Wayne

We ended up spending an entire week in Morro Bay. This was the result of day after day of gale warnings with gusts in the bay as high as 34 knots. We eventually found a place to anchor with the Harbor Patrol’s help but because the anchorage is so crowded, we had initially only put out 50 feet of chain. This was in 20 feet of water and is barely enough to keep you in one place with no wind blowing. Along with the wind, we had a current that switched directions four times per day. We were fairly nervous at first that we would wake up and find our boat had become part of one of the shoreside restaurants. Eventually we put out a little more chain and after a while we became pretty confident that the boat wasn’t going anywhere. 

While in Morro Bay, we met another couple about our own age. This was a bit of a surprise as most of the people out here are a bit older than we are. Jamie and Kathie are from Washington and they have a small boat that they just bought and learned how to sail last spring. We also renewed our acquaintance with several other sailors and made some new friends at a dock party.

You may be wondering why we are taking so long getting to San Diego. From Morro Bay it is only about 300 miles, which even in a sailboat you can do in about three days. Our original plan was to sail direct from San Francisco, however, once we started to talk to people there we realized that this was likely going to be a mistake. The hurricane season doesn’t end in Mexico until about mid-November, consequently, San Diego Harbour gets really full of boats from mid-September on. Prices go up, the harbour police are difficult and anchorages are full. That, in any case, is our excuse. We’ve been enjoying this leisurely trip down the coast. If it would only get a little warmer, we’d be happier.

Finally on Monday, October 17th, we got away from Morro Bay. The gale had ended and we had waited a day for the waves to go down. The swell had been reported as high as 16 feet, which would have made for a very uncomfortable time if we had left immediately. We left at about 8 in the morning and had little or no wind all day long. We motored a lot and tried all sorts of sail combinations including the spinnaker. First we would put up some sail and sail for a couple of hours, then we would drift with the sails flapping, then we would take down all the sails and motor for a while. We had about 120 miles to go to Santa Cruz Island which is about 25 miles offshore and across the Santa Barbara channel. We were a little nervous about this passage for several reasons. The first reason is that the shipping lane in the Santa Barbara channel is one of the busiest in the world and we would be crossing it at night. Secondly we would be passing Point Conception which is called “The Cape Horn of The Pacific”. Finally, Santa Cruz Island is pretty inhospitable with very poor anchorages. Of course we would be crossing the shipping lanes and passing Cape Conception in the middle of the night. With a little clever forethought, I managed to maneuver Susan into the shift that would see us across the channel and past the Cape. As it turned out the Cape was extremely pacific with near perfect visibility. Our major complaint was a lack of wind. The channel didn’t live up to its reputation either except for one close encounter and a herd of oil rigs. These rigs are right out in the middle of the channel and lit up like small cities. You couldn’t possibly hit one if you were awake, but, it’s hard to tell what they are, as fishing boats are often lit up like this as well. Anyway, after a lot of rig dodging, Susan got us right out in the middle of the shipping lanes just as two ships approached on reciprocal courses. She had the radar on and had just counted eight ships within eight miles of us. These two particular ships were yelling at each other in some oriental language on channel 16. This is illegal as 16 is for hailing other ships and distress calls only. This went on for about ten minutes. Finally an anonymous voice came on the radio and said “Get off channel 16 you knuckleheads!” There was a pause then a different voice said “You’d better try another language!” A third voice said “Don’t worry about it, they’re going to run into each other in about four minutes.” By this time Susan had woken me up because the west-bound ship was going to run us down prior to colliding with the other ship. We had right of way over the west-bound ship and in fact had a responsibility to stay on our course and allow him to avoid us. Of course we never demand our rights with ships that are twenty times our size. In any case we were happy to give way so that he would be able to comfortably avoid the east-bound ship. We called him on the radio to say that we would alter course, but he ignored us. He probably thought that we would demand that he avoid us. 

Once they were passed, we resumed our course and watched the two ships pass within an 1/8th of a mile of each other. Way too close! A few minutes later we had to alter course again to avoid the east-bound ship (he had right-of-way). These ships are normally very obliging. Whenever visibility is bad, we call them when we get them on radar or see them and tell them our position, course and speed. We want to be sure that we are not mistaken for a floating log!

As the day began, we saw three whales including two that appeared about 100 feet ahead of us, then dived before we got there. We are still arguing about what sort of whales they were, so to avoid being abused later by a small blonde person, I’ll just say that they were substantially longer than the boat. Several herds of hundreds of porpoises passed us as well. None of them had time for more than a couple of hops beside the boat. They all seemed to be going to a very important meeting somewhere to the south. We also saw two groups of seals do something that we have never heard of before. They followed our boat (at about 7 miles per hour) by swimming along and leaping out of the water every couple of seconds. They looked a little like porpoises, but they could only keep it up for a few minutes before they got tired and were left behind.

At about 4:30 pm on the 18th we arrived at our intended anchorage. Just to bug us, the engine decided not to start. As you will imagine this was the occasion for several rude remarks from a certain small blonde person! I made knowledgeable sounding noises with some tools for a few minutes and was just about to suggest that a couple more days sailing down to San Diego might be fun, when it started! Naturally I took credit for the repair. The anchorage was too small for us to feel comfortable and we ended up going back up the coast a couple of miles where we found a reasonable place just before dark. This was fortunate because this coast is not safe to approach in the dark. Our only options would have been to continue south or to sail back and forth off the coast all night long.

Santa Cruz is a really beautiful island. It is volcanic, mountainous and desert-like. The rock has caves, holes and tubes all through it and very little soil. What vegetation there is, is low scrub, cactus and short twisted trees. The few anchorages are all at the end of valleys in the mountains and when you look up them you think of an Edgar Rice Burrows novel. The island is only about 60 miles from LA and yet is uninhabited and virtually in its natural state.

The main reason that we had come here was to see the painted cave. This cave is at sea level. It has an entrance 120 feet tall, goes back over 600 feet and has naturally ‘painted’ walls. If you get there at low tide, when there is little or no swell, you can go to the end of the cave and pass into a chamber that the sea closes at high tide. Rumour has it that a seal colony lives there. Unfortunately our visit happened at high tide as we weren’t sure how long our anchorage would remain safe. It was about 2 miles from the boat so we put the little outboard on the dinghy. The dinghy ride along the coast was absolutely spectacular with cliffs that fall hundreds of feet into the water. There were many caves, both big and small, at sea level, under water and hundreds of feet in the air. The painted cave itself is really huge! As we rowed in, the roof and walls gradually got closer and the light got dimmer. The swell was about four feet high that day. As it roared in, it would lift us toward the roof and rush us deeper into the cave. A moment later the backwash would carry us exactly the same distance back out. Every swell would cause a deep booming groan from the back of the cave that was quite eerie. The entire time that we were in the cave, I had an optical illusion that I was looking down a steep bumpy slope that we would slide down and not be able to row back out of. The total effect was like one of those nightmares where you are running as fast as you can in molasses. We got about four hundred feet in before we decided that the swell was too dangerous to continue, so we headed back out. Even as deep as we went, we never had less than 10 feet of space over our heads and 15 feet on either side. However, there was a passage just ahead that was only about 8 feet wide. The swell was rushing through that passage with tremendous force and this is why we decided to leave. We have since been told that if we had continued, the passage would have opened up into a high chamber, hundreds of feet across, with its own beach. The ‘paint’ was green, brown and gold colored mosses on the roof and walls and was really not that spectacular compared to the rest of the cave.