We are still some 80 miles from Shoreline Marina in Long Beach and the Spirit of Adventure is sailing herself fairly rapidly toward home. Al is resting in the cockpit and I am sitting at my homemade table reflecting on this trip past Point Conception. I must begin this log with extreme gratitude and love for my wife Mary. You see we had planned on a four day trip to Morro Bay to celebrate our 49th wedding anniversary. My planning sounded good to both of us, as I was to leave two and a half days before her and I would take Al along as crew. We had reservations at our favorite place in Morro Bay, right on the water. She was bringing the golf clubs and we planned on spending time together while Al stayed on the boat and explored Morro Bay with my dinghy (a small inflatable boat with an outboard motor).
I also owe Al a bunch of gratitude for all of the help and enthusiasm he gave me. Al has a much nicer boat than I do and had been planning some off-shore sailing since I first met him in 2013. As I shared with Al my idea to sail up to Morro Bay, past the Channel Islands and Point Conception (considered the Cape Horn of California) he told me that he would like to "rough it" and go with me. Al has always impressed me as being a great guy and actually, I needed a crew person. Now personally, I love Spirit of Adventure and quietly overlooked his comment about "roughing it." I finally decided that his boat was just a lot nicer than mine. I learned a lot from Al on this trip. Thank you Al.
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| Track of the Spirit of Adventure Can also be found at https://my.yb.tl/Spiritofadventure |
6/17/2016 Friday- Shoreline Marina, Long Beach
As always, there is always more to do than time to do it all. Earlier, I had filed a "float plan" with Mary and with my good friend Fred of Later Gator fame. Fred has had my back on other adventures and I can always count on him to help if he can. He is another sailor that Mary can contact and discuss "what to do" if I go missing. Al and I pumped up the dinghy and checked out the outboard motor by taking a small cruise around the marina. As we were mounting the dinghy on the bow of Spirit of Adventure a neighbor boater walked by and said that he had a cover for my dinghy that he had never used. After a brief negotiation on the price, the dinghy was covered and lashed to the front deck of my boat. Al had purchased ten gallons of diesel fuel and we lashed that to the side deck on the boat. Fuel and water had been topped off earlier. I had cooked and frozen a meal at home, the night before, and it was stowed in the freezer. Al made one last trip to the grocery store and we were ready. Al passed Mary in the parking lot and didn't even think twice when she said she would be praying for us both. As we cast off lines and departed, our friends on AA dock wished a bon voyage. As we headed out into the ocean, the weather was beautiful, but with no wind. Spirit motored on throughout the night with Al doing the lion's share of standing watch.
6/18/2016 Saturday- Early Saturday morning (before sun up) we decided that we had wind and began sailing. Now for at least a week before our departure I had been following the wind patterns on a website and it had showed that the wind should be out of the south, which would have been great. That wind should have pushed us north for the whole trip. The winds were not out of the south, but were out of the north-west. As we tried to sail, early this morning, we kept getting headed more south than north. At 11:00 AM we tacked and headed toward Santa Cruz and Anacapa Islands. Our plan of sailing outside of the Channel Islands was scrapped for now. Sailing was great today and just before midnight, we could see the channel between Santa Cruz and Anacapa Islands and except for a brief period, we sailed easily through the darkness between the islands.
Note about Spirit of Adventure- Spirit has some neat equipment that helps us sail through the darkness and to know where we are going. One is our Garmin chart plotter which is similar to that some of you have in your cars. This shows us where we are and where the islands are. It can tell us how far we are from the islands with great precision. Spirit also has radar. This sends out a signal which bounces off of whatever is out there around the boat. It can detect islands, other ships and even some smaller things in the path of our small boat. In Mexico, I kept seeing these small "dots" on the radar which later were identified as the small floats on the fisherman's crab pots. It also has something called a "guard zone" that I can set, usually at four nautical miles around Spirit, and an alarm will sound if anything enters that space. Lastly, my radio has something called AIS (Auto Identification System) that will track the ships that are in our vicinity. It also will sound an alarm if we are on a collision course with another ship. I will refer to our use of this in Part 3.
Thank you for reading along with us on this trip.
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