to relearn what I had learned. Jennifer and I both find those days to be a bit of blur.

There were lessons I learned, especially about sleep deprivation. One needs sleep and there is now way around that.

One night trading watches with Jennifer, I found myself be quite certain we were in some sort of channel of darkness and I needed to stay in the trough of that channel. But I did find that moving one or two degrees to starboard would continuously increase our speed over ground (SOG), then returning to port those degrees would hold the speed, moving further to port would decrease our speed.

We were running before the wind, with only a double-reefed main, staying between 5.5 and 6.2 knots. The night was moonless and starless: nothing is visible beyond the boat.

We were traveling in a channel of sorts on the edge of the increasing/decreasing winds, but there was nothing solid for a hundred miles to port and a few thousand to starboard.

Jennifer was frightened much of those seven days, but overcame her fear to stand watch, to work and support me while I did deck work including night-time sail changes.

For me, I don’t remember feeling fear, except when it rubbed off from Jennifer. What I remember is the absence of any of those feelings. Instead a concentration on what needed to be done, when I was certain, and figuring out what needed to be done based on what I have learned from books when I wasn’t certain.

In some moments, like balancing the sails, something I have been reading and understanding, made much more practical sense.

We were on a reach across the swells and wind waves. The swells were running two meters, generally, with wind waves atop, sometimes, but other times at a different angles. The larger waves make a roar as they pass under the boat and the combination of the steady pressure of the wind on the sail and weight and shape of keel keep the boat steady on course and at a constant angle (heel).

Yes, the water is way, way above us before the boat rises across the surface. The roar is too loud to yell over and the surface becomes a forth as it scours from left to right.

During gusts the boat does change course and the electronic autohelm fights to maintain it.* This is where balance shows up. If the mainsail is set at a certain angle to the wind so that its resistance to the wind increases as the wind increases more than the jib does, the aft end of the boat will be pushed sideways more that the front end and the boat will turn into the wind.

If the mainsail is angled so that the its sideways pressure increases less than the jib’s pressure does, the front of the boat will move sideways and the boat will fall away from the wind until the mainsheet blocks the wind from jib and boat will once again turn towards the wind.

The goal is to have the boat retain her course as the windspeed increases. Learn about center of lateral resistance and center of effort for each of the sails to play the cerebral game of sail balancing.

Overcoming, what should be blind fear, is doing things that can be dangerous, mostly leaving the cockpit to reef or change sails. Training places the fear aside and allows me to go do those things when the wind is strong and the night is dark.

We’ve learned about Caro Babbo, how to keep her deck level when I’m working there; what speeds will be easy to maintain and what speeds will make her unstable.

When I visually think back on the times where I was doing things I had never done before, or at least in that place, more than a hundred miles offshore in complete darkness, I don’t see blackness, I see battleship gray: no visual cues at all. I don’t know why. Those days, there were seven of them, have their associated visual moments, but the passage of time and experience has no visuals. Is it emotional trauma?

I had written that Caro Babbo is a machine that moves forward and passes across the water carrying us. But I never felt that it was a machine that moved on its own. It was never a unified machine in my mind’s eye. Instead it was a collection of parts that Jennifer and I would individually set and together they would move in the direction we wanted, but it was Jennifer and I that made Caro Babbo move where we wanted it to go. Jennifer and I watched weather data every 12 hours and examined suggested routes, picked the routes that we felt most likely and drove Caro Babbo along those routes.

We did over time come to trust the contraption that is the sailing machine Caro Babbo. On nights when there were no large vessels near by, Jennifer would sleep through the night and I would get up every 20 minutes to check that all was okay, sleeping once or twice for 90 minutes. When vessels were near by, one of us was on watch, awake at all times. Though even that was not necessary, our AIS alarm never failed.

During some hazy daylight hours charging at over 6 knots, which was the speed we traveled most of the time, Jennifer was facing aft when a large whale surfaced a boat length ahead of us, crossing port to starboard: a gray whale we think.

With no engine running for the whale to hear, we believe it was pure coincidence that the whale surfaced where it did, not closer, or farther away. How many times had that happened during the night or when we were both below?

But for both of us, there are these spaces of time where we worked via our training and experience though the place and conditions were beyond anything we had done before.

Our overnighter from Monterrey wasn’t pleasant. It was very cold on the water with heavy wet mist and dew. We used radar a lot and slept in the cockpit the first part of the night since each of us was feeling sea sick. But the first three days of our initial trip compressed into eight hours: I went below and made pea soup that we each ate for dinner and again for breakfast. By the early hours of the morning we were taking turns sleeping below without nausea.

In the dead of the night, the wind calmed and we dropped to three to four knots. By 2 am, our speed had dropped to two knots, but the swells had not lessened. With fifty nautical miles to go, we decided we’d motor the rest unless a decent wind, enough to drive us at four knots showed up. It did not, and we motored around the jetty and into Morro Bay.

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*A wind vane would do that same, faster, but perhaps with only the same efficacy.